Identification Beau Brummell Was Significant

Identification

Beau Brummell was significant to the development of modern consumerism because he became the first male style icon. Consumer culture had to that point never had a male fashion icon, which made Brummell an anomaly. His legacy, however, is even more far-reaching. Many of the fashions that he made stylish still exist today in altered form. His fashion sense emphasized what was considered restraint. The "cool style" of Brummell remains the preferred style of most men today. Men's suits of today are modern incarnations of Brummell's ideals. Indeed, there have been few major shifts in men's formal and semi-formal fashion since Brummell's era. Today's fashionable clothes are merely modern adaptations of that style.

Brummell represented the first use of such an icon to market clothes. While there had been fashion trends in the past, when men began to follow the fashion lead of Beau Brummell, it was a heretofore unknown experience in consumer society. His influence was not derived from any particular social standing, but from his inherent fashionableness. This development continues to be echoed in consumer culture today, where we have style icons famous for little else but their good taste.

Pear's Soap was significant to the development of our consumer culture because it represented one of the first instances where a brand became specifically associated with a particular image. Pear's created some of the first iconic ads. Moreover, they were successful on multiple levels. The created a strong image association for Pears of cleanliness. They also worked on a more subconscious level, when they played to the underlying racism of their target audience.

This is noteworthy not merely for being anachronistic today but for the fact that it was an early instance of advertising being targeted as much to the subconscious as the conscious. An appeal was created that had nothing to do with the merits of the product itself, but rather due to its reinforcement of the notion that white is good and black is bad. Pear's ads tied this notion directly to cleanliness. Dirty (brown) was bad; poor (also brown) was uncivilized and Pear's was the means to solve this problem. It exemplified the white man's burden of cleaning up the dirty, poor brownness in society.

Betty Crocker made significant contributions to consumer culture. The character was one of the most successful, and was so in part because consumers who had been exposed to the character on the radio thought she was a real person. A character - a mascot - had for the first time been ascribed by the market the same respect as a human. As such, Betty Crocker was allowed by the market to exemplify the ideal American home life of the times.