Cocktail culture – Absolut Stockholm

Janet Forman offers up a taste of history, a few tippling tips, and and “absolut-ly” intriguing story or two.

How Grandpa’s Tipple Became a Darling of the Demimonde

Janet Forman offers up a taste of history, a few tippling tips, and and “absolut-ly” intriguing story or two.

How Grandpa’s Tipple Became a Darling of the Demimonde

This spirit’s tale begins as a love affair with the bottle, but in far from the usual way. Groundbreaking 1980s artist Andy Warhol was a teetotaler who found the scent of Absolut vodka so beguiling that he used it as cologne. This cultural revolutionary, who transformed Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles into Pop Art, became so captivated by the sleek lines of Absolut’s 18th-century apothecary bottle that he decided to paint his own interpretation.

The result—a primal image with ethereal power—suggested an equally radical marketing path to Absolut’s importer, Michel Roux: using avant-garde art from rebels like Warhol, Keith Haring, and Damien Hirst on Absolut’s labels and ads.

When this staid Swedish company began backing Warhol’s fashionably Boho crowd, they carried Absolut vodka into their countercultural haunts: the rowdy scene at Studio 54, the gay bars dictating fashion, even Warhol’s studio, The Factory, transforming grandpa’s tipple into a darling of the demimonde.

Absolut’s boundary-smashing ad campaign ran for more than 25 years, expanding to iconoclasts in other fields, such as fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, filmmaker Spike Lee, musician Lenny Kravitz, and even the remarkable graphics of Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood.

These days, Absolut is backing Indie films, music concerts, and live events, and has just premiered a new limited edition of the Warhol bottle—still available for purchase at press time—to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

About the author

Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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