This ad depicted the typical fashionable American family of the early 1960s...Dad in dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses; Mom in a classic red dress with a coordinating headband over her flipped hairdo; Son in jacket and short pants with knee socks and Daughter in short smocked dress with ankle socks and Mary Janes. The real fashion plate of the family, however, at least as implied by the ad, was the 1963 Frigidaire refrigerator in the center.
By 1962, most households had traded in their ice boxes for refrigerators of various makes and models, and of those, Frigidaire was one of the best known and highly regarded. That wasn't too surprising, as it had been Frigidaire who had manufactured the first electric self-contained refrigerator in 1918 and who had been at the forefront of developments in the industry since that time. This 1963 model contained quite a few advanced features such as the built-in ice cube bin (a contrast to the metal trays with handles commonly used at the time) and the Frost-Proof mode which did away with the messy and time-consuming process of manual defrosting. The model pictured here had the freezer section on the bottom, a design which is not commonly seen today but which in some ways is actually more practical than the more widely utilized freezer-on-top models. The 1963 Frigidaire came in several decorator colors, including the mint-green shade depicted in this ad.
While it may have been a bit over-the-top in retrospect to describe the Frigidaire as "fashion-fresh," there's nothing wrong with wanting to design an appliance that is nice-looking as well as functional. And, it appears, the 1963 Frigidaire succeeded well on both counts.
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