JF Ptak Science Books Post 1108
There’s really not much to say, I think, about these two ads. The first is one I stumbled on just this morning, one in what seems now to be a long series of advertisements whose initial appeal has not only been lost to time but which now seem to wear very thin in the socially-acceptable category. The ad is from Life magazine for July 1955, and features Carter underwear for men and boys–and for some reason, it features the happy boy/cranky man too-close combo riding a football out of a stadium. I don’t know what any of that has to do with underwear–especially the unhappy older man.
There are a number of these ads by Carter’s, I recall, and many of them have this deep, pit-of-your-stomach sense of wrongness about them, a high, first-order branding of their original meaning completely lost in translation, the sense of their time now completely gone.
