Ski

Vintage ski posters: snow, speed, and a name in red

Alpine resorts sold a season rather than a place, and the best posters did it with almost nothing: a tilted slope, a skier leaning into it, a hotel or a peak behind, and the name set as a single gesture.

The colour scheme is fixed by the subject — white, blue, one warm accent — which is why these prints look calm on a wall even when the picture is about speed.

What is in this collection

• Zermatt — the mountain drawn as a shape, not a photograph.
• Samaden — a skier, a monoplane, the Engadin.
• Montreux and Les Diablerets — the resort poster at its most graphic.
• Luchon — the Pyrenees, and a different palette from the Alps.
• Winter sports — the sport before the sportswear.

The sport before the sportswear

These posters show skiing as an outing: woollen clothes, wooden skis, a hotel with a lit façade and a train that brought everyone up from the city. The mountain is a backdrop rather than a challenge, and nobody in the picture is wearing anything technical.

That is part of why they age well. They are pictures of a holiday, not of an extreme sport, and they hang as easily in a city flat as in a chalet.

Where a ski poster belongs

Hallways, bedrooms, a room with wood — the blues sit beside timber rather than on top of it, and the white keeps a small space from feeling closed.

Because the collection is small and consistent, it works as a set: three at 40×50 cm in identical frames along one wall read as a series rather than three separate choices.

If you want the summer version of the same era, the travel collection is where those posters went when the snow melted.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave within 24 hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, in a tracked tube.