Advertising is a nebulous business—appealing, or attempting to appeal, to a culture that is always transforming, and whose methods of transformation are themselves in constant, unpredictable evolution. There is no finish line, and yet the pattern never exactly repeats. TASCHEN, with editor Jim Heimann, harnesses this paradox with their latest coffee-table book OUT THIS APRIL, All-American Ads of the 2000s, a compendium of freeze-frames from a past that can never be entirely known.

The book arranges advertisements first by product category–what exactly is being sold, a question the ads do not always clearly answer–and then by less exact tonal similarities, with sparse interspersions of lampoonish commentary. The order is cohesive, but often to humorous effect, such as when pornographic cologne ads abruptly give way to lozenges promoted by horses in polo shirts and cartoony mucus blobs.

Present throughout is a clear illustration of a sharp gender divide—food eaten by women is all either “guilt-free” or hyperbolized until it’s worth the guilt, for example, while men are shamed out of drinking non-whisky cocktails with the reprimand that “YOUR DAD WAS NOT A METROSEXUAL.” And of course, both sides are hit repeatedly with narrow, largely unattainable body-image ideals; used indiscriminately and utilized to sell, sell sell.

Though one might get a good laugh reflecting on the brazen image-makers at the turn of the century, it’s a laugh underwritten by the consciousness that we in 2025 are not so far removed from a time when oil companies took out whole magazine pages for Earth Day ads. Print advertising will not exit the public consciousness anytime soon, nor will the psychosocial fears, excitements, and anxieties upon which companies built advertising empires. Before too long, our children and our future selves will surely find the 2020s ridiculous too.