Word: like
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Central Park stood an exquisite blonde in a regal white dress (by Hattie Carnegie). She rustled her billowing petticoats and smiled a smile of quiet rapture. Above her decolletage, as bare as a lie and as bold as fashion, sparkled a small cascade of diamonds-or what looked like diamonds. Her slender, black-gloved hand gripped a black cigarette holder from which, now & again, she flicked a trace of ash with gracious disdain. A man's voice cooed...
...some preposterous comedy plot compelled her to be completely at ease while leaning against an exceedingly hot stove. Thus for about four hours, model and photographer labored over a picture, which had but one purpose: to convince as many women magazine readers as possible that they could look just like Lisa Fonssagrives in Hattie Carnegie's new creation...
...attention, and stab to the psychological soft spots of men & women. They appealed to fear ("Even your best friends won't tell you"), to snobbery ("Men of Distinction"), to romance ("She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Pond's"). They spoke in euphemisms, wrapped like cotton around the harsh facts of life, and invented dread new diseases (B.O., Office Hips, Halitosis). They found that endorsements by real people, from tobacco auctioneers to movie stars, were astoundingly successful sales plugs. ("Fifty million women a week see movies," explained one adman. "They see these dames always...
...newspapers alone. At least one-third of all the advertisements bought by that staggering sum are using models. The proportion is nearer half in beer, cigarettes, cosmetics, the biggest users of models outside the fashion field. The figures add up to the simple conviction that there is nothing like a girl to catch the public's eye. Actually, with the buyers' market making the going tougher than before, the advertising business has begun to realize that a pretty girl can only lead the customer to the store counter; she cannot make him buy. Only the product itself...
...which keep the models' bookings, relay telephone messages, give them a place to sit around and wait between jobs, and collect 10% of their fees. It is usually the model who has to sell herself, tramping in & out of photographers' studios, showing her scrapbook, trying to look like the advertisers' cryptic specifications ("We need the soap and motherhood type"). By great good fortune she may land a movie contract.† But in most cases, she will achieve a glamourous life only in the ads she poses...