Author Description

How to seem coquettish and provocative, while at the same time looking coy and demure, was the art perfected by fashionable young women portrayed in pre-war Shanghai posters. They were a genre all to themselves. If the true power of advertising lies in seduction, here was a style that subtly hinted at much more than it recealed, even when promoting products as innocuous as liprouge, talcum powder, soaps, perfumes, cigarettes and the ubiquitous Shanghai movies.