Before photographs sold ski holidays, posters did. For the first half of the twentieth century, railways and resorts commissioned artists to make the mountains look irresistible from a station platform. The look they created, flat colour, hard shadow, one strong shape, is still what most people picture when they think of vintage skiing. It is also the register our Destinations® designs are drawn in.
Why they look the way they do
The posters were printed by colour lithography, a process that relies on grease and water repelling each other. Each colour needed its own printing stone, so artists worked with a limited palette laid down in flat areas. Fewer colours meant fewer stones, and that constraint became the style.
The railway posters
In France, the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway, the PLM, commissioned posters from leading artists from around 1900 to sell journeys to the Alps and the Riviera. Its best-known poster artist was Roger Broders, whose travel the PLM paid for so he could see the places he painted. His 1930 Chamonix Mont-Blanc poster, showing an ice hockey championship under the mountain, is held by Poster House in New York.
Switzerland invents the modern poster
In 1908 Emil Cardinaux designed a poster for Zermatt: the Matterhorn in bold outline and flat colour, under an unnatural purple alpenglow. It is widely considered the first modern Swiss poster. Cardinaux went on to make more than a hundred more.
In 1932 Walter Herdeg, then in his mid-twenties, designed the sun symbol for St. Moritz. Switzerland's National Museum calls it the oldest tourism trademark still in use. Alex Diggelmann won an Olympic gold medal in 1936, in the art competitions the Games held then, for a poster of Arosa. Martin Peikert painted elegant women against the peaks of Champéry and Pontresina.
America and the photographers
In the United States, the German-born Sascha Maurer made posters for Stowe, Lake Placid and the New Haven Railroad, and designed Stowe's "flying S". His view of the job: a poster had to get its message across in a flash.
The change came from Switzerland too. In the 1930s Herbert Matter, working for the Swiss tourist office, built posters from photomontage, including a giant gloved hand above the slopes of Engelberg. By the 1960s photography had taken over, and the painted travel poster's golden age was over.
Why the originals are rare
Posters were printed in runs of a thousand or two and usually thrown away at the end of the season. The survivors are now collected seriously. In 2016 Diggelmann's Gstaad sold at Christie's for £62,000, at the time a record for a ski poster, and Broders' posters have made five figures. Several auction houses now hold dedicated ski poster sales every winter.
How we use it
Our Destinations® designs are not reproductions. They are new artwork drawn the way those posters were: a few flat colours, one strong shape, the resort's name set large. The Zermatt Tee puts the Matterhorn above a village that still does not allow cars. The Chamonix Tee sets a skier and a climber under the same peak. Each is cut from 230gsm midweight cotton and digitally printed, so the ink sits in the cloth rather than on it.