I wrote this story about the infamous Pirelli Calendar sometime last year, but it’s up again on the Sharp website in honour of the calendar’s return.

Say you’re a 1960’s-era Italian tire company executive and you’re sitting around trying to think up a good way to raise the profile of your product. Since you’ve just come from the premiere of Barbarella, you are all over the notion that putting a beautiful and scantily clad woman in something, anything, will make that thing more popular, no matter the inherent absurdity of the whole. Tires, you think, may be utilitarian, but there’s no reason they should be any different from a film about fur-clad psychedelic space bandits. Then you got to work.

Such, we suspect, was the inspiration behind the first Pirelli calendar back in 1964. Simple and tasteful, it consisted of 12 photos of models posing on beaches in their itsy bitsy teeny weenie 1960s cotton swimwear. There are no tires anywhere to be seen. The photography, while not as bizarre as any part of Barbarella, was high quality and artful. A closeup of a midriff took the place of a full portrait one month, and a woman’s closed eyes and pouting mouth stood in for another.

The calendars continued in much the same fashion until 1971, when, in some flash of artistic genius, one of the models was instructed to “lose the top, sweetheart” (which sounds much nicer in Italian, of course) and lo and behold there was a nipple. This was held back until June of that historic year, but then there it was, a full-on breast, spilling out of a model’s gauzy top as she lay on a black sand beach, ravished by the frothy waves. Very tasteful, of course, and still no tires anywhere in sight.

Read the rest at Sharpformen.com