You Can Now Walk the Dog, Sleep, and Work Out Shrouded in Big Macs

McDonald’s is all about comfort. It’s about giving you that nostalgic feeling of being a kid and slicking your fingers with burger juice and french-fry grease, the salty, ketchup-blanketed meal washed down with the sweet antidote of a large Coke.

But the comforts don’t end with a Big Mac—or at least they don’t end with eating a Big Mac. Not in Sweden, that is, where a new line of burger-festooned clothes, linens, and dog accessories launched as part of the chain’s global imlovinit24 marketing campaign—a series of events and other stunts launched Tuesday in 24 cities around the world. The collection made its debut at a "McWalk" fashion show in Stockholm.

There are Big Mac rain boots and Big Mac raincoats and a Big Mac comforter cover that would surely help dredge up the McMemories lying in the depths of your subconscious as you sleep ever so comfortably through the crisp Swedish night.

But it’s the active wear that impresses the most with both style and irony. Alongside pictures of prototypically chiseled (and mostly blond) Swedes wearing Big Mac thermal underwear, the copy reads, “Now, the future is here! Finally you can stretch, run and sweat along with the hamburger hamburgers.” About $12 from the sale of each $60 set (made from 100 percent luxurious polyester), goes to a Swedish ski program, a donation that piggybacks on McDonald’s sponsorship of the Swedish Alpine and Cross Country Ski Team, as AdWeek notes.

While there’s something wonderfully ironic and maybe slightly perverse about exercising with images of a 530-calorie Big Mac tiled across your well-sculpted abs, the association of nutritionally troubling foods with world-class athletes is a highly deceiving—and effective—marketing move. Because if LeBron James is pictured with enough McDonald’s products, then how could they possibly be unhealthy? The NBA star is paid $4 million for his promotional deal with McDonald’s—but he recently let it slip that he hasn’t partaken in any food from the Golden Arches in more than six years.

They may not have the American market appeal of King James, but Norse ski gods modeling Big Mac thermal underwear works in a similar way. But in Sweden, which is home to the only ski-through McDonald’s—in the resort town of Lindvallen—a Big Mac costs $9—and the obesity rate was just 11.8 percent in 2012, compared with 28.6 percent in the United States. 

Original article from TakePart