In the early 1940s, Maidenform Undergarment company started a hilariously creative advertisement campaign to increase bra sales. The campaign ran from the early 1940s until the early 1960s and featured images of women engaged in fictional fantasies about all the things they could accomplish while wearing a Maidenform bra. The slogan ‘I dreamed…’ came from the company’s employee Harry Trenner. When he was sitting around the kitchen table after dinner with his, He took it to Weintrob Advertising in New York. As a result, Maidenform created the “I dreamed…” advertising campaign.
The campaign was a roaring success. The company’s sales increased from 14 million to over 43 million between 1949 and 1963. One reason for the campaign’s popularity was the fact that the ads, while titillating, were not salacious. The models were sexy but wholesome, and the copy employed double meanings (“I dreamed I was a real dish”). A 1962 advertisement in which a model gently grasps the horn of a large bovine (“I took the bull by the horns”) may have been the raciest of the lot. Additionally, Maidenform’s dream world was exclusively populated by women.
Retrospectively, the advertisements provide a glimpse into the changing role of women in mid-century America, encompassing everything from the fanciful “I dreamed I played Cleopatra” to the more ambitious “I dreamed I won the election” and “I dreamed I went to work.”
Eventually, the ads were retired in 1969. Women wanted not dreams of power but real power on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement.
My personal favorite is still ‘I DREAMED I WAS TWINS’ while wearing my Maidenform bra. Haha! 🙂
I have to admit, the pointy shape looks quite commanding.
I think so too!
This is amazing! It’s wonderful to see women exerting their power through words
Compared to modern bras, those seem much more comfortable.
I believe most of those vintage bras fit the models perfectly. It’s disappointing to see so many modern bra ads where the model is wearing the wrong size
But why so pointy?
Why is there such a fixation on round breasts now? Breasts come in different shapes – they can be round, pointy, or elongated. It’s disheartening to see that beauty standards have always been so narrow-minded. However, at least they acknowledged the existence of nipples back then.
That’s exactly it. Even though it may have been considered too pointy, it still looked better than some shapes we see today, which are so smooth that there’s no distinction between the breast and torso :/
Just the style of the time. Round molded cups of today are no more realistic to what a breast actually looks like!
That was the stylish shape back then. Why? Well, why is anything stylish? Most of the time past styles look silly to the present.
Where do I get one or a few