MacLevy’s Figurama

In his unpublished Typhon in America, aka, Guide to Chaos, McLuhan cites many different news reports and ads from the late 1940s to illustrate the link between mechanization and sex.1 One of these, in Typhon Book II2, chapter i3, runs as follows:

Do you like my figure?
MacLevy’s have been keeping it slim and trim.

Monty MacLevy offered books

and home kits to help housewives shape themselves  up. His ‘Figurama salon-at-home slenderizing plan’ must have particularly caught McLuhan’s eye:

 


  1. Typhon can be considered a footnote to Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command which McLuhan reviewed in 1949. ↩
  2. ‘SEX AND TECHNOLOGY or PASIPHAE AND THE MINOTAUR’ ↩
  3. “Announcing the birth of a petunia”. ↩