Duke Professor Explores Aesthetic Marketing Strategy of Japanese Cosmetics Giant Shiseido in Web Essay

As models, designers and makeup artists descend on New York City for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sept. 10-17, a Duke University expert takes a close look at how one cosmetics company made its mark in history.

In her Web essay “Selling Shiseido: Cosmetics Advertising & Design in Early 20th Century Japan” (bit.ly/XJowV), Gennifer Weisenfeld, associate professor in the department of art, art history and visual studies, explores how Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido creatively produced and conveyed meaning through the visual and material aspects of its marketing.

“There is no Japanese company whose advertising design better represents the aesthetic of cosmopolitan chic seen through the visual sphere in the early 20th century than Shiseido,” Weisenfeld says.

Shiseido opened its Western-style pharmaceutical business in Tokyo in 1872 and quickly emerged as one of the leading cosmetics manufacturers in Japan, a position it still holds more than a century later. Some of the company’s most well-known products include scented skin toners, hair styling balms, toothpaste, white and tinted face powders, perfumes, vanishing and cold creams, and soap.

“Shiseido offered consumers an exotic, sensuous, embodied experience of cosmetics that satisfied their emotional and physical desires as well as the moral necessities of a healthy lifestyle,” says Weisenfeld. “The company sought to elevate its cosmetics advertising design to an art form, imparting a sophistication and sense of aristocratic taste to consumer goods.”

Weisenfeld analyzed elements of Shiseido’s advertising and marketing to illustrate how the company’s products and promotional strategies tell a distinctive story about Japan’s experience of modernity, including the impact of mass-market consumerism, urbanization and changing gender roles on national culture.

“This period saw the dawn of modern commercial design globally,” Weisenfeld says. “Japanese corporate sponsors were in an international and inter-cultural dialogue with their colleagues around the world, particularly those in Europe and the United States, who were all interested in developing a visual vocabulary that would appeal to the modern woman.”

The Web essay is accompanied by extensive image galleries drawn from Shiseido’s vast archives (bit.ly/yF7eR). Part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Visualizing Cultures initiative, the galleries include Shiseido ads and posters, postcards, product photos, pictures of company stores and buildings, as well as film and video clips.

Provided by Duke University