Cafe Mossant

Who is Charles Mossant?

Mossant was a famous brand of hat manufactured in France and well-known in the United States for most of the twentieth century. The company was founded by Charles Mossant in the nineteenth century, and by 1929 more than 2,000 hats a day were being produced. Half of them were directly shipped to the U.S. Hat production ended in 1998. The Mossant factory was in Bourg-de-Peage and it has been renovated as a commercial centre.

The brand is still known worldwide for its advertising posters. its most famous advertisement was the poster by Leonetto Cappiello shown below.

Leonetto Cappiello (1875 in Livorno, Italy - 1942 in Cannes, France) was an Italianposter art designer who lived in Paris.  He is now often called 'the father of modern advertising' because of his innovation in poster design. The early advertising poster was characterized by a painterly quality as evidenced by early poster artists Jules Cheret, Alfred Choubrac and Hugo D'Alesi. Cappiello, like other young artists, worked in way that was almost the opposite of his predecessors. He was the first poster artist to use bold figures popping out of black backgrounds, a startling contrast to the posters early norm.

Cappiello had no formal training in art.The first exhibition of his work was in 1892, when a painting was displayed at the municipal museum in Florence.

Cappiello made his name during the poster boom period in the early 20th century.