Ken Baker, Ph. D.
What becomes a Legend most ?
Barbara Streisand, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Lena Horne, Brigitte Bardot, Maria Callas, Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, Raquel Welch, Julie Andrews, Sophia Loren, Lucille Ball, Ann-Margret, Cher, Audrey Hepburn, Cindy Crawford, and Ray Charles…What do they have in common?
The year was 1968. During the first week of February, Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive killed 543 Americans. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4 and Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 6. At the end of August, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s riot police clashed with protesters outside the chaotic Democratic National Convention.
In October, Olympic Gold and Silver medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the summer games in Mexico City. And on Election Day in November, Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey, with former Alabama Governor, segregationist George Wallace, capturing 13.5% of the popular vote and five southern states.
On Christmas Eve, astronauts Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman orbited the moon 10 times, with Lovell radioing back to NASA. “Houston, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
And also in 1968, Richard Avedon photographed 26-year-old Barbara Streisand in the first of what would become a remarkable decades-long, promotional campaign. She was wearing mink.
Mink fur campaign relied on celebrities wearing the product
A Blackglama mink.
A few months beforehand, the Great Lakes Mink Association (GLMA), breeders of a distinctive black-furred mink for the fur trade, hired a New York advertising firm to promote their product. Copywriter Jane Trahey suggested the name Blackglama, an ingenious amalgam of GLMA with the concept of glamour.
More:Thousands of minks released by vandals in Ohio
But dark fur doesn’t photograph well, so Trahey also conceived of the brilliant…
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