In These Times

Daniel Thomas Cook is an associate professor of advertising and communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Duke University Press, 2004) and the editor of Symbolic Childhood (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). A version of this essay appeared in the exhibition catalog for Branded and On Display, which opens on January 26, 2007 at the Krannert Art Museum.