As wall fixtures go, it is perhaps moderately fascinating…Well, it’s fascinating to Hallmark, anyway. In fact, you’ve never seen anything like it before. Unless you’ve seen a drying rack.
Hallmark is the greeting card company, of course. And they probably should be sticking to that. Whatever possessed them to branch out into the world of Hosiery Drying Fixtures? What would possess anyone to do that?
We may never know.
So here is this shell thingie that you stick on the wall – and it holds stockings. It’s 1960 in this ad, so the ladies did need to wash ten pairs of stockings at a time. It also holds “sox” and gloves and lingerie, so you can really go to town and have a great time hand-washing stuff in the sink. I’m sold! You had me at Hello, Woolite.
The ad’s subtext implies (as subtexts do) that since you will no longer be co-opting the towel racks, harmony and sweetness will reign in your household (i.e. the Man of the House will no longer pop a gasket because the bathroom looks like washday out back of an Old Law tenement on the Lower East Side).
Still, the way Hallmark raves about their Sea Shell Thingie, you’d think they split the atom or something there in that “modern bathroom.”
And the tag line! “For The Proudest Lady In The Neatness Parade.” What the hell is a Neatness Parade and how many ladies are marching around being proud of their plastic underwear dryers? Are they marching down Fifth Avenue? Are they marching on Washington?
And if that wall fixture is really that fascinating, might the proud ladies not be hypnotized by it, and thus unable to march? After all, it IS a “Masterpiece in Plastic.” Said the Hallmark ad modestly.
