Sunday’s ad is for Rheingold Beer, from 1963, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Loretta Rissell. In this ad, she’s dancing aboard the S.S. Lurline wearing a strapless green dress. Her partner is either a Naval officer or someone dressed in all white wearing an apron, I can’t quite tell which it is.
Interesting the relentless effort made by Rheingold to give beer an upscale image or role. Some other brewers tried the same, as you’ve shown earlier. Did it work? I don’t think so. Beer’s ethos seems relentlessly working people or middle class, which I’m good with, being part of said group. There is a small world, influenced by culinary trends, where beer has an appeal but even there it is more intellectual than gilt-edged, I’d say, or more trendy is perhaps the right term. All those elegant society and business figures in the shooting glens, on yachts, on first-class trains…. today they’d be sipping Champagne, Belvedere or good whiskey. (Whiskey did make the transition, come to think of it).
Gary