Bought and Sold

You might not expect to find a literate and culturally aware exhibition under the same roof that covers JCPenney and Victoria’s Secret. But “Dream Girls: Images of Women in Advertising: 1890s-1990s,” circulated by the American Advertising Museum in Portland, Ore., fits right in at Westminster Mall.

A model of concise exhibition design, the show combines reproductions of print ads with appealingly low-tech interactive devices (overhead hair dryers that play radio spots, a mini-quiz that requires you to open an oven door) and morsels of useful information. (There is also a 74-minute tape playing four decades of TV spots, which had yet to be installed on a recent visit.)

The literate aspect of the exhibition owes a great deal to the writings of social critic Judith Williamson (author of “Decoding Advertisements,” 1978) and Marxist novelist and art critic John Berger (author of “Ways of Seeing,” 1972), both of whom view advertising with a jaundiced eye.

But even the more conventionally instructive texts in “Dream Girls” emphasize how the images of women and the content and tone of the ad copy reflected dominant cultural views of women’s place in society.

One of Berger’s big themes about the depiction of women in art is that “men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at.” Even the mirror was created, he says, “to make the woman connive in treating herself first and foremost as a sight.”

In the show, mirrors repeatedly juxtapose advertising imagery with the viewer’s face, a sly reminder that all this expensively conceived huffing and puffing is intended to put you, the consumer, in the picture.

Even before the turn of the century, women made the vast majority of household purchases. With the introduction of competing brand-name goods, companies began to court housewives with new messages of flattery and wish-fulfillment while planting the seeds of self-doubt that eventually built the juggernaut of consumer culture.

Even the dignified early campaigns offered a decorous whiff of sex appeal. In a turn-of-the-century Coca-Cola ad, a bosomy Gibson girl with a faint smile holds an ornamental glass of the all-American beverage.

An ad for Ivory soap shows a young American woman on holiday in London, intently listening to a dashing young druggist who recommends the soap that embodies the “American spirit of cleanliness and efficiency.”

Daintiness and cleanliness were supreme virtues, employed even to tout the advantages of the Lackawana Railroad, which claimed to lack the “smoke and cinders” that “spoil good clothes.” In the ad, a fastidious woman in all-white perches on a riverbank near a rail station; apparently grass stains don’t faze her.

The testimonial made an early appearance, lending chatty credence to manufacturer claims. Regular use of an elixir called Vestro turned one woman’s “bony, hollow” neck into a “full, plump” model. (Body fashions have undergone some adjustment since then.)

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In the ‘20s, images of smartly turned-out women sold the new luxury products: automobiles, Victrolas, cigarettes. Packaging took on new importance with such innovations as DuPont Cellophane (“What a lovely transparent wrapper!”).

And the store came into its own. An emancipated woman could march into a Piggly Wiggly store and “all by herself” decide what to buy on newfangled open shelves, with “big square price tags” and “no clerks to wait for.”

Marketers anxious to open pocketbooks snapped shut by the Depression depended on a combination of confessional vignettes (“She had been constipated since childhood”), fears of maternal failure or social faux pas (“a child needs the comfort and safety of luxury texture”) and endorsements by actresses (Jean Harlow seemed to favor Lucky Strikes primarily because the wrapper “opens without an ice pick”).

The 1950s ushered in a new emphasis on women’s domestic sphere after years of war-themed ads. Betty Crocker, a severe-looking matriarch in a pearl necklace and tailored outfit, promised that her cake mixes would “drive that old monster, monotony, right out of your kitchen window.” A smiling couple with two children offered a vision of the kind of “family happiness” the purchase of a Motorola TV would bring.

But the homebody heroine was just one persona on which advertisers projected women’s yearnings for perfection. The ‘60s unleashed the moody femme fatale; the ‘70s chased “real world” embodiments of glamour and achievement (Farrah Fawcett for Wella Balsam, Dorothy Hamill for Clairol); and the ‘80s ushered in the power-suited supermom.

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As Williamson wrote: “An advertisement dangles before us an image of an Other but it invites us to become the same.”

The show points out that some of the ad images of women that were supposed to represent a combination of feminist liberation and sex appeal really blew it. Remember that lanky beach babe who confides to her leggy pal, “He loves my mind and he drinks Johnnie Walker”?

The show also admits that advertising was a very white world for a very long time. When women of color did appear in ads, they generally were supposed to represent something “exotic” (such as the Asian woman posing in the lotus position for Bali Sensuale bras).

Not all selling ploys have come from men, of course. The show introduces some of the top women in advertising, including Shirley Polykoff of Foote Cone Belding, who dreamed up Clairol’s “Does she or doesn’t she?” campaign in 1955. (Life magazine initially balked at running the ad, citing impropriety. But when the management guys polled the magazine’s female employees, they failed to recognize the slogan as a sexual double entendre.)

There is something almost touchingly out of touch about advertisers’ attempts to understand the woman consumer.

“She’s not a moron; she’s your wife,” David Oglivy famously wrote in his 1967 autobiography, “Confessions of an Advertising Man.” The show includes a recent update: “She’s not an idiot; she’s your boss.”

* “Dream Girls: Images of Women in Advertising: 1890s-1990s,” through Sept. 7 at Westminster Mall (lower level JCPenney Court), Golden West Avenue at Bolsa Avenue. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Friday; 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714) 898-2250.