Pin Up: A Modest History

Imagine a world before Taschen Books, fetish clubs, the New Burlesque and Dita Von Teese. A world where nobody knew who Bettie Page was, and you couldn't access just about any erotic image ever recorded within a few mouse clicks. A Britain where the apex of female desirability was represented by

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Pan's People gyrating awkwardly in mumsy print frocks and brown tights to Gilbert O'Sullivan. This is the world of the mid-seventies, where this book first touched down, and when I wanted to possess a copy more than anything else in the world.

And now I do. Frankly, unless you were the right age to have been scorched by its impact at the time, you probably don't need this, for all the reasons alluded to above, but the classic images included have lost none of their fiery intensity. (You're probably familiar with many of them, because this book was for many years a standard picture reference for vintage glamour.) Looking at it now, there is entirely too much space devoted to rather bland publicity shots of movie stars. The text is laughable, hilariously dated and patronising. The pages devoted to male pin-ups are a silly, half-hearted token. And the two page spread on fetishism just isn't enough, though The Cramps liked it well enough to reproduce most of the images in a 1980's tour program.

And yet . . in its time, this book celebrated a half-forgotten vision of assertive female sexuality, arrayed in the full armour of corsetry and the savage war paint of uncompromisingly artificial cosmetics, almost camp in its theatrical intensity and very much in contrast to the earth mothers and flower children of the hippy era. Siouxsie Sioux, the real Jordan and all the wild and wonderful women of the punk era were just around the corner and must have been taking notes.

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