THE HISTORY OF THE PINUP GIRL
The pinup girl genre has an incredible 150 year history. It is an interesting combination of cultural history and art history starting in the 1860s. As naturally as modern pinups are with their sexuality today, pinup art and the histoty of the pinup girl is tightly connected to the history of feminism.
Let's beginn with the origins of pinup in the mid-nineteenth-century.
So called carte-de-visite photographs showed burlesque performers; the very first pinup girls included Lydia Thompson and Adah Isaacs Menken. Both of them tried to gain control over their own images for years.
Lydia Thompson 1868
Needless to say that they never succeded. Even the most famous pinup of all time - Bettie Page never owned her own image and lived her life in constant financial struggle. We should all learn from the history of the classic pinup girls and be protective of our product and the worth of our own image. Some modern Pinup Girls like Bernie Dexter managed to turn their image into a lucrative profession. I salute them because that's how it should be if pinup is what rocks your boat!
A SHORT HISTORY OF PINUP ART AND PINUP FASHION
Pinup as we generally think of it today, gained popularity in the early 1930s. It was a time in history when the image of a georgious girl took the soldiers mind of the war and reality. Whether it was the classic painted pinup calendar, advertisement, or the pinup photography,most guys in the service had a poster of his favorite taped in his locker lid.
These memorialized women were first known as 'Petty Girls', named after the artist George Petty, which were popularized by Esquire magazine during those decades. The ideal depictions of scantily clad and pleasantly voluptuous women were featured in magazine calendars, centerfolds and even painted on warplanes during World War II. And every girl curled her hair in pin curls and dimpled as she smiled hoping to be taken for a pin-up herself.
The attitude and fashion of vintage pinup girls went mainstream quickly moving from the centerfold right to the front cover. Matchbooks and movies even featured pin up girls and their, for those days at least, skimpy fashion. Some more mainstream names of pinup girls were Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield and the edgier Bettie Page. What was once considered risque, was now out in the mainstream, the strict Victorian attitude towards a woman's body, for better or for worse, would be forever shattered.
The rise of the sex industry shortly after would drown pinup girls and their fashions and overshadow them with tacky and perverted mutations of its essence while stripping the innocence and humor from the original pinup girl centerfolds of decades before. Pornography would replace the innocent pleasures of the pin up girl centerfolds.
Pin up fashion and art would prove resilient, however, and rise again with the help of independent burlesque troupes during the mid nineties as well as the underground resurgence of Rockabilly and Swing music amongst many younger people who would mix the fashions popular with these music fans, along with vintage pin up fashion. The most publsihed pinup artists were Elvgren and Vargas whose original pinup art is highly sought after today.
Today pinup girls and pinup art is back in the spot light and strong as ever.
The pinup style and pinup fashion is featured once again in movies, magazine ads and got adopted by pop singers and celebrities.
Everything old is new again!
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THE PINUP ICONS OF OUR TIME:
BETTIE MAE PAGE
Born on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tennessee
Height : 5 feet 5 1/2 inches / Weight :128
Bettie Page as a pinup model was fun, naughty, sweet, wild, raunchy, hillarious and untamed. A legend as much today as during her modeling days, every facet of Betties life and personality captures the interest and devotion of the thousands of fans that followed her career until the day of her mysterious disappearance. 20,000 photos have been taken of her by photographers between 1949 and 1957. Those often grainy images -- of a raven-haired beauty with thick black bangs, arching eyebrows, bright red lipstick and wearing nylon stockings with seams running down the backs, high heels and form-fitting skirts, polka-dot and leopard-print bikinis, negligees or nothing at all -- transformed Page into an enduring fashion icon.
At 35, Page quit pinup modeling and moved to Florida. She spent much of the rest of her life studying the Bible and trying to cope with broken marriages and sometimes violent mood swings that resulted in her being institutionalized for a decade. She was released in 1992 from Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County to learn that she had become a pop-culture heroine.
"I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer," Page explained in an interview years later. "I wasn't trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn't think of myself as liberated, and I don't believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn't know any other way to be, or any other way to live."
(extracted out of an artical in the LA Times by By Louis Sahagun December 17, 2008)
The glorious, wonderful Miss Bettie Page died on December 11, 2008 at 85
"I never was the girl next door" Bettie Page
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