The crew of the Memphis Belle pose with their B-17 Bomber, complete with George Petty illustrationīy the 1940s and ’50s, pin-up was everywhere. Petty-style drawings were used to both sell magazines to men and everything - fashion, homeware, films - to women. Soon Petty Girls weren’t just on walls, they were adopted by soldiers looking for a slice of comforting similarity as they headed to war. It was easy to transpose a childhood sweetheart or crush onto a perfect Petty Girl after all, that was the whole point of their design!Īnd just like that, pin-ups went from book to bomber. Placed slap bang on a double page in the middle of the magazine, Petty’s drawings coined the term centrefold, as they were torn out and given prime real estate on walls and lockers around America.Ī “Petty Girl” was the classic all-American girl next door, just reeeeally sexed up! She was lithe, but curvy, with elongated limbs that made her legs go on for daaaays.īut what really made the Petty Girl a phenomena was that Esquire readers could place her into their worlds. She was posed in idealized, everyday scenarios, from chatting on the phone to celebrating seasonal holidays and even ingratiating herself into what were then typically male jobs.ĭo you get it? Rigid….like the name of good industrial equipment But in 1933 he joined fledgling magazine Esquire and became an immediate hit. George Petty had been airbrushing and illustrating for years, mainly for cheese-tactic sexed-up adverts and calendars.
As we move onto the next chapter in our pin up history…īy the 1930s, a more a-typical version of the classic “pin-up” was starting to appear, but it was the “Petty Girl” that would take her to stratospheric levels of fame. You see, women had things to do, countries to keep running and they kind of needed working spines for that shit. So they stepped up, wearing more practical and masculine clothing than before.Ī trend that was immediately sexualised for war propaganda. Women donned Gibson Girl-esque hair-dos, along with S-bend corsets which simultaneously pushed out the tits, nipped in the waist, and pulled the wearer’s back forward, allowing for that classic Gibson Girl arse to tit ratio.įamed real-life Gibson Girl Camile Clifford and her RIDICULOUS waistīut the outbreak of World War I saw the demise of the Gibson Girl. No more would women obligingly get that Gibson Girl figure by donning an s-bend corset. Soon there was a Gibson Girl boom, with her face appearing all over magazine and newspapers, quickly becoming the ideal standard for American beauty.
To be fair, the Gibson Man does look like an insufferable twat She wanted independence, but like… not too much independence (Gibson Girls weren’t after the vote, that would just be crazy!).Ī Gibson Man was created to go with The Gibson Girl, but much like Ken to Barbie, nobody really cared. It was the impossible woman they wanted to pin to their walls, not her random boyfriend. There is no danger of these ladies getting sand in their hair, nor anywhere else.īut what bought the Gibson Girl to life was that she had a clear personality. She was a new woman, self assured, put together, sensual and intelligent all at once. She had sizeable breasts but an itty bitty wasp waist a swan-like neck that was dangerously close to biologically impossible and masses of dark hair piled precariously atop her head, miraculously inoperable to sweat, rain and general disaster.
Created in 1887 by Charles Gibson, The Gibson Girl is now widely accepted as the first pin-up.Įvery time I throw my hair up I aim for this level of beauty…and every time I get a crow’s nestĭrawn lasciviously, the Gibson Girl represented a woman that could be imitated but couldn’t actually exist.
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