Most of us here at eCool are simply not old enough to remember Maidenform’s “I dreamed” ad series that ran for some 20 years from 1949 to the late 1960s. Despite our lack of direct experience with the advertisements, a quick review of this revolutionary and provocative campaign leaves us awestruck. In the era of stay-at-home moms and wives, Maidenform’s ads suggested that women might succeed outside conventional gender roles – particularly if they let Maidenform support them as they pursued their lofty goals. The liberated message of this ad campaign was conveyed with images of women brazenly exposing their bras while doing something amazing. And on every ad, the copy read: “I Dreamed I [insert activity here] in my Maidenform bra.”
Predictably, our favorite ad in this series is one that looks back to ancient Rome, replacing the popular male charioteers of the ancient past with a charioteress clad in a torpedo-esque bra (eat your heart out Madonna) that will surely allow her bust to reach the finish line long before the rest of her does. The copy reads “I Dreamed I Drove Them Wild in My Maidenform Bra,” and the ads dates to 1961 (we think), the era of swords-and-sandals epics, about two years after the release of the blockbuster epic, Ben-Hur and about two years before maiden-formed Liz Taylor burst onto the screen as Cleopatra.
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