Surrealism Impact on Fashion Advertising
Between the years 1930 to 1950, the art movement
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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, impre
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and the clothes items which surround her appear as though they have been cut out and laid on top of one another. In this way, this ad exhibits the influence of collage techniques. This is interesting in the context of surrealistic influences, because the style of surrealism had its roots in the collage techniques of the early twentieth century. The use of collage in surrealism helps to enhance the overall fantasy of the images. It accomplishes this by juxtaposing images together which don't normally go together in the real world. In Example 3, the fantasy of the advertisement does not stem so much from the fact that the woman model is incongruent with the clothes items which surround her. Rather, it stems from the fact that the clothes seem to be circling around in the air behind her. Obviously, this is a scenario which would never exist in real life.
Example 4 provides yet another example of surrealistic distortion in advertising art (Rosenberg, 1930, pp. 44-45). This ad, from 1930, was created for the purpose of selling the Vici brand of shoes. As in the other ads previously discussed, the figure of the woman is highly stylized. In addition, the distortion of her characteristics can be seen in her elongated face an
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Approximate Word count = 4263
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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