Vintage advertising from Kohler is usually quite wonderful. These Wisconsin folks sure understood how to capture a time and a place and a mood in a … simple and truly engaging way. Look closely at this illustration, and you see they aren’t really selling much – just a tub, and a sink. But it was 1949, remember, and these things meant so much more — they were the fruits of freedom after the war, and after an even longer stretch of economic deprivation that stretched before that, all the way to 1929. A sink, a tub – a happy little boy in striped pj’s and fuzzy slippers. We can make fun, all we want, of the seemingly unfettered materialism of the postwar 40s and 50s. But consumers, during this time, were celebrating some well-deserved and long-time-coming … simple pleasures.
You know, I think this is also the underlying reason that I have trouble dumping on all the colonial revival stuff from this era… or 70s Mediterranean, etc. The women who chose these things did so with such great love (and probably with much greater care than most today, in our disposable economy). It’s…mean…to mock them. I’d rather celebrate all the heart that they put into making their homes nice. Isn’t that what we all try to do? Sentimental diatribe over. It’s all good.
Check out this other Kohler photo. I’ll find and post them all, over time…