The latest mobile lonely-hearts app IN THE Middle Ages, heraldry allowed knights to show off family histories in amazing detail, lugging shields or banners into battle that explained their ancestry, whether they had married an heiress and their status as a first or younger son. Eight centuries later American drivers are catching up, thanks to personalised “family stickers”: tiny stick-figure depictions of an entire household (most typically displayed in one corner of a minivan’s rear-windscreen). Though the trend’s origins are obscure, there is a consensus that it began in Mexico several years ago and at first involved generic outline figures, revealing only the number of children in a family. (A separate Mexican fad for displaying family names on cars caused controversy, because it was said to tempt kidnappers.)Now the stickers are well established north of the border. And, thanks to a combination of American individualism and advances in custom-manufacturing, they are morphing into ever-more-detailed family chronicles.Chroma Graphics of Tennessee, a supplier to such firms as Walmart, recently designed its first kits to celebrate...
from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1iR3jUj
No comments:
Post a Comment