Pinups

After World War I, many American soldiers came home from Europe with French postcards depicting sensual young women. During the 1920s, middle-class youth rebelled against the strict moral codes of the previous generation, and American magazines began to publish illustrations of flappers and bathing beauties. By the end of the decade, bathing beauty calendars had become popular. World War II, however, saw pinups, photos, and illustrations of beautiful young women in seductive poses become a major industry. Pinups were legitimized during World War II when the U.S. government and the film industry operated hand in hand to distribute pictures of glamorous Hollywood stars to soldiers overseas. The walls of barracks, the bulkheads of ships, and the fuselages of airplanes were covered with pinup girls of all types. These pinups served as objects of sexual desire; they also functioned as links to home.

Pinups came in a range of styles: they could be innocent photographs of women in swimsuits or explicit pictures of nudes. Commercial pinups were sexually evocative and widely distributed. Esquire magazine was famous for its popular pinup illustrations, first featured in 1933. These pinups targeted the sophisticated tastes of the urban upperclass male. Pinup artwork featuring Esquire's famous Varga girls drawn by Antonio Vargas, for example, often became aircraft nose art when flyers copied the illustrations onto their planes. Varga girls were painted in a delicate watercolor style but were quite voluptuous. Other illustrators popular during World War II for their pinup art included George Petty, whose Petty girls preceded the Varga girls as pinups in Esquire, Rolf Armstrong, who is considered to be the father of the American pinup, and Gil Elvgren, who created art deco pinups from the 1930s into the 1940s that were widely circulated among the servicemen during World War II.

The most popular pinup to make it onto an aircraft nose was a comicstrip creation named Miss Lace. Cartoonist Milton Caniff contributed a comic strip, Male Call, to the U.S. Department of War's Camp Newspaper service. Miss Lace is the most popular comic strip pinup girl of all time, surpassing Al Capp's Daisy Mae from the Li'l Abner comic strip—although Daisy Mae was painted onto many airplanes also. Miss Lace was a darkhaired beauty who was innocent but very sexy and was meant to remind servicemen of the ”All-American” women back home. Male Call was discontinued after the war because Caniff considered Miss Lace to be a product of her time, and the fantasy was no longer necessary once the armed forces came home.

Pinups came in other forms: Hollywood stars' pictures were featured in magazines sent to soldiers; wives and girlfriends had pinup photographs taken to send to their hus-bands and boyfriends; and famous illustrators created morale-boosting artwork. Several starlets had pictures taken ”for the boys.” These included exotic brunettes like Jane Russell, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Lamour. Blondes were also popular with the men in the armed forces. The most popular pinup by far was blonde Betty Grable, a self-described girl-next-door. The photograph of her in a swimsuit with her ”million dollar legs” was shot from the back and [Page 633]was the most widely distributed picture of the war. As a testament to her popularity, in 1944, Miss Grable starred in the motion picture PinUp Girl.

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