The Stuff of Dreams?

Just as I'm watching old episodes of "Mad Men", along comes the January 2022 issue of Vogue (shivering in at 92 pages), with Olivia Wilde on the cover in a black bra and high-waisted black skirt by Michael Kors Collection. I was looking for the tagline, "I dreamed I hitch-hiked through the desert in my Maidenform bra."

The successful Maidenform ads are referenced in the second season of "Mad Men" when their (fictionalized) competitor Playtex wants the (also fictional) ad agency Sterling Cooper to dream up a similar new campaign for them. In the '50s and '60s those ads were everywhere, from news weeklies like "Life" to fashion glossies like, well, Vogue. They were so numerous over time they almost seemed to parody themselves:

Etc., etc. etc.

"Mad Men" is a rather bitter indictment of advertising agencies and their cavalier attitudes toward promotion. Almost exclusively run by men in the 1950s, they didn't seem to care as much about giving women what they wanted as telling them this is what they were desperate to have. 

I long assumed those Maidenform ads were cooked up by a lecherous crew of "boys" on Madison Avenue, but the origins were more innocent. Harry Trenner was an account executive for Maidenform at Weintrob Advertising in NYC. He and his wife Florence were sitting around the kitchen table in their New Rochelle home when they came up with the idea, probably laughing all the time. The outlandish premise seems like a variation on going to school without your underwear, nightmare fodder when I was a kid. The client bit and ran with it for many years.

The cover of Vogue is no laughing matter. This one was shot by star photographer Annie Lebovitz. Ms Wilde appears in another "bralet" (combo of "bra" and "bracelet"?), wearing an outfit in your basic chartreuse Gucci-logo satin. Yes, it's hard to take this stuff seriously, but I continue to be very, very worried. Sooner or later some mortal will, to be followed by many willing mortals who shouldn't.

 
Another feature was an oversized brown leather Prada motorcycle jacket shown in 14 photos on Emily Ratajkowski. No price was given but others on the Prada website were $6,000. Will I now have to crawl around the attic hunting for my 1980s Schott leather jacket? I know it's there somewhere. Maybe I could do it in my Maidenform bra...