a1az:
In 1915 Gillette created the Milady Décolleté razor,
and to put it on women’s radars he advertised it as an accessory that
was as necessary to buy with a modern dress as a hat or pair of gloves.
“Small and curved to better fit the armpit, the razor was designed
to supplement the sleeveless and sheer sleeved fashions of the period,”
Hertzig confirms. To convince women that buying a razor came part and
parcel with buying the latest fashion, catalogs began to cleverly market
the two products together. For example, anti-underarm hair ads were
appearing “in McCall’s magazine by 1917, and women’s razors and depilatories
showed up in the Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1922, the same year that
company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves,” Anita Renfroe,
author of Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You, explained in her book.The first advert that ran for the women’s razor was a one-inch square in Harpers Bazaar ,
and with that small bit of ad real estate new rules for femininity were
drafted. Shaving wasn’t going to be a passing trend but a new part of
what it meant to be a proper woman in polite society.After all,
the goal of advertisers and magazine editors wasn’t to meet women’s
needs — it was to create new ones. That was the only way to keep
products moving off of shelves. And with more problems women had to
worry over, the more magazine issues an editor was able to sell. For
example, Cyrus Curtis — the owner of Ladies’ Home Journal — shared in a speech to advertisers, “Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal?
The editor thinks it is for the benefit of American women. That is an
illusion…the real reason, the publisher’s reason, is to give you people
who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell
them about your products,” Joan Jacobs Brumberg shared in her book, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Magazines were just ads gift wrapped in advice to get women to buy them and their products. And buy them they did.
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