Who is Mr. Thomson and why can't he keep his hands to himself?

An oddly intriguing 1960s-era campaign I stumbled across recently. 

Let’s handle this part right up front: Obviously, seen through modern eyes, it’s sexist as all get-out – but if you just want to reinforce your disgust at the ads, there are other web sites out there that will indulge you. 

 

Here, I’m more interested in examining these ads as an ad campaign – what made them attention-getting, recognizable, and endlessly reproducible, as well as how they channeled the zeitgeist (for better and worse).

So who is this Mr. Thomson with the audacity to feature himself as a handsy designer of women’s apparel? 

 

The internet is surprisingly barren when it comes to The Thomson Company, the textile manufacturer behind the ads, the brand, and the exclamation – but digging deep, here’s what I’ve been able to find out and suss out.

Though he was the public face (so to speak) of the company, our Mr. Thomson was, in fact, an advertising creation, as fictitious a character as, say, Charmin's Mr. Whipple (who also couldn't keep his hands to himself). 

The Thomson Company took its name from the Georgia city where it was founded in 1936 by Harry Johnson, Archie Clarke and Lavelle McCampbell. Beginning with a line of inexpensive trousers and later expanding into higher-quality dress slacks, the company’s sales grew rapidly; by 1956, it was said that about 20 pairs of trousers were being produced every minute – approximately 35.5 million pairs since the company began.

Understandably, the first slacks were produced exclusively for men and boys – this was 1936, after all – but by 1964, the company touted slacks for both sexes. 

The brand for men was called “Mr. Leggs,” a name which had an oddball literalness that, today at least, seems ill-suited to pants for men. (Though in fairness, this was years before Hanes revolutionized the hosiery industry in 1969 with L’Eggs, their pantyhose packaged in plastic eggs and sold in supermarkets.)

The women’s brand, as we've seen, was far more evocative.

I can find no record of who handled The Thomson Company’s marketing and advertising – whether it was done in-house or through an ad agency – but these ads for women’s slacks and coordinated tops seems to have started appearing in 1963, at a time when increasing numbers of women were joining the workplace and fashions were getting splashier and more colorful.

For raising the profile of the Georgia company’s fashions, the campaign was, in several ways, rather ingenious. 

Again, setting aside the sexism and chauvinism on display – actually, no, we can’t set that aside, because that was the crux of the campaign; and in the context of the times, a familiar, relatable situation for women in the workplace. 

Certainly, it was an unexpected, mildly shocking way to instantly make your ad stand apart from every other fashion ad that featured women modelling their clothes. The attention of this “Mr. Thomson” may have been unwanted, but the women tend to look more bothered than threatened. 

The simple layouts highlighted the clothing and their appeal. And by representing Mr. Thomson by only his hand, there was an air of mystery that invited the reader to imagine what the rest of him looked like.

 

Even the phrasing of the headline provoked audience engagement. Was “Mr. Thomson … please!” spoken in exasperation, shock, or even coquettishness? 

But no matter how you interpreted the phrase, it also functioned as a statement of brand preference. Eventually, even the clothing labels exclaimed “Mr. Thomson … please!” 

And best of all, the concept’s simplicity made it endlessly reproducible. In ad after ad after ad, young women in every variation of the company’s stretch pants – often with nearly identical poses and body language – gently but firmly fended off the advances of the Fictitious Mr. T.  

(Well, maybe not in the ads where he would lock his fingers around the woman’s waist, pulling her close as she seemed to recoil from him. Those ads, like the disembodied Mr. Thomson himself, probably crossed a line there.)

Maybe it’s no surprise that by 1967, the company finally put a face to the hands of its namesake. After several years, the campaign may have needed some refreshing. But it also neutered Mr. Thomson a bit; though he was no less handsy, he now showed the bland good looks of a store mannikin. 

But that was still preferable to the ads that featured his enormous visage looming behind women like the Great and Powerful Oz.

 At some point, the company seemed to get its consciousness raised and started running ads that dispensed altogether with the problematic Mr. Thomsen.

On the other hand, as the ads for their Mr. Leggs brand showed, Thomson wasn’t the only chauvinistic mister in the company’s portfolio.