Comparing 40 years of ads for lipstick and cigarettes

This project sources two brand’s advertisements - Revlon and Marlboro - from the Vogue Magazine archive from 1970 through 2015, and extracts two prominent elements from each advertisement: color and word. By recontextualizing the extracted elements back into the chronological book format, the book gives way to a fresh narrative of the respective brand and its evolution.
In the books, each ad is reduced to two dominant colors and presented as spreads in a chronological book format to provide a fresh narrative of the respective brand and its evolution. The ads are reduced to the familiar form of color pixels.
In the books, each ad is reduced to two dominant colors and presented as spreads in a chronological book format to provide a fresh narrative of the respective brand and its evolution. The ads are reduced to the familiar form of color pixels.


The front of the books have a concrete poem constructed from words that were used most frequently over time. They appear in the poem in the order of most used to least used to create a senseless poem that provides a surprising depth of information about it's brand.
Collaborator
Lexy Copithorne
Collaborator
Lexy Copithorne