Sexist Adverts of Mr Leggs Slacks by Dacron From the 1970s

These infamous 1970s Mr. Leggs slack ad campaigns by Dacron used the basic strategies of humor and appeasement to appeal to their targeted audience and potential consumers to increase profit sales. They provide a degrading depiction of women, and as a result, they provide a very accurate depiction of sexism in the 1970s.

One Dacron advertisement illustrates a woman’s head attached to the skin of a poached animal being used as a rug while a man stand’s confidently with one leg propped on the head of the woman and the other on the rug, flaunting his Mr. Leggs slacks. This Mr. Leggs print ad suggests that the Dacron company is not only trying to increase profit sales for their slack pants, but suggest the advancement of women is barbaric and advocate the oppression of women in America.

Dacron captured the attention of the 1970s man by using emotional appeal and repetition, to target his audience. During the decade of the publishing of these ads, the women’s right movement was taking place, causing men to begin to feel inferior and feel they are slowly losing control of the women of the nation. Emotional appeal is used in these ads by giving men back that sense of power they feel they are being stripped of by women. The advertising technique repetition can be seen specifically through the repeat of the implied power that the Mr. Leggs slacks has the ability to give men over women.

While Dacron captured the attention of egotistic men in the 1970s, today the company’s ad has become a testimony to the progression of the modern woman. Today the Mr. Leggs Slacks advertisement by Dacron may be seen as extremely prejudiced and discriminatory but sexism is still very prevalent in the ads of today. Dacron’s use of the logical strategy emotional appeal, coupled with the advertising technique repetition causing the 1970s consumer to feel a parallel relation between what is taking place in his own social and home life and what is currently taking place in the nation in comparison to the Mr. Leggs advertisement.