Ondřej Táborský

Beauties in a Hazy Mist. The Erotic Nude in Late Socialist Advertising

In the last years of the communist dictatorship, advertising calendars with erotic themes entered the visuality of Czechoslovakia. The article analyses how the genre of the nude appeared on a mass scale in this seemingly marginal element of image production and why this happened only in the later half of the 1980s. It draws attention to the functions of advertising in a planned economy, where its use and contents were influenced not only by political interventions from above but also by the development of the discourse of the field and its application in different types of media. As a result, a specific gender order of socialist advertising emerged in Czechoslovakia. Thanks to the renaissance of the photographic nude the first experiments with the use of the nude in promotion nonetheless appeared in the 1960s, but only to be cut short with the suppression of the Prague Spring. The return of the erotic to product communications came with the advent of Perestroika — in the form of wall calendars. The article shows that while this was done in contravention of official advertising policy, there were no attempts to suppress it.

Ondřej Táborský: ondrej.taborsky@nm.cz

< back