Blog Posts by Subject: Advertising

Lincoln Center is all abuzz as it ramps up for another Fashion Week. Fashion luminaries, hovering press reps, and harried show staff walk briskly across the Plaza towards the next scheduled event. The sense of anticipation is accompanied by the throbbing bass from the show tent, where models strut their stuff. For the in-crowd, the new look of tomorrow eclipses the desire to reflect on what has come before. But the scholars just next door in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts relish the past. While Lincoln Center has always been considered the locus of cultural history as-it-happens, it also harbors cultural artifacts of yesteryear stored nearby in the archives of LPA. 

Toby Daniels is a proud, self-proclaimed enabler.

The founder of Social Media Week (which is happening in nine cities, with an opening reception at NYPL, its global event partner) has worked tirelessly for years to bring social media tools into the hands of individuals, businesses, and non profits.

St. George Library Center hosts a book discussion of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell on Monday, January 24, 2011 at 6:30PM.

Like a repeated news ticker, once again Facebook  is in the news. As a high player in the social media marketplace, it comes as no surprise that Facebook would lead headlines, but unlike Twitter , who caught media attention for reaching a record of 5 billion  tweets last week, Facebook's latest news round is not so glamorous. It does boil down, however, to the fact that social media is a marketplace.

Manischewitz, Hebrew National, Wolff's Kasha, Empire Kosher Poultry--it's no surprise that these companies have produced Jewish cookbooks over the years. But advertising booklets have been around since the nineteenth century, and lots of (non-Jewish) companies have tried to attract Jewish customers with recipe booklets, a wide array of which can be rediscovered in NYPL's Dorot Jewish Division.

These hosiery ads take a slightly different approach. Here, the modish subject is still involved with a mischievous small animal, but now she is engaged in braving the elements. What does this say about the product being advertised? Yes, their stockings are reliable; they’ll hold up in the most difficult of conditions! Selling intimate apparel in early twentieth century America required practical social imperatives. In a time when stockings had to be moved from luxury to necessary goods, consumers needed to be convinced. 1921 is still a long way from the time of Victoria’s Secret.

But the story of women’s liberation could never have happened without the 

My colleague Susan Waide put me onto the illustrations you see here and in my next post. They’re all advertising illustrations by M.C. Woodbury, executed between 1920 and 1922, for the McCallum Hosiery Company in Northhampton, Massachusetts. I love them for their period feel, and for what they say about fashion advertising in the U.S. at that time.

We’ve grown so used to lingerie ads that are filled with sexual angst, or at least that’s what I remember from fashion magazines since I was young, and still see today. What strikes me about these two ads is the sweetness portrayed in the imagery. A modish, obviously style-conscious young woman is featured, while one 

On January 24, 1984 Apple Inc. introduced us to the Macintosh.

During a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII (January 22, 1984) a television commercial by Apple was aired to promote the Macintosh personal computer. The ad showed an unnamed heroine (played by Anya Major) wearing red shorts, red running shoes, and a white tank top with a Picasso-style picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer, running through an Orwellian world to throw a sledgehammer at a TV image of Big Brother — an implied representation of IBM.”

This was followed by an on screen message and voice over stating: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.