copywriting for the J. Peterman catalogue
“I’m exhausted. I’ve been on this street a thousand times! It’s never looked so strange! The faces…so cold! In the distance, a child is crying. Fatherless…a bastard child, perhaps. My back aches… my heart aches… but my feet… my feet are resilient! Thank God I took off my heels, and put on my Himalyan Walking Shoes.”
“It’s a hot night. The mind races. You think about your knife, the only friend who hasn’t betrayed you, the only friend who won’t be dead by sun-up. Sleep tight, mates, in your quilted chambray nightshirts.” Seinfeld
I know a fair bit about direct marketing and catalogues and in my opinion the best catalogue writing was immortalized on Seinfeld when Elaine gets a copywriting job with J. Peterman. This company was/is famous for its Hemingway descriptions of clothing he discovered while travelling to remote parts of the world, with expensive price tags on the end. The only difference from the real J. Peterman is that the Seinfeld character speaks in the same catalogue prose.
While Peterman is character of ridicule, the fascination is there, of selling products through nostalgia for a bygone era by using colonialism to highlight male ruggedness and style. Here is some of the current J. Peterman copy.
Notes
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