Shanghai Posters: The Power of Advertising

by Anna Hestler, Format (Illustrator), Jamie Cox (Editor)

How to seem coquettish and provocative, while at the same time looking coy and demure, was the art perfected by fashionable young women portrayed in pre-war Shanghai posters. They were a genre all to themselves. If the true power of advertising lies in seduction, here was a style that subtly hinted at much more than it recealed, even when promoting products as innocuous as liprouge, talcum powder, soaps, perfumes, cigarettes and the ubiquitous Shanghai movies.

148 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ste · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pointless little book. A very short generic history of Shanghai, and then reproductions of posters with random irrelevant captions that say nothing about the artists, products or models - they don't even translate the text. A few of the posters are legitimately artistic, but most are poorly drawn and feel unworthy of collection, and for some reason in the communist era the book mostly prints photos of ballets instead of the more interesting Communist Party propaganda posters. If it was published this year, I would have guessed this book was written by ChatGPT, but it's from 2005, so I guess a human worked very hard to produce something this meaningless.