The Day Coca Cola Came to France (and how Parisians Reacted)

“Things go better with Coke”? Not the French apparently– at least, not when Coca Cola first officially began marketing the drink here in 1950. According to these photographs I came across in the LIFE magazine archives, it would seem that Parisians didn’t initially find the ‘great taste of Coke’ … well, all that great… This wasn’t actually the first time…

Credit is Due for America’s Black Couturiers

Not a month seems to go by without a new cultural insensitivity courtesy of the biggest names in fashion. The good news is, we’re finally entering an era that just doesn’t let it slide. As brands begin to learn from their mistakes and respond to demands for change and corporate diversity, we hear the call…

Jesus and Kitsch: The Rise of the American Megachurch

They called him Big Butter Jesus – Sweet Cream Jesus. Sometimes, Touchdown Jesus. The nicknames for the massive statue outside Monroe, Ohio’s Solid Rock Church may have varied between dairy and football allusions, but its purpose was unflinching: bring in the people. With his arms outstretched to the heavens, conveniently off Ohio’s Interstate 75, the…

The Vault

Found Photographs of Perfect American Road Trips, Fifty Years Too Late

Trailer parks just don’t look like this anymore! What I wouldn’t give to go back 50 years and re-do the American road trip just like I picture it in my mid-century kodachrome dreams. Today I found a fabulous Flickr account full of old slides and photographs found at estate sales and garage sales by a nostalgic…

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The Mysterious Art of the Falling Panties

Apparently, women’s underwear in the 1950s was just pants. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist). I stumbled upon the work of a Chicago-born artist, Art Frahm, who was best-known for his pin-up paintings between the 1940s-60s, in particular, his “ladies in distress” series, depicting doll-like damsels whose panties would perilously fall to the ground in the most public of predicaments. Since 1996, American…

The Real Jessica Rabbit

What I remember most about Jessica Rabbit is how she was always wearing that provocative red dress, cut oh so inappropriately low at the back, even just to run around town. Meet the real-life Jessica Rabbit, Miss Vikki Dougan, the 1950s ‘It girl’ who inspired the iconic cartoon sex bomb… Photographs by Ralph Crane for…

Before & After Pin-Up Models Back in the Day without Photoshop

Ever wonder why today’s fashion campaigns are a product of lengthy Photoshopping sessions? What kind of touch-ups did the models get before Adobe came along and changed our world forever? As these pin-up before & afters show, the models literally became cartoons of their former selves…

Vintage Japanese Advertising Could Sell Us Anything

The foamiest men’s shampoo to make bath-time oodles more fun? The latest must-have make-up for your back? Whatever they were selling, we would’ve been buying. If you were in post-WWII Japan, your eyeballs had the luck of watching the advertising world grow brighter, hipper, and (especially in the ’80s) weirder. From the surreal visuals and zany…

6 Startling Things I Didn’t Know about Bettie Page

Last night, I watched Bettie Page Reveals All, a 2012 documentary about her life history, with much of it narrated by Ms. Page herself and that wonderfully thick Southern accent of hers. Now here is the part where I admit that I ‘ve never really paid much attention to Bettie Page as a cultural icon before; always just putting her in that category…

Lost Fetish Files of Mid-Century S&M

Note: this article includes some sexually explicit and graphic content. There’s something especially spicy about mid-century, femme-dominant S&M — and that’s saying something, considering Sadomasochism has been shaking things up in the bedroom since (roughly) 1785, when the French philosopher Le Marquis de Sade first published his erotic fantasy novel, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The…