“Snoopy in Style NYC” is a highly significant exposition on the Peanuts comic and animated cartoon series by Charles M. Schulz, who first published the comic strip on October 2, 1950.
I personally remember my first encounter with Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts crew when I was on a Korean Air flight in June 2000, when I immigrated to America with my mother and brother at the age of nine. On the rear sides of the passenger seats were small LCD displays, on which I could watch Mr. Schulz’s cartoon. Charlie Brown and others were having a high school graduation, and the entire episode carried a tinge of sadness and nostalgia about the past. The song often played at graduation, “The Pomp and Circumstance Marches” (1901–1930) by Edward Elgar, could be heard in the background. I saw the American cartoon characters hug each other in celebration of their friendship, and I felt that I could try to understand this important rite of passage of middle-class life in suburban America. And in a way, I myself was “graduating” and transitioning from the Korean way of life by moving to the US in pursuit of a better life and new friendships.
As the exhibition illustrates, Peanuts is an intellectual property and brand that penetrated all facets of American life and imagination, including pop culture, fashion, and sports, and during the American Century (around the late 20th century), this ubiquity translated into global visibility and brand power.
An overview: upon entering the exhibition, we face an amply spaced information walkthrough with bright and fun visuals, and all that one would want to know about Mr. Schulz’s venerable American cartoon. From there, we find to the left a fashion segment titled “Snoopy in Fashion,” which showcases various concept outfits created in collaboration with designers in 2026 and worn by life-size Snoopy dolls. On the right, we enter a concavely shaped Wimbledon-themed tennis and sports booth, where people can try out different T-shirts and buy Snoopy-themed tennis balls. Further to the right, Joe Cool’s Listening Lounge provides participants with records and record players for us to enjoy fresh streams of analog music. And lastly, product displays and a lavish gift shop showcase the historical and current product offerings within the Peanuts brand and merchandise lineup.
So many interesting facts emerge from the depths of the archives and surprise us throughout the exhibition. For example, we discover that Mr. Schulz was not a big fan of jazz, but he recognized that jazz would be a perfect accompaniment for Peanuts as a soundtrack, which involved collaboration with Vince Guaraldi. We also learn that Mr. Schulz highlighted the importance of Title IX for women athletes to the public in a Peanuts strip in 1979. In the comic strip, Peppermint Patty informs Marcie and Woodstock that women receive only twenty-one percent of collegiate athletic scholarship budgets, of which only fourteen percent is devoted to women players.
With the US Open currently up and running in NYC, one of the information displays describes Mr. Schulz’s wife as a devoted tennis player and details the year in which the sport first appeared in the comic strip as 1951. Furthermore, Mr. Schulz helped Rosie Casals organize the tennis tournament titled “the Snoopy Cup” from 1983 to 1985, and Billie Jean King was the winner in its debut year. (King was the American tennis player who was formerly world No. 1 and had also defeated Bobby Riggs.)
In the exhibit, we find an important display of Peanuts-inspired wearable art in collaboration with Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. De Castelbajac designed a coat adorned with Snoopy dolls, which was later worn by Vanessa Paradis. The “Snoopy in Fashion” section further showcases fashion concepts in collaboration with designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Martine Sitbon, Mary McFadden, Missoni, Oscar de la Renta, and Versace.
For Mr. Schulz, fashion and design were essential aspects of creating recognizable characters for his comic. Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist’s wife, is quoted as saying, “He understood that comic strip characters had to have a style.” Charlie Brown originally wore a “little white T-shirt,” but the character was truly brought to life when Mr. Schulz gave him a jagged stripe, and he stuck to similar outfits and styles for each of the characters to make them easier to identify. This is why “Sally always has polka dots, Linus has horizontal stripes, and Schroeder has bars.”
Charlie Brown is the middle-class American boy, possibly representing a midtone hue. Charlie Brown is not without flaws, which he can’t see himself. Lucy can spot them because she is bright and sharp, possibly like a pink or orange and full of confidence. Sally is a pragmatist, yet she is rude to her older brother, Charlie Brown. Schroeder is more serious, focused, emotionally detached, and intellectual than the other characters. And Snoopy allows the other characters to know more about themselves through his friendly ways.
If Popeye the Sailor Man illustrates an early form of superhero who rights wrongs through superior force and ingenuity, and Tom and Jerry is about the clash of opposite personalities, between hard power and direct aggression and soft power and passive aggression, Peanuts is a comic series built on an entirely different dynamic. Mr. Schulz’s comic illustrates the spectrum of personalities that bond and communicate, and ultimately try to understand one another.
Why do we find ourselves being pulled closer to Peanuts whenever the characters appear on TV screens and display signs, or even T-shirts and stickers?
There is no right answer, but maybe Peanuts is about the diversity of personalities that differ between Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder, and others, which produce what we call “drama” or “life.” We humans hunger for drama, conflict, meaning, love, and friendship, all of which manifest visually and emotionally in Peanuts.
In closing thoughts, we find Peanuts iconic not only because the characters’ appearance is eye-catching or fashionable. Peanuts is an iconic American comic because we all grew up watching it, and the characters and their voices live inside of us. Peanuts offers something not easily definable and is also open-ended on the questions of human experience and relationships through a middle-class mainstream American lens.
We are all a part of the Peanuts crew.
Snoopy in Style NYC, September 2nd–26th from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM at 25 Little West 12th Street
CategoriesTagsAuthor 
Chunbum Park or “Chun” is a painter, photographer, curator, and writer based in Cliffside Park, NJ. They received a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Park is an editor at the Brooklyn to Gangnam visual and literary print magazine, and they write exhibition reviews for various art publications.