Dentsu Vietnam promotes gender equality through historic images for the Women’s Museum

The Vietnamese Women’s Museum has a bold, new, thought-provoking look, created by Dentsu Vietnam.

The museum, which showcases the role of women in Vietnamese society and culture, is very popular with locals and visitors alike as one of Hanoi’s top attractions. Whilst the mission of the museum as whole is to celebrate the lives of Vietnamese women, the memories and contributions of heroic women during times of war are particularly poignant. Visitors are also drawn to displays highlighting femininity through the clothing of ethnic minority groups. A key role of the museum is to organize activities to further the cause of gender equality.

The agency set out to create imagery intended to conflate the key role women played in the country’s labor force during the Vietnam War with the existential challenge they still face in the workplace and society at large today. By linking the history of Vietnamese women’s empowerment through the Vietnam War with current trends in global media, they delivered provocative statements, using Propaganda-style posters, to attract the attention of both foreigners and Vietnamese.

As a style, Propaganda is popular both in and outside of Vietnam, and was thus chosen as the vehicle to execute the concept, using headlines developed based on modern memes drawn from global political and media landscapes, such as Facebook, women’s rights, and the ‘Glass Ceiling’ debate. The images used for the three posters in this “travel-through-time” series also hint at a wealth of other visual treasures waiting to be discovered within the museum’s historical photo collection.

The Director of the museum, Nguyễn Thị Bích Vân expressed her gratitude to the agency for its contribution to the museum with the following comments, “The museum preserves the cultural heritage of Vietnamese women, but also strives to educate young and old generations on the importance of gender equality. The posters express the fearless, unwavering spirit of women and the agency’s creators employed a refreshingly innovative means of delivering social messages through visual design.”