Monday, January 4, 2010

Skiers in the nude

Back in the 70's, I was working with Look binding, the product was unmistakeably recognized by the singular shape of its protruding heel unit. As a company, we were fighting hard against Salomon which was promoting a more traditional heel shape that would become the mainstay for years to come. Right at that time and out of the blue came a poster - I believe from Holland - showing a huge skiing cartoonish scene where all the participants were... naked! What was more special about the graphics was that each skier had ski bindings that happened to just look like a Look product.

The poster soon became the rallying, underground promotional tool of the company. I had put my hands on one of them, framed it and hung it up somewhere in our house before I probably trashed it as better pictures (these were easy to come by) displaced this unique artwork off the family walls. More recently, Peter Juen, my friend and a former colleague at Look in the USA sent me a picture of the infamous scene that he – unlike me – had carefully preserved. He assumed those were French skiers due to their propensity for lewd behavior; I responded that French were much smarter than skiing bare-ass and that these folks were probably Dutch. I have since done some (fruitless) search on the internet to find some fresh prints of the picture and wonder if anyone knows where they could still be found. Comments and hints are of course welcome!

1 comment:

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