Newsweek's Mad Men issue dons 60s homage ads

Ahead of this weekend's long-awaited restart of the hit AMC television series Mad Men, America's perennially ho-hum, middle-class mouthpiece Newsweek is hooking newsstand readers with a Draperesque issue featuring retro advertising creative inspired by the fictional firm SCDP and the show's maddeningly addictive 1960s-era pop style.

This hopefully one-time-only (please don't spark a fad) collection of blissed-out, gender-normative magazine ads puts the fun in advertising fundamentalism; they're worth a look and a re-look, perhaps alongside a reading of the wonderful Harper's essay "The False Nostalgia of Mad Men" by Jenny Diski from the January Jones issue.

From the psychedelic "The Spam Who Shagged Me" page to the erect Johnston & Murphy ad and the all-the-right-props Uprising piece, these homages are as priceless as Peggy's glass-ceiling tantrums, as tasteless as a Patio commercial, and almost as historically accurate Cooper's infamous "slippery slope" line.

Great move by the magazine: It's Don Draper's rye-soaked train wreck, and we can't look away.

You can view all the ads here and vote for your favourite. 

(Tip 'o the hat to the Magazines Canada blog.)