“A Touch of Class: Selling Status in the 1920s,” an exhibition that showcases the advertising history of that era, will be on display from Monday, May 17, through Friday, August 13, at New York University’s Fales Library, 3rd floor of the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. The exhibition, open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., is free and open to the public; for further information the public may call (212) 998-2596.
A Touch of Class will display advertisements from popular magazines of the 1920s in a look at the use of exaggerated images of upper-class life; these magazines were targeted to largely middle-class audiences. The social roots of this marketing strategy in ads from such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan are explored. The display makes use of the Fales Library’s collection of periodicals.
This exhibition is curated by Alyssa Shirley, a master’s student at NYU’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study.
The NYU Fales Library holds a collection of over 170,000 volumes of British and American literature, and other special collections, from 1700 to the present. Its research collections comprise first editions, presentation copies, scholarly editions, and manuscripts.