The early-to-mid 1990s saw an explosion of chewing gum packaging featuring all sorts of imagery, much of it seemingly irrelevant to the underlying product. Inserts might include film stills from The Godfatheror Jurassic Park, pornographic pictures, or, in this case, characters from New Zealand cartoonist Kim Casali’s syndicated “Love Is…” series, which originally dated to the 1960s and ’70s.  

Images from a photo shoot from the Polushkin Brothers’ Fash-Fashion collection, which alluded to both queer and fascist aesthetics. Images in the series appeared, respectively, in an ad for Dr. Martens in the lifestyle magazine “Ptiuch,” and as an example of the countercultural aesthetics of the National Bolshevik Party in the pages of its press organ, “Limonka.”

This billboard advertising the cigarette brand L&M is positioned in front of the burned façade of the Russian White House, which was bombed on Yeltsin’s orders during the 1993 Constitutional Crisis. It possibly inspired one of the most famous passages from Victor Pelevin’s iconic satire of the 1990s, “Generation P” (titled, in English, “Homo Zapiens”).