Alternative methods of car care with the leopard-skin Mercedes

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If you think leopard-skin interiors are outrageous, how about a leopard-skin exterior? This W110 model Mercedes-Benz sports nothing less. The question is, how do you keep it clean? Well, with a vacuum cleaner of course! This obliging young lady is happy to demonstrate it for us, having thoughtfully remembered to take off her shoes first. This photograph was taken in 1975 in Whickham, north-east England, by Dennis Hutchinson, apparently for The Sunday People newspaper. We know no more than that, so feel free to go mad with your captions and suggestions in the comments below.

It’s made us hark back to our college days, when a favourite lecturer was Mr. Mulder, who taught us marketing. One particularly well-remembered lesson was about marketing mishaps and one of the most notorious was that of Swedish vacuum-cleaner company Electrolux. We were told the Swedes didn’t care to hire an English-speaking advertising agency upon entering the British market. The result was a classic blunder, seen all over the country in advertisements with the catchy line ‘Nothing sucks like an Electrolux’.

With no way of verifying this most amusing story at the time, we thought it was a hilarious blunder. Now, with internet fact-checking available, we learn it wasn’t quite what it seemed. Yes, Electrolux promoted their products in Britain with said slogan, but it was thought up by a British agency in the 1970s, when the word ‘suck’ in the negative sense hadn’t permeated into British English. In the States things were quite different, though, and the Americans apparently found the slogan as hilarious as we did. So today’s lesson concludes: ‘Take nobody’s word for granted, even if they are your favourite lecturer.’

As for the leopard-print Mercedes, we’re not quite sure what the moral of that story is…

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: Dennis Hutchinson/The Sunday People
 

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