Mister Mailman

If these images are anything to go by, there was no higher calling in mid-century America than that of custodian and distributor of the nation’s mail. Teams of craggy faced functionaries held communities together with benevolence, integrity and kindly wisdom. No mail carrier was too busy to spare the time to engage with the public, offering sympathy, encouragement and bonhomie with every delivery. In today’s world of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy none of this is remotely affordable and if the U.S. Postal Service gets its way the mail carrier’s duties will soon be limited to a high speed drive-by with correspondence stuffed into “curbside mailboxes”. When these images were published the postal service was still the gateway to romance and tragedy, to opportunity and penury and our final illustration shows a hapless recipient of bad news, stunned by what he has just read. 

Solvay SA

This is the Baronet Works in Warrington on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal. Belgian multi-national chemical company, Solvay is the operator and manufactures industrial polymers on the site. Since the foundation of the business in 1863 it has grown into a company employing 29,000 people in 55 countries. Despite the affinity between Solvay and solvent, the name derives from the founder, Ernest Solvay. Which opens up an unlikely connection between the complex utilitarian manufacturing structures on the canal-side and the refined Art Nouveau aesthetic to be found in the buildings of Avenue Louise in Brussels. Ernest Solvay’s son, Armand is the link – in 1894 he commissioned Belgian architect, Victor Horta to design a large Art Nouveau town house on the fashionable Avenue Louise. No expense was spared in terms of construction materials and interior decoration and after two years of building work it was completed as Hôtel Solvay in 1900. Generally regarded as one of the great exemplars of Art Nouveau architecture at its short-lived zenith, Hôtel Solvay has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It could be argued that the exquisite refinement of Horta’s design practice which extended into every aspect of the furnishings, fixtures and fittings has its equivalent in the elaborate computations and formulations that dictate the extraordinary complexity of shapes, forms and volumes required to serve the chemical industry. While environmental concerns proliferate around the production of volatile chemical substances, there is no escaping their ubiquity in our lives as consumers and in the absence of a clear path to an additive-free existence most of us make compromises. Which leaves space to admire the design ingenuity embodied in the industrial process without becoming a cheer-leader for environmentally unsustainable activities. In the same way, an admiration for the beautifully finished craftwork in rare tropical hardwoods in Horta’s interior is not an endorsement of the unregulated exploitation of finite natural resources. 

Groucho Recommends

 

Lending one’s name and reputation to a commercial product was an everyday and lucrative transaction for Hollywood stars. There were several who attained prodigious levels of promiscuity – Arthur Godfrey, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth to name but a few – and there was the inspirational example of Constance Talmadge who endorsed no less than 11 different products in a single issue of Liberty magazine in October 1927. Her indiscriminate approach may have been driven by the impending arrival of sound recording which brought her silent movie career to an abrupt end just two years later. These arrangements were negotiated via agents – it’s difficult to imagine the adman ushered into the presence of the illustrious star to extol the virtues of the very latest twin-tub, carpet-beating, cocktail shaker – and some were obviously more zealous than others in marketing the services of their clients.

 

   

Decisions about which products to favour and which to pass on are lost in the past and the evidence in the form of advertising offers few clues as to the process. What is clear is that for many there was no conflict between protecting their image as a star and associating with some very banal and unsophisticated products. Laxatives and toilet tissue were universally avoided but almost anything else was acceptable. As a master of verbal wit and cynicism, Groucho Marx was certainly fully aware of the idiocy of endorsement but unwilling to reject such a well rewarded proposition. Any damage to his reputation for denouncing human folly was more than compensated for in cash. The famous painted eyebrows and moustache were put to good use on behalf of a wide range of advertisers including General Electric, Rheingold Beer, Teachers Whisky and Skippy Peanut Butter. There was even a little jousting with Tony the Tiger for a serving of Sugar Frosted Flakes. These three examples need little further comment except to observe that the demonic gleam in Groucho’s eye as he inspects his Amana Home Freezer suggests it may be full of deep frozen body parts.

Lucky People

 

The American Tobacco Company (manufacturers of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand), unhappy at trailing Camel cigarettes in public popularity turned to Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the public relations industry) to revitalise their product and encourage female smoking. Bernays pursued his target with two strategies. The first was to overcome the female inhibition about smoking outdoors by breeding the confidence to light up anytime and anywhere on equal terms with men. In 1929 Bernays hired a small army of glamour models to march in the New York City Easter Parade flagrantly and imperiously smoking Lucky Strikes in full view of the assembled public. The subsequent press coverage of this transgressive event was a classic instance of the publicity that money cannot buy.

 

The second strategy was to promote cigarette smoking on the cinema screen by circulating directors and producers with handy guides to the wide range of dramatic possibilities that can be enhanced by the imaginative deployment of a cigarette in the hands or mouths of the cast. Bernays understood that cinema audiences could be depended on to imitate what they saw on screen and obediently smoke their way through moments of emotional stress and tension. Bernays called this process, engineering consent. This was the era of the green Lucky Strike pack and one of Bernays’s greatest concerns was that the female smoker, endowed by nature with a superior sense of colour relationships, might be put off by the shade of green, finding it clashing with their favoured choice of tones and shades. Much energy was expended on a campaign to persuade the couture industry of the wondrous potential of green as a high fashion colour to little effect. The green neurosis persisted until 1941 when Raymond Loewy designed the white pack with the famous target on both front and back. The advertisers congratulated themselves on having doubled the publicity potential of the pack without spending an additional cent.

   

The services of Hollywood stars were always available if the price was right and copywriters carefully crafted the form of words that would help seal the deal with smokers. The comforting fiction that nationally recognised figures from the movies, with their enormous disposable incomes could find nothing better than Lucky Strike placed them, for an instant, on an equal footing with their audience. Every actor had a similar story to tell – without Lucky Strike they could never have survived their punishing work schedule or maintained the expressive tones of their all-important voices. Most participants cultivated a frosty air of hauteur – only a few deigned to look with favour on their admirers but they all agreed that nothing eased throat irritation more effectively than a cigarette.

Past and Present No. 8: Marseille

I always travel with a small selection of faded vintage postcards in the hope that it might be possible to pair them with some contemporary views. Marseille proved to be intractable – economic forces and the Nazi occupation having obliterated all but the most securely rooted landmarks. The Vieux Port and the docks at la Joliette have been abandoned by maritime commerce in favour of leisure, culture and urban motorways. When I found a potential match I was often at a disadvantage – early postcard photographers being adept in the art of talking their way into neighbouring buildings to obtain an elevated viewpoint. In the absence of a personal drone or cherry-picker these are the best. Most frustrating was the trip to the corniche where I could see an almost perfect match if I had the power to hover in space some 4 metres from the seaward side of the path on which I was standing. It was pleasing to see that a bus passed the exact location of the tram in the postcard as the photo was taken. 

Burton – the Tailor of Taste

I can scarcely claim to have ever scaled the heights of fashion but as a typically pretentious adolescent I shared some of the dubious preferences of my contemporaries. A cornerstone of these preferences was a sneering contempt for Burton’s stores and their offer of unearned respectability in the form of made-to-measure suiting to be worn with white nylon shirts and skinny ties. These sartorial opinions were fraught with unconscious snobbery and anxiety about social class boundaries – especially the grey zone that existed where the aspirant working class overlapped with the lower middle class. One of the responsibilities of an art student in the 1960s was the obligation to display a transgressive fashion sense in defiance of middle class conformity. Only a minority with a flair for being ahead of the game fully discharged this duty and most of us took the easy way out by avoiding haircuts, wearing Levi jeans and smoking a lot of hand-rolled cigarettes. No Levi denim rested on Burton shelves, then a Burton customer would probably have been quite satisfied with Lee Coopers, widely despised by denimistas as poor imitations lacking authenticity. 

The Sheffield postcard shows a classic Burton store from the inter-war period when their numbers climbed to a peak of 2,000. A light touch Art Deco flavour lent distinction to a Burton high street box, clearly designed to emulate a flagship cinema in scale and presence. Most of these stores were built for visibility with retail activities confined to the lower floors – the upper floors were let out either as office space or snooker halls, the latter ensuring a steady flow of potential customers past the shop windows. There was an Architect’s Department to implement the house-style and an emphasis on verticality by means of glazing and pilasters on Neo-Georgian or Neo-Classical façades. Portland stone, faience and black granite frontages decorated with elephant-head capitals were topped with ornamental parapets in a subdued Egyptian style. These photographs come from Abergavenny, Weston-Super-Mare and Hull, the last of which is the most extravagant with its black and gold colour scheme. 

Burton is still present on the high street with over 400 stores having painfully adapted to the era of fashion tribalism and designer-labelled casual wear but the best efforts to position itself at the cutting-edge are persistently undermined by the long shadow of Alan Partridge. The original business model of freehold acquisitions has probably supplied the cushion that protected the name from extinction. 

Child Soldiers of Madison Avenue

Today we expose another cross-section through the geological record of mid-century American advertising and consider the impact of child centred publicity. Few images are as potent in emotional appeal as that of the child and for advertisers it is one of the basic elements in the visual vocabulary. A well-chosen image can help to convince the public that they are buying from an essentially honest and benevolent business when these qualities are reflected in the eyes of an innocent and guileless child. If the product contributes directly to the welfare of children (medicinal, infant foodstuffs, hygiene) the image must be modified to maximise parental anxieties and engage with protective instincts. When the product is primarily designed to meet the desires of children (breakfast cereal, confectionery) the chosen image will show the child transformed in terms of energy, alertness, health and contentment. A fortunate few graduate to the status of brand characters and enjoy long lives in a state of arrested development. Gender stereotyping is everywhere – boys are adventurous and naughty while girls are sensitive and helpful. The unimaginative advertiser is most likely to resort to cuteness of countenance to overcome consumer resistance – what monster could deny happiness and security to such an adorable and ingratiating child? Most of the following examples fit into one or other of these basic categories but a minority defy any classification and seem to have been conceived in a perfect storm of conflicting ideas. These are the ones that give the greatest pleasure to the detached observer of human folly.