Between the years 1930 to 1950, the art movement known as surrealism had an important impact on fashion advertising in America. During that period, many fashion ads used elements of fantasy in order to make an emotional appeal to consumers. Prior to that time, fashion advertisements were generally concerned with simply informing the consumer about the products. Usually, the ads just showed the products and described the facts about them. The ads generally did not elaborate on how the products would make the consumer feel better or improve his or her life. An example of this "old style" of fashion advertising can be seen in a Sears Roebuck catalog from the turn of the century. Example 1 shows one such catalog ad depicting "bloomers and trouserettes for women" (Cohn, 1976, p. 384). The copy for this ad is very factual. It mentions ease of washing and low prices; however, no further attempt is made to appeal emotionally to the desires of the consumer.
During the 1920's, styles in fashion advertising began to undergo change. As noted by Margolin, Brichta & Brichta (1979), the 1920's saw a shift in "the focus of advertising from explaining how an article worked to describing the pleasure it could give the user" (pp. 62-63). Along with this shift in emphasis, modern art styles became increasingly predominant in fashion ads. The elements of modern art were used because they helped increase the emotional appeal of the advertisements. Art deco, cubism, futurism, impressionism, and abstraction, as well as surrealism, all found their way into the magazine ads of the time. Of these, surrealism related most directly to the subconscious fantasies of the consumer. One of the primary purposes of surrealist art was to tap into the subconscious mind of the viewer. In this way, it can be seen that surrealism fit in well with the shift in ads from a "factory viewpoint" to "the mental processes of the consumer" (Marchand, 1985, p. 11). ...