Life — September 1935 — page 2: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Vanities of 1810" - Old Overholt Whiskey Advertisement This is a whiskey advertisement disguised as social satire. It humorously catalogs fashions and customs from 1810—gentlemen's clothing styles, spectacles, sailing vessels, pianos, and social gatherings—with the punch line that Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey "first won renown / Among folk like this" in that era. The joke appeals to nostalgia: drinking this whiskey connects the 1810s consumer to that romanticized historical period. The final line—"If you want to know why / Just do like this"—with an image of someone drinking, suggests the whiskey's popularity explains itself. It's essentially using period-costume humor to market liquor as a product with authentic historical pedigree, bottled during Prohibition enforcement (noted at bottom).