Moet and Chandon White Star 1899

Alphonse Mucha created this advertisement for Moet and Chandon White Star champagne, likely around the turn of the 20th century. The image is a fantastic example of Art Nouveau, a style that reveled in organic forms and embraced fine art's role in commercial design. Mucha, a Czech artist working in Paris, became famous for his theatrical posters, and here we see that aesthetic applied to marketing luxury goods. This artwork can be seen as a part of the broader commercialization of art. The sensuous female figure embodies abundance and pleasure, holding grapes while draped in flowing fabric, she represents the good life. Such advertising reinforced the idea of champagne as a status symbol, connecting it to beauty and sophistication, and it created consumer desires. To fully understand this image, we would want to look into the history of advertising and the rise of consumer culture in France at this time. We would research the changing role of women in society and the ways they were portrayed in commercial imagery.