A closer look
Before the intense rise of highly aggressive corporate advertising in the 1930s, the beloved holiday figure was frequently illustrated as an incredibly tall, gaunt man wearing eerie blue or brown robes. A massive American beverage company deliberately hired talented commercial illustrators to dramatically redesign the mythological character specifically to aggressively boost their slow winter soda sales. They explicitly clothed a jolly, deeply rotund grandfather figure in their highly saturated corporate red, inadvertently cementing a permanent global cultural icon purely through commercial repetition.
