Dressing up Santa Claus

Initially, Santa's costume was brown, blue, white, purple and even green, but not red. And there was no single, canonical image of this legendary character.

The image of Santa Claus in a red suit first appeared on the back cover of National Geographic magazine in 1931, and it was Coca-Cola's New Year's advertising company. Due to this approach, the brand wanted to significantly increase the sales of soft drinks in the cold season, when Coca-Cola was not particularly relevant. As a result, the image of the Red Granfather very quickly spread throughout the world.

The modern image of Santa Claus was designed by painer Haddon Sundblom. His images became the most successful among other painers works.

The suit of Santa in the interpretation of Sandblom was red with a white edge of fur. But, for the sake of truth, the priority in using such color combination in the clothes of a fairytale character does not belong to Coca-Cola at all. Much earlier Santa, dressed similarly, appeared on several covers of the comic magazine “Puck” (1986, 1902 and 1905) and on posters advertising drinks from White Rock Beverages (1915 and 1920-ies).

The modern image of Santa Claus — part of the brand Coca-Cola. Despite this company is not the inventor of red santa, it made the greatest contribution to his canonization. And actually the red color of the clothes in this case does not bear absolutely no semantic implication.