This cigarette ad is one of very few from my collection of mid-century women’s magazines. Knowing that cigarette advertising was big business in the 1950’s I expected to find more. The Viceroy cigarette advertisers published this ad featuring college students in the March 1956 edition of Glamour magazine. The tagline explains why the smoking woman with a cigarette in each hand is wearing a blindfold.
You can tell the difference blindfolded!
Mainstream cigarette smoking is something that is quite foreign to the current generation. Millennials (those born in the 1980’s and 1990’s), on the other hand saw the decline of smoking in public places firsthand. Knowing what we know now about second hand smoke, it is hard to remember a world where cigarette smoking was an integral part of our culture.
I can remember the controversy of the various public space smoking bans throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. Do you remember the smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants? As a non-smoker, I remember the annoying smell that came from the office of chain-smoking co-worker before smoking was eventually completely banned in the office in the late 1990’s. It wasn’t until 2000 that smoking was banned on all airlines. Cigarettes, like landlines are still around, but are fast becoming distant memories.
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