Advertising Sectioned

Corsets by D. Fear (Nottingham Journal, 1935)
 

I can't begin to imagine how often foundation garments are found in the wardrobes of well-dressed Nottingham women nowadays. Although, we can probably hold the burlesque scene responsible for some higher-than-average concentrations of corsetry at The Maze, if you happen to turn up on the right night. Still, Madonna and Dita Von Teese fans notwithstanding, I'd guess most women were relieved to shuffle the things off and breathe normally when foundation garments finally went the way of cuff-links, tie-pins, bowler hats and those slightly disturbing real-fur stoles with little foxy faces attached to them.

Back in 1935, it was a rather different story. “The well-dressed woman knows how essential it is to have the correct foundation garment before acquiring her new outfit,” runs the copy of aptly-named local corsetiere. The otherwise mysterious and semi-anonymous D. Fear – a person whose advertising not only anticipated the kind of CAPS-LOCK typographic shouting now standard among panic-mongers of the internet, but someone who plainly had no truck with what we'd now consider the fundamentals of effective branding.

Let's face it, anyone born with a moniker like theirs in 2015 would have been bludgeoned into submission by a firm of marketing consultants in Hockley for not keeping their real name, long before they opened up shop on St Peter's Gate and advertised their services in the Nottingham Journal. True, it's a memorable handle, but in the unlikely event that D. Fear stayed in business until the eighties, they'd have been a dead cert for the goth trade’s heavily engineered wire, silk and tight back-laced outer-wear that arrived in the wake of Siouxsie Sioux.

Sadly, that probably wasn't to be – though I do like to imagine, against all reasonable odds, that the line “late corsetiere to James’ Store” is a reference to some flamboyant local individual rather than a former place of employment. We can but hope.

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Greater Nottingham Co-operative Society (1970)
 

Ever since the mid-eighties, accusations of plagiarism have created a booming industry. The combination of samplers in dance music and hip hop, the growth of the internet as a cultural ATM, the development of software that detects near identical passages in texts nobody ever needs to read - they all play a part in keeping artists worried and copyright lawyers’ wallets bulging.

The biggest of them all was the 29-year battle between Apple Computers and The Beatles’ Apple Corps, who fought five separate legal cases between 1978 and 2007 over the use of apples in their branding and logos. So it’s ironic that when The Beatles were still setting up shop in late sixties London and computers weren’t even invented yet, our very own Nottingham Co-op was already running adverts on a theme it obviously hadn’t realised would one day become very lucrative.

“Co-op House always has the best of everything for the whole family at the right price - dividend too,” reads the advertising copy, neatly shaped into the outline of an apple and topped with a very sixties sprig of leaves. Even though the Co-op probably figured an apple was just a neat graphic device, and its message was resolutely ‘square’, the style is pretty obviously borrowing from the kinds of psychedelic posters that were everywhere at the time.

But that’s the point, really – everyone was borrowing from everyone else, and if looking a bit like a Grateful Dead gig poster helped the Nottingham Co-op’s customers to indulge a feeling that they might be in San Francisco while buying their home furnishings, then so much the better. Images of apples were used to reference forbidden knowledge, healthy eating and fresh ideas for centuries before the corporate lawyers came along to claim ownership. Maybe we should sue them.

Wayne Burrows on Wordpress