MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper explores the nature of the texts and images associated with advertising, including commercial images, artistic and literary representations, photographs and postcards, the printed word and the visual arts in the fashion and clothing context.

Advertising became an increasingly important aspect of retailing through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, not least as the range of printed media steadily expanded. The Victorian advertisement exposes materialistic fantasies. It tells of goods that excited the imagination and of mundane realities of everyday life. Fashion advertisements during the mid-nineteenth century were small and not more than a price list or itemized inventory, but by the late 1880s, illustrated advertisements were clearly amongst the most visually arresting in the Victorian periodical press. The illustrated fashion advertisements would have been available to a cross-section of society. Women were the primary audience for most nineteenth-century advertisements. Advertisements and related notices in the newspapers and magazines about clothing and finery were a invaluable resource for women. The advertisement became both mirror and instrument of the social ideal. It was possible to create the illusion of the ‘perfect lady’, a beacon of Victorian affluence, via advertisements. Such advertisements would suggest fringes to improve the coiffure, corsets to mould the female figure, baby food which closely resembled human milk in composition, and matching soap for the hands and complexion.