On the road of chasing capital, human beings always have unlimited potential.
In [Sorry to bother] , the heroine Detroit is a performance artist.
The kind that is not well-known, the days are tight, and he lives in the garage with her boyfriend.
Art did not bring any substantial income, she has been living on another profession.
Every morning, I put on my makeup, got in my boyfriend's N-handed car, and came to the corner of the street.
Taking a deep breath, brewing enough emotions, took out the advertising board, and squinted at the passing drivers and pedestrians.
Her hardworking look is exactly the same as Badger in "Breaking Bad", who was also on the street, dressed as a dollar, training advertising boards.
They all have a unified name-body advertisements.
As the last bead of traditional advertising, although they are poor, they are the most coquettish chickens on the street.
And everything started in London in the 1820s.
At that time, the industrial revolution was in full swing, productivity increased sharply, commodities were continuously produced, and surplus breed consumerism.
And consumerism's pro-son advertising Yomo is also the bud.
At that time, the advertisements were posters posted on the streets, and the shop windows and white walls were densely packed, just like the cowhide moss of today.
Over time, there are fewer and fewer places to post, and the levied advertising tax is getting higher and higher, and merchants are starting to wonder how to make advertising flow.
Thus, human body advertising came into being.
As for who first adopted the human body advertisement, there is no way to verify it.
However, Prince Muska, a German nobleman living in London at the time, recorded their early appearance:
People used to be content with putting advertisements together; now they are mobile. A man was holding a piece of cardboard that was three times taller than his hat, and it was written in large letters "Twelve shillings for a pair of boots." Another man held a banner and said, "A shirt is only threepence."
The portrayal of Prince Musca may not be vivid enough, and afterwards, some good people portrayed this group of people into a picture.
At that time, the people who acted as advertisements for human bodies were all poor people and homeless people. They did it with the money and didn't need to pay taxes. Compared with posting posters, the cost was too much.
Coupled with more flexible dissemination, major businesses followed suit. For a time, the number of advertisements on the streets of London overwhelmed pedestrians.
But at the same time, competition began to become fierce.
In order to make their own ads stand out, major merchants racked their brains and turned the body ads into a drag party.
It is worth mentioning that the style of wearing the advertisement on the body in Scarf's painting (third from the right) was written into the novel by Dickens and described as a " sandwich man -a piece of human flesh sandwiched between two boards." ".
Since then, the Sandwich Man has become a classic image in literary works that portrays poor people and accuses the crimes of capitalism.
In the novel "The Son's Big Doll" by the Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming , Kun Shu, an unemployed young man from the township, supports his family and relies on being a sandwich man for the movie theater.
It is absurd that the youngest son can't recognize his father after taking off his outfit due to long periods of reciprocation.
Back to the topic, Sandwich Man may be the most influential human body advertisement later, but at the time, it was by no means the most eye-catching.
And a newspaper established in 1830 is much crazy.
For promotion, the newspaper provided the board members with signs with news of the day, and also invited mobile bands to create momentum, and they were majestic and pompous on the street.
Even bolder is the Warren shoe polish factory, where the boss asked a group of people to dress up as shoe polish packaging, which is regarded as carrying out the theme of cross-dressing.
More and more exaggerated human body advertisements have brought tremendous pressure on public transportation.
Finally, in 1853, the London Municipal Government issued the "Hackney Transport Act" , which explicitly banned human advertisements from passing through the streets.
Since then, the scenery has died down.
But it did not disappear. More than 70 years later, Hollywood on the other side of the ocean changed its appearance and ushered in a new peak.
In the 1920s, on the eve of the Great Depression in the United States, the economic bubble inflated and various industries were falsely prosperous. At the same time, the film market also ushered in the first round of rapid expansion.
In 1927, [Jazz singer] brought a sound film to the screen, but it suffered a loss in publicity, and the market response was cold.
Two years later, [1929 Hollywood Comedy] was ready to be released.
This is also MGM’s first feature-length feature film with sound. The executives attached great importance to it. Not only did they invite comedy king Keaton and Oscar actress Joan Crawford.
Moreover, because of the [Jazz Singer] case before, the publicity did not hesitate to pay for it, and even the human body advertisement of the year was resurrected.
But I have to say that Americans will play more.
Two days before the film’s release, a several-story billboard was erected at the entrance of the Astor Theater. Not only did it have a luminous film title, it also secretly repaired a manned platform.
Next, more than a dozen sexy girls walked into the billboard and started dancing on the street.
It is not surprising now, at the time, the sensation caused by this move was comparable to Titanic crashing into an iceberg.
The publicity effect exploded, and it was naturally used for reference. Within two weeks, Fox directly copied MGM’s creativity in order to create momentum for [Love Network Song] .
The girl was replaced by a man who played acrobatics, plus a ballet troupe, and the billboard was equipped with a rotating spider web. The project was huge and the ambition was obvious.
However, under false prosperity, these are just the norm.
The Great Depression soon approached, and a new round of human body advertising contests that were on the verge of becoming a flash in the pan.
Waiting for it to reappear, it is 2015, without the background of the time, it looks like performance art.
Hollywood's upstarts in body advertising are quiet.
However, thanks to too many variants, one is dumb, and countless others are passing on.
The one in [Sorry to bother] has never been obscured by history. It is the original shape of a cardboard lift. Like the sandwich man, it is a common human body advertisement today.
Perhaps the hip-hop culture and human body advertising practitioners are from the bottom of society, and after a hundred years, the two have been organically combined.
Obviously, the human body advertisement that joins the street dance should be more attractive, and it has become a magical skill for them who are commissioned according to the passenger flow.
Even a special competition has been developed, which seems to have been separated from advertising and formed a culture.
In addition, tattoos have also become the style of advertisements for human bodies.
In 2005, Andrew Fischer became known to the public for auctioning off the forehead advertising space.
Although he was not the first to do this, after that, gimmick advertisements for body tattoos quietly emerged.
In the 2012 US presidential election, someone in support of Romney spent US$15,000 to get professional wrestler Eric Harzburg to have an "R" tattooed on his temple.
Although Romney lost the election in the end, the effect of public opinion is still good.
Finally, human body advertisements began to covet the human body itself.
This seems inevitable. On the road of chasing capital, human beings always have unlimited potential.
It is human advertisements that have exhausted all kinds of tricks to alienate people a hundred years ago or now. Both practitioners and bystanders have become prisoners of consumerism.
However, consumerism will not die, and human body advertising will always go back to the next century.
Just like in [Sorry to bother], hot Detroit, and the hip-hop squeeze.
They are nothing more than beautiful advertisements, side-effects of consumer machines. Their fate has been doomed since 1820.
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Author/Yaoyao Wine
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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