Darling

Works in Jan’s Market Makers series reflect on the role that branding, marketing, and social media have played in our lives.

Darling appropriates a vintage US advertisement for the Schlitz beer company where a housewife laments having burned a meal, and her husband comforts her with praise for the beer.

This piece presents an older America and a bit of the darker side of the advertising medium in a humorous way. The roles given, of the wife cooking dinner and the husband returning from a day at the office, reflect the traditional gender roles of American society. The joke humorously reveals patronizing attitudes in the culture toward women.