Barbizon Lingerie - Give her the slip.

Pointy Tree Day is on it's way, readers, and we've had the Phil Are GO! Garage Sale and Antique Store Assault Squad ransacking the greater Chicago area for December issues of magazines, to be sure we have the larder stocked with hilarious ridiculousness, all set for a tortuously long holiday season's absurdity.

This 1959 ad in Esquire is just a little sample. Mmmm, nothing satisfies like gold velour curtains. And what could look more natural than a model vamping in an empty room in front of those curtains, framed about as artfully a mugshot?

This, uuh, "dreamling" retailed for $11 in 1959. So what's that in current Futurebucks? Only $90. Wow. And it's not even silk. How do we know? Because they use a made up word for whatever the fabric is: "satin de lys (r)". Ah. Nylon. Got it. Ninety bucks? Fuck you, Barbizon.

Barbizon also has some fantastic names for colors. They're so fantastic that you have a really hard time guessing what color they are. When a color's name is so fancy it's useless as a descriptor, that's pretty fantastic.

"In delicious shades of champagne, snowflake, bliss blue and dawn blush."

Also, that's not even a sentence, but Barbizon chose to capitalize it and use a period, which is more than they felt the opening line of the ad deserved...

"golden gift by Barbizon in our new luxury fabric, satin de lys(r)".

This ad only has four lines of copy in it, and only one of those qualifies as a complete sentence. Of course, anything even obliquely associated with romance is so heavily buried under marketing babble that the essentials of grammar aren't even a consideration.

Considering that this ad was created and published in Esquire Magazine in 1959, it is also possible that you and I are the first people to have ever even looked at this ad without at least one martini in us... and I'm not even sure about me.

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