Pop Art Souper Dress by Campbell’s Soup

American, 1966

Silkscreen printed paper 80% Cellulose 20% Cotton

Gift of Stephen and Gail Rineberg

“Today’s art is different because our world is different from any previous one.  Instead of winding country roads we are likely to do most of our traveling on highways liberally edged with billboards, and the dinner Mother serves us may be frozen TV instead of home cooked.”

-Sixteen-year-old Linda Kohn, Seventeen, April 25, 1966

Pop Art icon Andy Warhol first displayed his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Each of the 32 paintings represented a different kind of Campbell’s soup sold. These paintings signified the Pop lifestyle where art and everyday life were intermingled in music, art happenings and fashion. His paintings were inspiration to this anonymous designer who created the Souper Dress at the height of the paper dress craze in 1966. 

The Souper Dress was obtained by mail directly from the Campbell’s Soup Company. Customers could order as many as they liked by sending $1.00 and labels from two different kinds of soup for each dress. The order form proclaimed “It’s Carefree - No Washing, No Cleaning.”  In stark contrast to the one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted haute couture tradition, this dress personified a rapidly changing, youthful, consumer culture. Like Warhol’s multiples, the Souper Dress eroded away the mystique of the unique and exclusive in favor of the popular and now. 

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