The Home Office’s alcohol awareness campaign Know Your Limits will be brought to life at this year’s Clothes Show Live exhibition, taking place at the NEC, Birmingham from 5-10 December.

The campaign is one of the exhibition’s sponsors, having identified the show as a prime environment in which to get across key messages highlighting the risks of excessive drinking.

As the largest fashion and beauty event in the world, Clothes Show Live attracts a mainly female audience, which will often attend in small groups of friends. This provides a real opportunity for Know Your Limits to reach its core audience.

The Home Office has stressed that the campaign is not about stopping people from enjoying a drink, but about promoting sensible drinking behaviour. The message being conveyed is about taking personal responsibility for drinking behaviour and knowing when to stop.

Experiential agency TRO has created the campaign’s presence at Clothes Show Live. In addition to designing and building the exhibition stand environment, TRO will be branding three changing rooms and producing a range of message-bearing giveaways.

“Our brief is to enable visitors to gain a personal experience of the campaign’s key messages; also to create a Know Your Limits buzz at the show,” said TRO account manager Emma O’Leary. “Focusing our execution around the campaign’s themes of vanity and vulnerability, we have exaggerated the controversial shock tactics provided by the theme in order to create a stand that strikingly jars with the stylish, glamorous environment provided by the Clothes Show Live.”

Visitors to the stand will be challenged to perform a series of tasks that they would carry out on a typical night out – only this time hampered by wearing a set of KYL goggles – glasses incorporating a special technology that gives the wearer the impression of being drunk. When trying to apply cosmetics to a face superimposed on a mirror while wearing the glasses, girls will discover just how disorientated they are by the simulated effect of alcohol.

Another stand feature will be a clothes rail displaying a selection of favourite clothes, which, on closer inspection, turn out to be damaged – with torn sleeves, stains on a silk dress and a pair of shoes from which the heel has been snapped off.

What initially looks like a full-length mirror will actually be a lenticular picture showing contrasting images of the same person visible from different angles.  From one side visitors will see an attractive Brad Pitt look-alike at the start of the night, while the other the view reveals a worse-for-wear version.

The Home Office will be evaluating the success of the experiential medium during the campaign. On leaving the stand, visitors will be asked fill out a short questionnaire aimed at discovering whether their experience has made them feel more negative about binge drinking. In exchange for the completed form, they’ll receive a small branded gift carrying a reminder message. Stand staff will also be logging the number of people taking part in the activities.