Monday’s ad is entitled Home Preview of the Mardi Gras Costume, and the illustration was done in 1952 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #65 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, a group of people in a New Orleans courtyard, beers in hand, are looking over a costume that shortly thereafter will be up on a float in a Mardi Gras parade. I don’t know if that was a common party theme, but it seems like a fairly thin excuse for a celebration.
