When snow covers the ground and the days get shorter, you know it’s time to celebrate the winter holidays and spread cheer and good will. Even celebrities can’t resist the action, lending their talent and likeness to all manners of Christmas merriment. Popular personalities of stage, screen and song deliver messages of joy in the form of holiday specials (dramatic retellings of Dicken’s A Christmas...
As we see more and more public spaces become smoke-free, it’s easy to forget that smoking wasn’t always considered hazardous. In the days when it was socially acceptable to smoke, cigarettes were advertised on television and endorsed by popular celebrities and cartoon characters. A carton of cigarettes was considered an appropriate gift for children to give their fathers. In the Mad Men universe, where smoking...
With all the running around preparing for the holidays and shopping for that perfect gift, I always find myself exhausted by New Year’s and once again… no new calendar! Usually by the time I get around to getting one I’ve missed at least January. But not this year! I’ve found some gorgeous mid-century modern calendars – some even free! The best one (I think) is...
As of 1965, women’s liberation has not yet pervaded mainstream culture. In season four of Mad Men, we get a taste of what’s to come as women become more independent and empowered. Despite the increase in seemingly independent women, including budding feminist, copywriter Peggy Olsen, most of the ladies inhabiting fictional 1960s NYC are marriage-minded and family-oriented. When SCDP (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) lands the...
From the The Pierre in NYC to the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome, hotels frequently serve as backdrop to exciting plot points on the hit series Mad Men. Creative ad man Don Draper and his cohorts use hotels to seduce clients and women and to celebrate their latest conquests. The show often provides a fictional peek at the advertising strategies and campaigns of real-life brands and...
It was with reluctance that I took on Ultra Swank’s assignment of a segment on Googie design. I am not an expert. Art historians and critics can be a vicious group. One false move and I could be forever condemned to an underworld of Louis the XIV basement rec. rooms accented with a million velvet Elvis paintings! Oh well, maybe they’ve got some Pepsi in...
Fellow fans of Ultra Swank are well aware that we are revelers in a cultural period of technology supreme. Be it Hi-Fi or Hydrogen Bomb if it had push buttons and chrome it was an object of desire! Few artists captured this ‘age of the machine’ better than Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965). Immigrating from Russia to New York City in 1919, Artzybasheff’s career included over 200...