Emma Dent, "*Mad Men*’s 'Maidenform': Shaping Narrative through Shapewear’s Commercial History"

The exacting attention to detail of Mad Men’s showrunner Matthew Weiner has crystallized into near legend over the course of the series’ almost seven-season run.  Because of Weiner’s well-known perfectionism, Mad Men’s fidelity, or lack thereof, to period accuracy inevitably enters into both critical and popular writings about the series.  There is an especially strong impulse among fans to “expose” Mad Men’s historical anachronisms.  These revelations often seem to render the show criminal, convicting it of the felony of being a work of fiction and not, say, documentary.  Episodes that center on advertising campaigns for real-life brands like Maidenform and Playtex are ripe for such dialogue, given that audiences are easily able to compare the creative work of the true “mad men” (and women) of the period with Sterling Cooper’s fictional output.  While popular, is this kind of comparison productive to a critical understanding of the series?  As an art historian invested in visual culture, I would argue yes, but not if it produces a reductive good versus bad reading of the fictional advertisements and their period counterparts.              

Advertising, as Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, explain in their introduction to Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, operates in complex, and often specific, narrative ways throughout the series.  As they argue, the show uses advertising as “a structure for exploring the moralquandaries of a corrupting world.”  According with this description, the sixth episode of Mad Men’s sophomore season, “Maidenform,” transforms a commercial turf war between two lingerie brands – Playtex and Maidenform – into a broader meditation on female sexuality, objectification, and the limited models available to women of the 1960s.  Although victorious in the sales race, Sterling Cooper’s client, Playtex, lacks the sex appeal of competitor Maidenform and its popular “I dreamed…” campaign.  “Maidenform is a dream, but Playtex is a bra,” Don exasperatedly remarks at the episode’s opening, evidently hesitant to abandon what has heretofore been a successful strategy.  Don’s irritation notwithstanding, he and his team begin to develop a new idea that will place Playtex more in line with its rival.  Partly the brainchild of Paul Kinsey, the resulting advertisement plays upon two models of female celebrity: blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe and elegant First Lady and mother Jacqueline Kennedy. 

The new campaign’s underlying assumption is that every woman models herself after one or the other.  Pitching the idea to Playtex executives, Don confidently declares, “Women have feelings about these women because men do.  Because we want both, they want to be both.  It's about how they want to be seen by us, their husbands, their boyfriends, their friends' husbands.”  According to both Don and the new advertisement, the question is not one of either Marilyn or Jackie; instead, every woman allegedly seeks to channel both sex and grace. 

As Don makes clear, this revised campaign for Playtex is designed to move the brand into

“Maidenform’s neighborhood.”  A careful consideration of actual advertisements from Playtex’s challenger Maidenform in relation to the work produced by Mad Men’s fictional agency, however, reveals the extent to which the show selectively focuses on a certain type of Maidenform “I dreamed…” advertisement--one not necessarily representative of the brand’s broader, twenty-year-long campaign.  In the first few minutes of the episode, Duck Philips slaps a magazine onto Don’s desk, its pages opened to reveal a Maidenform advertisement featuring a coiffed brunette standing before a steaming, jet-black locomotive.  Echoing the train’s crimson accents, she wears rouge-hued fringed pants and matching pumps, and grasps a scarf of the same color in her left hand.  Apart from the white brassiere she sports, the woman is outfitted not unlike a matador before a bull.  Below the image appears one of the brand’s signature slogans, “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks with my Maidenform bra.”  The advertisement’s caption, therefore, suggests that this Maidenform matador captured the attention not of the male bull, but of men in general, with her bra.  In her essay “Maidenform: Masculinity as Masquerade,” Lilya Kaganovsky writes that Maidenform advertisements like this one are “aimed at the gaze of the other” (Kaganovsky’s emphasis).  Indeed, with her arms proudly outstretched, the woman seen in this advertisement is clearly on visual display.  Moreover, her intended audience is as much male as it is female, a point emphasized by Ken Cosgrove’s quip that he had four such advertisements posted on the walls of his dorm room while in college.

 

In the episode, this specific Maidenform advertisement comes to epitomize the brand’s entire campaign and the “neighborhood” into which Sterling Cooper’s client Playtex seeks to relocate.  Sterling Cooper responds by generating a concept that repeats the Maidenform advertisement’s emphasis on the “woman-as-object” or “woman-as-image.”  The dark-haired “Jackie” and platinum “Marilyn” versions of the same model stare invitingly at the audience.  Although each holds a beverage – coffee/tea for the more proper “Jackie,” champagne for “Marilyn” – these libations are nothing more than props.  The two women are occupied not with sipping their respective drinks, but with presenting themselves for the audience’s visual consumption.  The spare black and white backgrounds that frame “Jackie” and “Marilyn,” respectively, further highlight their status as images/objects and affords them no real three-dimensional space in which to exist.  Unlike the locomotive that vies with the Maidenform model for our attention, little remains to distract viewers from fixating on the leading ladies in Sterling Cooper’s Playtex advertisement.   

Due to the very nature of the “I dreamed…” campaign’s design, and of lingerie promotion in general, nearly all of Maidenform’s advertisements objectify their models in some basic manner.  The specific Maidenform example that Mad Men chooses to focus on in this episode, however, performs this objectification to an elevated degree.  Other Maidenform examples from the period, like the black-and-white advertisement that appeared in Life magazine’s April 11, 1960 issue, present a slightly more complicated vision.  Here, four bra-clad women sit before a stage curtain playing a variety of string and wind instruments, including a harp, flute, cello, and trumpet.  The advertisement’s tagline reads, “I dreamed I played in an all-girl orchestra...”  In contrast to Sterling Cooper’s fictional Playtex advertisement, or even Maidenform’s own  “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…,” this Maidenform advertisement presents women engaged in an activity beyond that of standing and modeling.  Unlike the women depicted in each of the aforementioned advertisements, this female quartet scarcely registers the audience.  Each member of the ensemble is instead absorbed in her own music making.

 

Many of the Maidenform advertisements that appeared during the 1960’s in both general

interest publications like Life and women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and McCall’s arguably follow templates more akin to the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” example than the “all-female ensemble” case.  Yet even in the advertisements that appear to most overtly objectify their female subjects, the women are given at least a spark of agency through activity.  Playing upon another timeworn saying, the “I dreamed I painted the town red…” advertisement appeared in the pages of Life magazine at least once on November 29, 1963.  In this entry, animated, blonde-bobbed woman looks directly at the audience while leaning dangerously from a metal scaffold.  Sporting matching chambray cap and capri pants, the woman is in the process of covering over the brick building’s drab, chalky exterior with vibrant red paint.  Details like the paintbrush clutched in her gloved right hand, as well as the pail dripping with pigment that rests on the scaffold’s platform, serve to emphasize her efforts.  When discussing the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” image, Kaganovsky calls attention to the inclusion of the possessive “their” in its tagline.  In Kaganovsky’s reading of this advertisement, “their” affirms that the woman’s identity is not developed from within, but instead predicated on the gazes of others.  Sterling Cooper’s reinvented Playtex strategy picks up on the gendered textual overtones of this particular Maidenform advertisement and arguably exaggerates them.  Regardless of the scenarios depicted, each of the Maidenform “I dreamed…” advertisements feature the pronoun “I.”  In doing so, Maidenform’s advertisements at least offer the women a limited capacity to speak.  On the other hand, Sterling Cooper’s Playtex tagline reads, “Nothing fits both sides of a woman better than Playtex.”  The caption strips “Jackie” and “Marilyn” of any voice, reducing each to the general category of “woman.”  The fictive Playtex advertisement thus magnifies the female objectification hinted at in Maidenform’s copy.

In contrast to both the Playtex and train-centric Maidenform advertisements, Maidenform’s “I dreamed I painted the town red…” tagline focuses instead on the action of the woman depicted in the advertisement.  Arguably, she offers herself up as much for visual consumption as the woman who stops the train in its tracks.  However, the caption accompanying her image leaves room for multiple interpretations.  The text suggests that the woman is active and allows us to regard her activity as more than a mere performance designed for viewing.

When Maidenform debuted its “I dreamed…” campaign in 1949, the company was run by the husband-and-wife team of William and Ida Rosenthal.  Contrary to expectation, it was Ida who steered the business’s financial and commercial development, while her husband designed its undergarments.  Not unlike Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, a New York-based femalecopywriter named Mary Filius dreamt up the campaign’s soon-to-be famous slogan,writing “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra.”  Throughout itstwo-decade run, the campaign set Filius’s caption in dialogue with a range ofscenarios.  Some, like the “I dreamed I stopped them in their tracks…” example, more evidently position the brand’s models as just that: models, objects to be looked at for their aesthetic appeal.  It is this kind of Maidenform advertisement to which Sterling Cooper’s Playtex concept responds.  If advertising indeed acts as “a structure for exploring the moral quandaries of a corrupting world” in the show, then Mad Men draws out certain qualities of the real-life Maidenform campaign so as to more compelling advance its own narrative agenda.  Peggy does not relate to the two feminine ideals society presents to her.  Neither a Marilyn nor a Jackie, she is also not content to be an object put on display.  Intensifying the shades of female objectification present in the Maidenform campaign in its fictional Playtex mock-up, Mad Men uses advertising’s history as the basis for an altogether new fiction.