Botany 500 - Fashion Flare-Up.

It must have been easy to be an advertising art director in The Seventies The Very Late Sixties. Conceptualizing an ad for magazines like Esquire in '69, you could assume your readership had A) Plenty of money, and B) a consuming need for trendiness, no matter what.

As 1969 men's fashions go, this blue plaid suit is not the craziest thing you could expect to see. In fact, it's quite reasonable, coming from the era that gave us, uuh, this.

So, let's say you're 1969. How do you sell a suit to potential customers with loads of cash who insist on following the latest cultural departure from reason? You put your suit on a handsome dude and build a 1/4-inch plywood Peter Max holiday pantomime, of course. Grab a pretty model from your file cabinet full of headshots and paint her face like a trippy, puckish nymph. Wait. A prop. We need a prop. Eyeball cutout on a stick saves the day!

Advertising complete! Zeitgeist captured! Now, just put your feet up on your desk, blow a jay, and wait for the art direction awards to start rolling in.

Oh, by the way. $99.50 and $120 are about $100 and $600, respectively, in today's modern Futurebucks.