Andy Warhol The Souper Dress c. 1965-1967:
Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, this dress was sold by the Campbell’s Soup Company in the late 1960s as a form of advertisement, combining the fad of paper dresses with Warhol’s popularizing of soup can images. The souper dresses were made of paper and sent to individuals through the mail after they sent in two Campbell’s soup can labels and $1.00. The dress could not be washed, and was therefore only intended to be worn once or twice. The souper dress is held within collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art , and the Andy Warhol Museum, among others.
Medium: screen-print in colors on paper dress. c.1965-1967.
Approximate Dimensions: 37.5 × 22.5 inches
Very good overall vintage condition; fold-lines as originally issued; minor signs of handling & aging as commensurate with medium; some minor fraying at base; a fine well-preserved example.
Unsigned from an edition of unknown. Labeled, ‘The Souper Dress' at the neck. Scarce. Manufactured by The Campbell Soup Company c.1965-1967.
Literature & references:
The Costume Institute at The Met.
The Warhol Look: Glamour Style Fashion, The Whitney Museum of Art, pg. 6.
Further background:
This is the 1960's Campbell's Soup dress that was inspired by the work of Andy Warhol. These were produced by Campbell's Soup as an effective advertising campaign when paper dresses were all the rage in the mod 1960's. A classic example where fashion, art and industry intersect into one image. This A-line dress is printed with the Campbell's Soup red, black and white labels. At the back of the neckline is the original attached label that reads: "The Souper Dress/No Cleaning/ No Washing/ It's carefree fire resistant unless washed or cleaned/To refreshen, press lightly with warm iron/80% Cellulose, 20% Cotton".
This dress is owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, the Andy Warhol Museum, FIT, as well as other museums and collectors around the world.
As art historian Marco Livingstone has stressed, Pop Art was never a circumscribed movement with membership and manifestos. Rather, it was a sensibility emergent in the 1950s and rampant in the 1960s. Andy Warhol (who began his career as a fashion illustrator) had been painting Campbell's soup cans since 1962. Such advertising icons, along with cartoons and billboards, yielded a synthesis of word and image, of art and the everyday. Fashion quickly embraced the spirit of Pop, playing an important role in its dissemination. The paper dresses of 1966 - 67 were throwaways, open to advertising and the commercial.
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Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop Art king, Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images. Warhol was widely influenced by popular & consumer culture, with this being evident in some of his most famous works: 32 Campbell's soup cans, Brillo pad box sculptures, and portraits of Marilyn Monroe & Mick Jagger, for example. Rejecting the standard painting and sculpting modes of his era, Warhol embraced silk-screen printmaking to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color. The artist mentored Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and continues to influence contemporary art around the world: His most bold successors include Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. Warhol has been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou, among other institutions.
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