The Touch, the Feel of Nostalgia

Zooey Deschanel, Miranda Lambert Star in New Cotton Campaign

Posted by Charlie Moran on 04.07.09 @ 05:51 PM

Polyester and Lycra have never seemed all that rad to me, but apparently Cotton Inc. decided its chosen fabric needed to step up its game, and so the brand sent its famous jingle to rock-star rehab. In new spots from DDB that began airing Sunday, Miranda Lambert, Jazmine Sullivan and Zooey Deschanel spin personalized covers of the song.

No idea if M. Ward was involved, but his recent singing partner, actress Zooey Deschanel, recorded a version that wouldn't sound that out of place on the She & Him record. Her new verse is about waking up with the sun in your face, which is a bit more relatable than Lambert's plea to keep it real when you're famous:

Viewers of last weekend's broadcast of the Academy of Country Music Awards probably caught the Lambert version, which throws an extra quickie verse about fame and being a good person in just before the money quote.

For whatever reason, the Missy Elliott protege and five-time-Grammy-nod victim Jazmine Sullivan's ad isn't on the web yet. Maybe they're waiting for her next single?

The campaign will be rolling out online and in print in the months to come, and the components will feature all three ladies. Cotton Inc. has already been smart enough to purchase terms like "Zooey Deschanel cotton" on YouTube, as well as providing high-quality versions of the videos themselves, which is oddly not as common as one might think with these kinds of campaigns.

The brand itself is pushing this as nostalgia, although Cotton Inc. only dropped the jingle in 2001, when we were, uhhh, just about starting the last recession, although ostensibly none of us remember that because it wasn't so effective by then, which is why it went away in the first place.

But the nostalgia goes deeper than that, actually, because the last iteration of the Cotton jingle in 2001 was, in fact, a remix of the classic as well -- although it remains the furthest the brand has gotten from Aaron Neville's cover in 1992. Watching the ad, with its samples of modem noises and people in desks with actual jobs, really does make us long for those days ...