Soup Labels And $1: The Campbell's Paper Dress You Probably Forgot About From The '60s

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If you've ever donned a paper hospital gown and thought, "This is surprisingly comfortable; I wish I had one at home," you might be the target audience for a 1960s promotional dress offered by Campbell's Soup. The Souper Dress, which was released by Campbell's in 1967, was a nonwoven, or paper, shift dress meant to be disposable. It featured a repeating pattern inspired by Andy Warhol's series of paintings of iconic Campbell's Tomato Soup cans.

The white dress had black piping around the sleeves and neck, and Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans in straight, horizontal rows across the front and back. The pattern ended a couple of inches above the dress's hem, at which point there were two thick gold stripes. To purchase the dress, you just had to send in labels from two different kinds of Campbell's soups, along with $1.

Campbell's wasn't the first (or last) company to use this marketing ploy. Disposable paper dresses became an artsy way to protest the era of consumerism during the late '60s, when mod fashion and anti-establishment counterculture were in their heyday. The first to spearhead the trend was the Scott Paper Company, which advertised its new line of paper products via a Paper Caper mail-order promotion in 1966. If customers sent in a coupon, two proofs of purchase, and $1.25, they could get a nonwoven A-line shift dress in a red bandana or black and white pattern. The company sold half a million of these dresses in just a few months, inspiring DuPont and Campbell's to create their own.

The Campbell's Company has four Souper Dresses in its collection, and there are also many on display at, or in the collections of, different museums across North America. The Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (San Francisco, California), the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (both in New York City, New York) all have dresses in their collections. The dress is also occasionally on display in the "What We Wore" platform at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan.

If you want to own a piece of Campbell's Soup history, you can purchase a dress from an art gallery or even on eBay. Just be prepared to shell out big bucks. Some galleries offer the dress for sale for between $5,300 and $25,000. A Souper Dress sold on eBay for $1,800 in August 2026, and at the time of this writing, the online shop currently has a few others for sale ranging in price from $1,295 to $13,750. If that's a bit steep for you, you can purchase a poster featuring an image of the iconic dress for around $56 on eBay. It makes the perfect retro kitchen decor for a midcentury modern home.