Flapper by Joshua Zeitz

Author:Joshua Zeitz [Zeitz, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: United States, 20th Century, Women's Studies, Social Science, History
ISBN: 9780307523822
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2007-02-06T06:00:00+00:00

17

WITHOUT IMAGINATION, NO WANTS

IN LATE NOVEMBER 1928, with the winter holiday season in high gear, millions of American magazine readers opened the latest edition of The Saturday Evening Post and saw a familiar, illustrated icon staring past them. Tall and angular, young and chic, outfitted stylishly in distinctive flapper wear, the “Fisher Body Girl” seemed, at first glance, to be selling clothes, or makeup, or shoes.1 On closer consideration, she was selling automobiles. “Of all those who express motor car body preference,” announced the advertisement, “95% Prefer ‘Body by Fisher.’ ” The message couldn’t have been clearer: Buy a GM model—be it a Pontiac, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, or Buick—and this body was yours.

The idea of using sex and fashion to sell cars wouldn’t have made a great deal of sense to the prewar generation. But it was well in line with the ethos of the Jazz Age. By the 1920s, a powerful group of advertising specialists, headquartered along Madison Avenue in New York City, had perfected ways of using the flapper to sell consumer items and using consumer items to define the flapper.

One of the more curious publishing phenomena of 1925 was a sparsely written biography of Jesus Christ authored by a leading New York advertising executive, Bruce Barton.2 Almost as quickly as it hit bookstores, The Man Nobody Knows climbed to the top of the best-seller list, where it remained for more than two years and through twenty-seven different printings. The half-million readers who thumbed through Barton’s slim volume learned that Christ was, above all, “the founder of modern business” and a sage for all times who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” It was a wholly unusual take on Jesus Christ, but it seemed to strike a chord.

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