Mark Megahan
As long as there have been pictures of girls, men have been sticking them on a wall. Right around 1941 the practice went viral and the “pin-up” became an art genre in its own right. A huge part of the success, besides the images themselves, were the way they were mass produced.
Pin-up calendars
The pin-up rage really started somewhere around the 1890’s, when images could be clipped from newspapers or magazines. The naughty postcards of the era before were meant to be stashed discreetly in a drawer. Suddenly, those same images were toned down just enough to be displayed in public, and they were. By the millions.
Somebody with a head for marketing realized that those postcard and chromo-lithograph images would be great for calendars, “which are meant to be pinned up anyway.” Posters soon followed. There was a rush to capture images of the day’s sex symbols, which is how Betty Grable became one of the most famous of the pin-up girls.
Always a ‘good girl’
During World War II, lonely soldiers plastered their favorite pin-up girls from lockers to the cockpits of bombers. The images were painted on planes and tanks and bombs. Rita Hayworth seems to have been at as many battles as Betty Grable, thanks to the Louis F. Dow Calendar Company. They “produced special booklets of pin-up art created by their star artist Gillette Elvgren to be mailed overseas.”
After the war, came a new age of prosperity and pin-up girls became advertising. “If a pretty, wholesome girl-next-door could be utilized to sell a product, why not a girl in stockings modestly flashing some skin (But she’s always a ‘good girl’ – Its not her fault that playful puppy pulled her skirt over her head!).” You can thank Chicago artist Haddon Sundblom for the “explosion of vibrant beautiful pitchwomen.” That was the status quo through the “Leave it to Beaver” fifties but when the sixties came along, the sexual revolution brought one to the erotic art world too. Gentleman’s magazines and the ubiquitous “centerfold.”
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