Selling Prestige and Whiteness

One of Helen Lansdowne’s protégées, Margaret “Peggy” King, said in an interview that Lansdowne “encouraged me to rent paintings and sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, to have very good clothes, to work with top decorators at home and in the office.”1 Lansdowne had a proprietary air concerning her group of women and gave them advice on everything from writing copy to managing their homes. This interest in style that extended beyond the walls of J. Walter Thompson (JWT), hints at Lansdowne’s strongly held belief that how one approached style and art permeated all aspects of life. Her attitude toward high art illustrates two interconnected points: (1) she was fluid in the language and attitude of social mobility (a female Horatio Alger character, in effect, a Ragged Jane), and (2) she cultivated style and taste by identifying the proper art (high art) to revere as being the domain of the upper class, closely linked herself to that art, and stressed the importance of that art to her staff. Perhaps Lansdowne had a particularly developed sense of the appeal of social prestige because she had worked so hard to lift herself out of the poverty she experienced as a child. This understanding and ambition would have contributed to the highly effective psychological appeal of social prestige used in the Pond’s testimonial ad campaigns. Viewed another way, after Lansdowne improved her fortunes, she was very willing to entice others with ambition that success and status were one and the same.