Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

TEMIN, Wilma Ruth
Certainly the most interesting and surprising ad is the one for the
store opening, published as a storyboard, in sequence, taking up
the entire cover of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. The use of
two planes and art nouveau’s sinuous and insisting contours from
European posters are clear. In the foreground, there are female
figures, an elegantly dressed lady and a girl, which we can relate
to the merchandise for the female public that the opening store
offered; on the background, the façade of the store, drawn (see
Figures 3 and 4). The same layout which we see in Hohenstein’s
ad for A. Calderoni Gioielliere (see Figure 5).
Figures 3 and 4. Ads published on November 18 and 29, 1913, at the time of the
opening of the new store. Museu Paulista da USP
Figure 5. Ad created by Adolfo Hohenstein in 1898 (In: FALABRINO, 2001: 67)
The use of the visual metaphor, in which an object stands for an
idea, was very common in political cartooning, but not so common
in ads; maybe because of that, these examples become even more
interesting. We associate the opening of the store to the opening of
curtains in a theater play.
In São Paulo, as of the beginning of the 20th century, newspaper
ads gained larger sizes and fixed places, concomitantly with the
emergence of print shops specializing in the production of copper
and zinc clichés to print them (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. Examples of ads of different sizes, using typographic families and many
images. Published in 1917, 1920 and 1931. Museu Paulista da USP
Through this small excerpt of the book about Assis Chateaubriand
(MORAIS, 1994), it is possible to see the status of advertising in
Brazil in the 1920’s, especially with regard to newspaper ads:
(...) Even the large Brazilian newspapers still lived in the Stone Age
of advertising. The Country did not have half a dozen advertising
agencies... They had only gone as far as the figure of an individual
advertising agent, a type of broker who took the rare ads to
newspapers and won a commission on sales. The composition of
ads was done by typographers in the print shops of newspapers...
Advertising done with ‘stereos’, name clichés were know for, was
very rare. Foreign factories installed here were an exception – and,
among them, the American General Motors opened its own in-house
‘agency’, called Advertising Section, where five people worked,
whose job was to create, produce and provide posters and leaflets to
dealers (MORAIS: 1994: 142).
Mappin, following the English tradition of department stores, as of
the 1920’s, also had its own advertising section. It was headed by
Luiz Sequeira, a Portuguese who, during the period from 1924 to
1951, was in charge of all the store’s ads. This is an evidence of the
store’s concern with the publicity of its products and offers.
Newspaper ads provided information about the merchandise being
sold at the store, and occasional merchandise, like the sale of flags
of the Allies during World War I, or those that could be found at any
time of the year, like boy’s clothes with detailed drawings, and English
ties. They could inform opening hours and changes of address
or telephone. The merchandise for sale at the store was faithfully
reproduced in trace drawings, transformed in printing clichés. The
store logotype took the upper margin of the ad, thus creating an
identity.
5. Mappin’s catalogues, specific for sales
and sophisticated for new collections
Mappin’s catalogues were first published in 1919. Until 1935,
they were published annually and sometimes also for sales.
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 482