Vanity Fair Ads

Of course her head and face are left unseen to the viewer in much the same way the faces of the figures in Höch’s Das schöne Mädchen are intentionally concealed or removed from the piece. Her figure is devoid of identity and solely used as a female body to help draw attention to the automobile. Since the Vanity Fair advertisement explicitly is meant to convey a message of helplessness that only a product can fix, the sentiment of machine-based consumerism uses the female figure’s body as a tool to draw attention to machinery—in nearly the same way that Höch’s collage does.

Since these two separate works of art both originate from 1920, they share a post-war era of heightened attention to mechanisms. Of course, the era was heavily misogynistic, and just by viewing the Vanity Fair advertisement, one can surmise the public male view of women did not include a space for women to understand machinery.

In the Vanity Fair advertisement, the explicit purpose of the visual is to give the viewer an understanding of a marketed product—the Kelly Springfield tires. Regardless of the gender of the viewer, the advertisement carries the same purpose. The implicit connotations of the visual of a woman sticking her head into her car advertises to male viewers the notion that women must not be able to understand mechanics; the tires must be fantastic enough to warrant no “trouble from that source,” leaving men to have one less burden in relation to their automobiles. Female viewers come to understand that with Kelly Springfield tires, there is one less problem to fear while