13 of the Most Appalling Vintage Ads You've Never Seen

Whenever I fall into a swoon of despair over the gross inequalities in society—and let’s face it, they are legion—I try to cheer myself up by looking at vintage ads.

Let me tell you, that stuff is appalling.

More than art, cinema, or television programming, ads can provide a window not only into who we are, but more importantly, who we wish to be. They create an impossible ideal, one Madison Avenue knows no ordinary human can live up to, and then furnish the “means necessary” to achieve that ideal.

Often, it’s not just the product that’s being touted, but the person you can become if you use the product: thin, elegant, young if you’re a woman; rich, tautly erect, and with a full head of hair if you’re a man.

If you’re none of those things, so the meta-message goes, you will never enjoy the finer things in life. In many respects, this is the promise of influencer culture on Instagram. By providing you with highly manipulated images of people you wished you looked like, all delicately scooping mango sorbet in front of a luxury beach resort, influencer-advertisers can eventually wear you down. They don’t call it a “feed” for nothing.

One might dismiss my grousing as much ado about nothing. Ask anybody whether they think advertising affects them, and the answer is always a scornful and resounding no. Yet global ad spending runs about $628 billion each year. To think that ads have no effect on you is to betray a lack of awareness of how ads work, which is subliminally, unconsciously. Advertisers are artful. Because consumers have grown more sophisticated, Madison Avenue has devised less direct but equally potent ways of telling them they’re not okay and how a specific product will fix them, once and for all.

Along the way, ads have held up a mirror to society. The Aunt Jemima pancake artwork people didn’t think twice about in the 1950s would be the subject of a national boycott today. To me, this is a reason for hope. It reminds me that across the narrative arc of history, progress is incremental, even though it seems unacceptably slow to those of us who are living it in real time. We have vile and as-yet-unaddressed injustices, but at least our national consciousness has been raised, and I breathe a little easier knowing that.

Here then are twelve reasons why looking at vintage advertising can be a powerful reminder of just how far we’ve come.

Not sure what pervy old ad exec thought tarting up a little girl and writing sexually suggestive text would be a good way to sell personal hygiene, but you can bet he’d be dragged all over Twitter today. Progress!

This particular ad makes my fillings ache. The subliminal message is clear: use Ivory—as in WHITE—soap, or you and your spawn are going to turn into a Black train porter. Not even nasty old racist executives on Fox would run an ad like this today. So even though I feel sick just beholding this awful reminder of our past, I do find myself celebrating how unacceptable we’d find it now.

How old is this girl—fourteen? Fifteen? This ad is so horrifying, it takes my breath away, being as it is a sly endorsement of bedding post-pubescent children, “used goods” like the BMWs they’re advertising. I’d like to go back in time and retroactively set fire to this ad agency.

What fresh hell is this???? Malcolm X must be spinning in his grave.

I love the not-so-subtle homoerotic elements of this ad, especially the words “long and hard” right next to a cigarette held inches away from a man’s mouth. Admittedly, fifties’ advertisers were big proponents of Freud. I also enjoy the absurdity of a doctor endorsing cigarettes.

Were the fifties and sixties awash in pederasty? Here we have an “apple for the teacher” held directly in front of the boy’s unmentionables, whilst “Teacher” looms over him with a switch. There are some things you just can’t unsee, and this is one of them.

There is only one word for this ad: horrifying. And look at all the text! Did we have more time on our hands back then or were we simply more literate? This is the same General Electric, by the way, that pays zero in federal income tax year after year. I spell “evil” G-E-N-E-R-A-L E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C. How about you?

The only thing more gag-worthy than a spoonful of mayonnaise is this ad.

“Projection” equipment. Get it? Hardy har har.

When you see ads as appallingly sexist as these, you begin to understand why old white dinosaurs like Trump keep trying to bring back the fifties and sixties. What a fun time that must have been for them! Women were “soft and gentle.” Black people offered wine and did your dishes. White men were on top of the world, being catered to by everybody, including Madison Avenue.

If you need to run to the bathroom to throw up, I understand. “Mr. Leggs” trousers in dacron were doing their utmost to sell you slacks, sure, but also a magical reminder that men are in charge. I’d like to see an ad like this try to pass muster today. It goes to show we HAVE made progress, although not nearly enough.

To get you thinking about the images you see, I decided to include this contemporary one from Givenchy. Remember: advertisers have gotten very subtextual in how they craft their products and messages. What does this image say? If you want access to this woman’s Holy of Holies, you’re going to have to buy her this really expensive purse.

Do you have any “favorite” vintage ads? If so, include a link, if you can. I’d like to see them. And keep fighting the good fight against the overreach of advertisers in general and Madison Avenue in particular! The only people who can stop this nonsense is us.