Mad Men was the first television series to be produced by the US cable station American Movie Classics (AMC). Until the series launched in 2007, the network was known to viewers mostly for its reruns of old films. When it debuted, a reviewer at the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara, provided readers with a two-line gloss on the show that emphasised its appeal as a rerun of the pop- culture past:
Set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960, Mad Men has the storied look of The Apartment, Bewitched and a retro boutique all rolled into one. Men in slim suits and white shirts, women in pointy bras and sweater sets, all sideways smiles and white hip patter amid the rattle of ice cubes and the tiny clatter of lighters. [ ]
That a contemporary television series looked so convincingly like the set of an old movie caused something of a stir among critics and audiences. Mark Greif, writing for the London Review of Books, remarked:
The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread […] The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters.
For Greif, this was a problem – it demonstrated the triumph of style over historical substance – but for many viewers the show’s emphasis on the centrality of material design, fashion, props and sets was a confirmation of an already-established popular interest in the role of design in everyday life. In contrast to critics like Greif, who thought these elements distracted from the plot, fans began to take to blogs and message boards to share their obsession with, in the words of one, ‘the tiny details that are just so perfect’.
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Now entering its fifth season, Mad Men has never boasted the kind of ratings that can qualify it as a hit TV show. (To put it in perspective, one of the most popular programs in the US remains Two and a Half Men. Even in its post-Charlie Sheen format, that show attracted 27.7 million viewers for its premier season return. Mad Men’s return, by contrast, brought in 3.5 million viewers.)
Yet Mad Men has had an impact well beyond water- cooler conversation. Magazines like GQ, Vogue and Vanity Fair not only put the stars of the show on their covers but presented readers with style instructions for their own lives: how to replicate the look of the Sterling Cooper offices, Betty Draper’s kitchen or Joan Holloway’s silhouette. Publishers jumped on the bandwagon, producing titles like Kings of Madison Avenue: The Unofficial Guide to Mad Men, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America and The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age. The US clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, used the distinctive 1960s look as inspiration for a nation-wide fashion campaign. Brooks Brothers made a suit based on that worn by leading man Don Draper (itself based on a 1960s Brooks Brothers original). A nail polish company released a Mad Men-inspired line of colours.
These consumer tie-in opportunities are obviously a lucrative alternative revenue stream for a program that reportedly costs $2.84 million per episode to produce, but Mad Men’s influence in popular culture is thanks to more than a marketing initiative: it is hard to escape the dedicated fandom evidenced online via Facebook and Pinterest, not to mention the Halloween costumes, cocktail parties and theme weddings.
Like other premium cable television shows such as The Wire and The Sopranos, Mad Men has attracted a highly devoted following. Unlike the gritty realities of everyday American life offered by those shows, however, Mad Men has provoked a rather unusual form of fandom. Few devotees of The Wire or The Sopranos express a desire to replicate the backrooms of the Bada Bing! or the crack houses of downtown Baltimore, not to mention the sartorial stylings of a Carmela Soprano or an Avon Barksdale. As a 2010 article by Lorin Clarke in the Australian edition of The Big Issue aptly put it, ‘the clothes, the coffee tables and the cigarette holders [in Mad Men] are gorgeous details, but what makes them penetrate the part of your brain that drives you to visit op shops?’
To be sure, Mad Men’s Madison Avenue is a world altogether more appealing than New Jersey or Baltimore, but the show also benefits from the increasing mainstream interest in all things ‘vintage’. Borrowed from its use in wine terminology, anything now described as vintage connotes the application of principles of connoisseurship regarding the consumption, presentation, care and preservation of old objects. While it is possible for the average Mad Men fan to indulge consumer desires directly at the local mall, the real pleasure – a pleasure the show itself demonstrates, and to which its significant production budget testifies – is to be found in the collection and curatorship of the vintage originals. This means circumventing the mall in favour of second-hand shopping locations: charity shops, antique stores, garage sales, or car boot markets.
A growing number of cultural critics, not to mention corporations, are now taking note of consumer habits such as second-hand shopping, foraging, and local, fair-trade and free-range consumption movements, citing these as evidence of a new ‘ethical consumption’. One of the most interesting examples of this ‘consumption with a conscience’ has been the revaluation of artefacts of the past, especially items that originate in the era of burgeoning industrial production of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. ‘In a post-industrial world, an object’s provenance and aesthetic quality and design history hold more influence than its mere novelty,’ explains sociologist Adrian Franklin. His essay, published last year in a collection tellingly titled Ethical Consumption, explores how ‘objects with tangible histories of production compare favourably to those created now which have a sort of absence of origin’. For consumers of vintage homewares, fashion, music and books, the past serves as a ‘renewable resource’ in which they can invest. Recycling the past now feels as spiritually satisfying as recycling paper.
Old items are desirable not only because they present an alternative to contemporary production systems but because they also represent an alternative way of making the present feel valuable and authentic. Put simply: things which stand the test of time become important. And, by repossessing those things, we are able to attach some of that value to our present. The collection of ‘old stuff’ allows us to invest our current lives with the powerful emotions that we associate with the past and with nostalgia. The pleasure of vintage shopping, like the pleasure of watching Mad Men for the ‘tiny details’, comes from the projection of objects from the past into our present, a tactic which transforms the present into the potentially valuable and significant past – a past worth remembering.
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It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the program that Mad Men not only contributes to the vintage trend but articulates the nature of its appeal. An episode in season three, for example, uses the redecoration of the Draper living room to explore how individuals express their desires regarding the past and the future through material objects. While Don is discussing a contract that will see him committed to the company for the next three years, Betty hires a professional decorator to give their home a new, modern look. After a final consultation with the interior decorator, she leaves her newly refreshed living room for a meeting with a charming local politician, Henry Francis. When the pair happen to catch a glimpse of an old-fashioned ‘fainting couch’, Henry explains to Betty how the sofas were used to accommodate Victorian ladies whenever they were feeling ‘overwhelmed’. Betty, her own life and living room in a state of modernisation, immediately senses a connection to this old sofa, deciding to buy it to complement her redesign. Of course, it’s a disastrous match. As the decorator admonishes:
Decorator: What were you thinking? It’s awful.
Betty: It’s an antique.
Decorator: We discussed this for months, and we decided antiques were expected. Look around! You have ruined the whole room.
It’s clear that Betty’s attachment to the fainting couch has little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with how the newly-acquired ‘vintage’ piece connects with her feelings about her present life. The fainting couch is her connection to women of an earlier era who found themselves overwhelmed, frustrated and constricted by their times. The one question left hanging is, does Betty’s vintage impulse-buy suggest her desire to escape modern America and return to that constricting Victorian era, or does it represent a longing to bring female frustrations out into the open, into the heart of the modern home? To put it another way, is vintage shopping an excuse to go backwards, or is it a means to move forward by using reference to the past as a springboard for action in the present?
It’s clear that Betty’s attachment to the fainting couch has little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with how the newly-acquired ‘vintage’ piece connects with her feelings about her present life. The fainting couch is her connection to women of an earlier era who found themselves overwhelmed, frustrated and constricted by their times. The one question left hanging is, does Betty’s vintage impulse-buy suggest her desire to escape modern America and return to that constricting Victorian era, or does it represent a longing to bring female frustrations out into the open, into the heart of the modern home? To put it another way, is vintage shopping an excuse to go backwards, or is it a means to move forward by using reference to the past as a springboard for action in the present?
Whether or not Weiner’s family history has had an impact on his interest in vintage culture, it is true that his interest in exploring the power of items from the past is inspired by the very simple historical mystery that sits at the heart of all families. As Weiner explained to an interviewer for the New York Times, ‘part of the show is trying to find out – this sounds really ineloquent – trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents.’
That same longing to put ourselves in personal conversation with an otherwise inscrutable past also explains the current appeal of vintage shopping. Vintage has emerged at a cultural moment in which consumers are able to access, circulate and reconfigure the traces of the past in new and dynamic ways. The digital era has given audiences increased opportunities to rescue and recycle the past even while it also seems to distract from the materiality of things.
It is no coincidence that in the era of digital technology there has been a surge of interest in outmoded technologies like manual typewriters, old-fashioned crafts like lace- making or cider-brewing, and even services like Instagram, which give current photos the patina of history. Vintage items conjure authenticity and realness in a time when digital images and virtuality dominate. Owning a vintage vase, skirt or sofa refreshes the present, grounding it in relation to the past, a place that is prima facie identified as authentic and real.
If the reclamation and re-consumption of the past can be said to have become an established cultural style, it is not a result of a crisis of something lost, or a need to go back in time, but rather, through a surfeit of information technology and global networks, it is what we have gained – new markets for old things.
