“The 2016 Pirelli Calendar May Signal a Cultural Shift,” declared an article in this week’s New York Times style section. The “signal”, being that for the first time in years, the women in the Pirelli pages were chosen for reasons other than their ability to make the average man salivate.
For November, there is a photograph of Patti Smith wearing a very Patti Smith-like outfit: a vest, button-down shirt and combat boots. For August, there a photograph of Tavi Gevinson wearing a calf-length, satin black skirt that evokes the holiday cocktail party attire of mid-century intellectuals. And for December, there is a photograph of Amy Schumer holding a latte in heels and a nice set of underwear.
For a brand that has always believed it has “channeled the zeitgeist of great political and social mobilizations”, apparently 2016 is the year that women became valued for more than just their bodies.
Little of this seems particularly revolutionary to me. Women are dominating a great deal of the talk (if not yet the boardrooms) in popular culture, and if artifacts of an earlier “masculine” culture were still putting women on display in the same unabashed, objectifying way that they did decades ago, they would appear outrageously out of touch. Even Playboy has scrapped its nude centerfold.
The reaction in the press to the Pirelli calendar, over time, has usually been more ironic than this year’s. A 1969 article in this newspaper about the release of that year’s edition had a sardonic take on the thing, making clear that it was, basically, soft-core pornography.
Gloat, gloat, gloat, went the journalists as they left the Europa Hotel clutching their plain-wrapped copies,” Ian Breach wrote. “Leer, leer, leer went the London taxi driver who spied a black and white print sticking out of a document case.
And the coverage reveals that the women in the calendar were rather self-aware about how they were being used:
Yawn, yawn, yawn, went Pegga St. Helen and Anak as they posed for just one more shot and gave a smile that lasted for 1/30th of a second.
It’s important to remember, too, that by and large, in the first 10 years of the Pirelli calendar, the models were clothed. Social mores of the time didn’t allow for full-out nudity. And that was true right up to 1984.
In that first run, the calendar’s exclusive appeal was, in large part, economic. It was distributed only to a precious few – largely, those who sold Pirelli tires (remember Pirelli was a tire company) at their dealerships. Sometimes it was also sent out to a small selection of the public, usually powerful people. Those people would then trade the thing around. On the black market, a calendar could fetch up to £55 in the late 1960s.
Nonetheless it was eaten by its own success. The firm brought an end to the calendar in 1974. It was beginning to engulf the brand. Besides, the cost of producing the calendar was mounting, the design director, Derek Forsyth, told the Guardian in 1983.
But demand for the thing continued, and it gained a kind of pedigree as legitimate art. In 1980, the Tate spotted a 1973 copy for sale at an auction, it purchased it – for £44, about £200 now. And in 1983, Pirelli revived it. Nudity was a much more easy gambit for them by then, and it is true that subsequent Pirelli calendars mostly weren’t much for clothes. Each calendar was then assigned to a famous artist, who took his – I was going to say her, but it was mostly “his” – own approach to the photography. Sometimes this seemed to have some relationship to cars or pneumatics – Uwe Ommer, the 1984 photographer, got literal about it and put tire tracks on his model’s asses.
It was at that point, really, that the legend of the Pirelli calendar – the idea that it was a kind of high-end porn for classy businessman – was really born. Supermodels commanded large sums to pose nude, and the calendar got caught up with the rise of the not-so-healthy body image issues the fashion industry was feeding into the minds of hundreds of thousands of women.
There were nonetheless exceptions. Annie Leibovitz, who photographed this year’s calendar, also photographed one in 2000 that showed nude dancers, contorted into poses that defied some of the more cheesecake tastes of the male photographers.
And in 2002, Peter Lindbergh lined up a procession of fully clothed starlets – Lauren Bush, Brittany Murphy, Mena Suvari – for his calendar. And just as has happened in the last few days, Lindbergh’s images were hailed as a breakthrough moment for the calendar. “This is Pirelli’s most challenging calendar yet,” Germaine Greer rhapsodized in this very publication. “This is a prophetic calendar for a year of austerity and grief.” One wonders what she’ll say about this one.
