Tuesday, January 1, 2013

The Beauty of Retrospect: Karen Graham For Estée Lauder

I know it's New Year's Day, and I ought to be looking ahead and all that, but since this isn't the first full calendar week of 2013, I thought I'd look back for the next few days and feature women I've featured before. Which, of course, gives me the opportunity to revisit perennial favorites like Karen Graham. :-)

I've lost count of all the Estée Lauder print ads Karen Graham posed for in the fifteen years that she was that cosmetics company's spokesmodel.  And I always seem to find more.  Though I normally don't show whole ads here, preferring instead to concentrate on the pictures from them, I thought I'd show these Lauder ads in full, as they both feature two pictures of Karen Graham each; one a large portrait, the other a smaller photo.


I don't know why the ad agency for the Lauder company felt it was necessary to include two photos of Karen Graham in a single ad.  But you won't hear me complain about it.  :-) And these two ads show how Victor Skrebneski is just as adept with color as he is with black and white - the vibrant colors in each pair of photos complement the respective maroon and peach backdrops of each ad perfectly, and Karen Graham looks as real and alive as if she were sitting next to you in the same room.  (Don't we wish!)         


The "Country Brick" ad is, as indicated in the copy, from 1975; the "Tea Garden" ad is from 1978.  The latter ad, showing Karen Graham with her hair softly fluttering in the breeze in the larger photo, is clearly the more casual of the two.  

No team was better in conjuring up comfortable bourgeois images than Estée Lauder's company and Victor Skrebneski's camera - I mean that as a compliment - and the magic continued after Karen Graham's stint as the firm's exclusive model was over.

Remember, you can click on each picture to enlarge either of them. :-)

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