Formfit Lingerie - Exquisitely bored.

Selling women's underwear must be hard.  All you really want to do is show a woman in her underwear and the sales take care if themselves. But no. The client wants you to show how Formfit underwear can change a woman's life. They want you to show the model being exuberant and lively in her underwear. This is why underwear ads are almost always stupid. They love to show people winning Nobel prizes in their underwear, playing tennis in their underwear, or performing limb reattachment surgery in their underwear.

This ad looks to be painted by one of the pinup masters. I would have thought it was painted by Gil Elvgren, but the American Art Archives (whoever that is) thinks it was Haddon Sundblom. They even claim to have passed the Formfit ads under the nose of a "pinup historian" who seems to think it was Sundblom, although they also mention Elvgren as a possibility.

Sun-who? Sundblom was the guy who painted all the Santa Clauses for Coke, and also pretty much crystallized the look of Santa in the American mind forever.

I think this picture has the heavy eyebrows and soft hair of an Elvgren girl, but what do I know? I'm no Pinup Historian.

So here's a girdle model who clearly doesn't need a girdle. Advertising is full of images of people selling products they have never needed. Actors selling tooth whitener who've never had yellow teeth. Spokesbimbos selling diet pills who've never been chubby. Starlets demonstrating colostomy bags who've never had colostomies. You know... the constant lie of advertising.

Our model is performing yet another improbable underwear task. She's playing solitaire.Why so improbable? People usually put on their underwear and immediately finish dressing or make the sexiness with their life partner or whatever (which probably means getting right out of the underwear again). They don't sit around and pass the time. What oh what could she be doing? Only some captions can tell.

Joke #1 - Time dragged. Jackie was going to be in so much trouble. She had to be at work in fifteen minutes and her chicken suit was still in the dryer. That thing took forever to dry.

Joke #2 - Dammit. Jackie lost her rent money to herself and now she was about to lose her clothes. She really had to give up strip solitaire.

Joke #3 - Jackie was almost done strip-pokering her way into the bath tub. Afterwards, if she played enough craps, she'd comp herself dinner. Then, depending how long that took, she'd either get some sleep or get dressed and go right back to work. Such was the grinding slowness of the life of a compulsive gambler.

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post  -Mgmt.]