#historical advertisements

[ladies-home-journey]

lingerie advertisement, Heinz beans advertisement

Ladies Home Journal, May 1920

[eroticlamb]

Anita Louise featured in a WINX advertisement, November 1933 ♡

[postcard-from-the-past]

Advertisement of the Parisian cabaret music hall Folies Bergère

French vintage postcard

[petermorwood]

"Quality Street" sweets - TIL that...

...despite this particular brand of sweets appearing in my childhood most often at Christmas, historic costumes worn by characters on the tins were NOT a part of the widespread "Dickensian Christmas" look which appeared so often on cards and packaging.

Instead it's because the characters and their Regency costumes were inspired by a play by "Peter Pan" author J. M. Barrie.

The play was called "Quality Street".

And the tins are collectibles.

*****

A Christmas-related appearance of the sweets was mostly coincidental, though the empty tin from one year did often appear at the next, full of home-made mince pies or even an entire Christmas cake.

Large, fairly airtight tins are useful that way, especially at trapping the spirituous exhalations of cakes made in mid-September and "fed" weekly thereafter with spoonfuls of brandy, or whiskey, or rum (sometimes all three, alternated) until it was time for the armour-plating of marzipan and royal icing to go on.

It used to be a common belief at home that opening the tin containing an un-iced cake near a naked flame at any time after mid-November was more than the opener's eyebrows were worth.

The eyebrow thing never happened, because it was one of those family fables, but I do remember bringing one such Quality Street tin down to Anne McCaffrey's house when I'd been invited to stay.

It contained not a Christmas cake but one of Mum's famed Chocolate Gateaux of Doom (my name for it, not hers), made specially for that visit and whose recipe, what with the plain-chocolate sponge cake and the apricot-cream filling and the double-chocolate ganache icing, required most of a bottle of cognac.

Since this cake didn't have the sealant-and-spackle cladding of marzipan and royal icing, it also required refrigeration to "keep it calm". My car didn't even have air conditioning, so in transit the cake got quite, er, excitable.

How excitable, we soon found out.

When Annie's stable manager sauntered over and popped the lid, expecting to find some nice Quality Street choccies, she was instead hit in the face by a near-visible cloud of booze vapour (a gin-ie, perhaps, even though no gin was involved) and reeled back with a cry of "Jaysuz, does yer mother own a feckin' distillery?"

Had she been smoking one of her habitual thin roll-ups at the time, our family fable might have been proved true after all...

:->

[gonkaccino]

Season 4 hope/prediction: Deb's show is solid, zero issues, runs flawlessly with great ratings, but her personal life is completely eroding. We start with her discovering Marcus is leaving, and it culminates in DJ going into labor right before a taping. Deb chooses the show. When it's over, and she finally flies to Vegas, it's too late -- Aiden's not letting her in because he loves his wife too much to let DJ get into a shouting match with her mom right after giving birth, and instead takes the brunt of Deb's wrath, with her making excuses and talking about how they used her money for IVF, and anyway, DJ's fine, so who cares if she wasn't there? Kathy's in the room with DJ and the baby (DJ's the closest she has to a daughter, after all) and Deb leaves too furious to think about how badly she's hurt her family.

She heads back to her Vegas mansion -- empty, obviously, Josefina and the dogs would be in LA -- and pops open a bottle of wine. Alone. Completely alone. Can't call Marty, she has no friends, the closest she's got would be Kiki and wouldn't that be embarrassing, calling your poker dealer to talk about your feelings --

and then Ava's there. She got the news about DJ's labor, she got the story from Aiden (who was distraught, by the way, man's too much of a sweetheart for Vance drama), a spare key from Damian (happy to pawn that off on her, though if it isn't returned promptly he's taking legal action) and has arrived just in time to see the Deborah Vance having a breakdown the likes of which no one thought physically possible. Crying gives you wrinkles, you know. But Ava has to be here. She's the physical embodiment of a lesson Deb never truly learned: you don't have to like someone to love them.

In my imaginary fantasy land that I am concocting this would then subsequently lead into them fucking nasty but I understand that this may be a step too far for the surprisingly large number of very normal people who watch this show and would forgive JPL for not taking it that far. However I do believe they should fuck about it and let Ava take the reigns in their relationship while they see how many of Deb's bridges they can un-burn.

[vintagefashionplates]

1893 Article: "Dressing Without the Corset: The Artistic Side of Dress Reform Illustrated."

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Selection of 1980s Hugo Boss’ advertisements — Part 5.

Parts: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

[alwaysbewoke]

[labyrinthofstreams]

Art Needlework by Frederick Herrschner; Catalogue No. 29, Fall-Winter 1927-1928.

[ladies-home-journey]

Odorono deodorant advertisement

Ladies Home Journal, May 1920

[marzipanandminutiae]

Just saw a Hilton ad that feels relevant to my post about landlords ripping up Victorian houses

A young woman is walking down an ornate staircase in a darkened old house, next to a wall of oil paintings, texting an apparently unresponsive AirBnB host in confusion

It then cuts to the same woman happily receiving towels from a smiling concierge in an all-white, brightly lit Hilton hallway

The framing here is fascinating and dismaying: the old house is dark, confusing, and associated by the text (“ghosted by your host?”) with the fear and discomfort of a haunting. By contrast, the hyper-modern and generic hotel is a bastion of safety and familiarity.

The message is clear- come to a modern hotel instead of a Creepy Old House That’s Probably Haunted! Why bother with the quirks and personality of a building outside the most baseline current design? Our featureless white walls invite no thoughts or opinions of your own!

Please ignore the fact that construction quality has tanked in recent years due to hyper-capitalist cost cutting, and you only have two minutes to escape from a building like this in a fire (while it offgases plastic fumes the whole time)!

I hate it here, architecturally-speaking

(Obviously there are very real issues with short-term vacation rentals. I just find the coding here interesting: they didn’t choose a modern house for the AirBnB, or a historical hotel for that segment)

[jonquilandlace]

Hello I am back on my "Rise of the Pink Ladies was an actually incredible show and didn't deserve to be cancelled much less PULLED from the STREAMING SERVICE within a MONTH of its finale airing!" bullshit

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Selection of 1980s Hugo Boss’ advertisements — Part 9.

Parts: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9

[postcard-from-the-past]

Advertisement of the Kupferberg Gold sparkling wine on a vintage postcard

[esteemed-excellency]

Fashion ads compilation from the Mele Brothers department stores (1890s - 1900s)

[yesterdaysprint]

Palmolive advertisement, Paris, 1949