Man Appeal: Advertising, Modernism and Menswear

Embracing a wide range of material from promotions for shirts to suits, and from footwear to underwear, this deeply researched and timely study analyses advertising for men’s clothing and the representation of masculine identities in the context of poster design and periodical publishing in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Work by celebrated graphic designers Tom Purvis for Austin Reed and Ashley Havinden for Simpson of Piccadilly is assessed alongside that by less well-known, though equally talented, practitioners in advertising design like C.B. Bowmar, Traus, Fran Sutton, and William Houghton. The central theme of this book picks up on Cyril King’s idea, expressed in Man and his Clothes in 1927, that publicity could be instrumental in overcoming any apathy or resistance which men might have toward changes in fashion - especially if advertisers attended to the balance between ‘atmospheric’ or symbolic content and ‘reason why’ or factual content. Accordingly, the seven chapters it contains are organised thematically as well as chronologically and deal with issues such as period style in commercial art, the dynamics of text and image in advertising messages, the rise and influence of advertising agencies, market and media classifications, consumer psychology, gender and sexuality, class, pleasure and spectatorship, and national propaganda.