Retrophilia: Bathing Beauty
retrophilia (ret troh FEE lee uh) n. 1 An intense attraction for things of the past. 2 a weekly series for popsucker wherin the irrepressible Wootini reveals the horrors of the past to the present to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
This girl appears to be taking a bubble bath. Nothing odd about that, right? Well, she also appears to be on the phone. Nothing terribly odd about that, either. People chat on the phone doing all kinds of unusual things. No biggie. But make the jump to see just why this ad left me so confused...
Okay, yeah, I could point out how ridiculously sexist it is that this shampoo claims its the best one for girls because it's pink. And all girls love pink, of course. And the mildly threatening last line of the copy where they ask, "You're a girl, aren't you?" Because if you are, then you should love pink. But it was the sixties, so a little bit of sexism was to be expected.
Still, does being the sixties explain why this girl is taking a bubble bath in a barrel? And why her phone is attached to the side of that barrel? Who is she calling, the Old West?
Wootini
Posted to Hot Stuff, Retrophilia on 21 September 2009
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: advertisement, lustre creme, pink, retrophilia, shampoo, sixties
Блог очень качественный. Надо бы Вам награду вручить за него или просто орден почета. =)
Not only that, but in an ad for shampoo, why is everything wet and sudsy except her hair, which is not only dry, but done up in a ribbon, as if to assure the reader that it has not been and will not be wetted?! And notice, in the era before cordless phones, that the telephone is like a children's toy in that it has no wire cx to anything but the receiver, so she's guaranteed to be on the phone with nobody.
I happen to have the issue of a magazine in which that ad appears. I think the solution to the "puzzle" lies in that last line, "You're a girl, aren't you?" It's a piece of irony, because the makers of the ad knew it was to appeal to boys (men), not "girls", and not to the user of the product at all, so the photo need not actually relate to the use of the product nor make any sense. So they expected a male audience to read down to that last line and laugh.