A new exhibit at Duke University features prominent photographers' black and white images of British and American women in distinctive advertisements for Pond's beauty products.
"The Power of Refined Beauty: Photographing Society Women for Pond's, 1920s -- 1950s," which is free and open to the public, runs through Aug. 22 in the Special Collections Gallery at Perkins Library.
For more than 30 years, the pictures of women from the highest ranks of society were used in advertisements by the J. Walter Thompson Co. The company's distinctive campaign for Pond's was groundbreaking in its use of market research. It succeeded by pairing fine art photography and the powerful appeal of personal testimonials from elegant, elite women, including Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt, Lady Milford Haven, Mrs. George Whitney Jr. and Anne Morgan.
Praise for Pond's beauty creams from beautiful socialites convinced millions of ordinary American women to try a product that lacked the cachet of its European competitors, which were perceived as being of a higher quality. Over the life of the campaign, Pond's moved from being only one of 350 brands of cold cream to being the leading U.S. cold cream.
The 29 images and seven advertisements in the exhibit are from the J. Walter Thompson Archives of the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke's Special Collections Library. The photographers whose work is featured in the exhibit include Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton and Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
A complementary exhibit, "You've Got Personality: Celebrity Endorsements in Advertising," is on display through June in the display cases outside the Biddle Rare Book Room at Perkins Library. This exhibit includes documents and other items related to the Pond's "society women" advertising campaign. The exhibit also features advertisements and additional examples of celebrity endorsements found in the Hartman Center collections. For more information and to view the online exhibit, go to http://library.duke.edu/exhibits/ponds/index.html.