A pin-up girl, also known as a pin-up model, is a model whose mass-produced pictures see wide appeal as popular culture. Pin-ups are intended for informal display, e.g. meant to be "pinned-up" on a wall. Pin-up girls may be glamour models, fashion models, or actresses.
The term pin-up may also refer to drawings, paintings, and other illustrations done in emulation of these photos (see the list of pinup artists). The term was first attested to in English in 1941;[1] however, the practice is documented back at least to the 1890s.
The pin-up images could be cut out of magazines or newspapers, or be from postcard or chromo-lithographs, and so on. Such photos often appear on calendars, which are meant to be pinned up anyway. Later, posters of pin-up girls were mass-produced and became an instant hit.
Many pin-ups were photographs of celebrities who were considered sex symbols. One of the most popular early pin-up girls was Betty Grable, whose poster was ubiquitous in the lockers of G.I.s during World War II. Other pin-ups were artwork, often depicting idealized versions of what some thought a particularly beautiful or attractive woman should look like. An early example of the latter type was the Gibson girl, drawn by Charles Dana Gibson. The genre also gave rise to several well-known artists specializing in the field, including Earle K. Bergey, Enoch Bolles, Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, George Petty, and numerous notable artists, such as Rolf Armstrong and Art Frahm.
Notable contemporary pin-up artists include Elias Chatzoudis, Armando Huerta, and Chuck Bauman. Another is popular Pin-Up Artist Olivia De Berardinis who is most famous for her Pin-Up Art of Bettie Page and her pieces in the earlier editions of Playboy.
It was conscious contemporaneity and sexual self-awareness on stage that burlesque performers had reached a new age. With this increasing sense of awareness, burlesque actresses/performers used photographic advertisement as business cards to promote themselves and raise their popularity.[3] These adverts and/or business cards could often been found in almost every green room, pinned-up or stuck into “frames of the looking-glasses, in the joints of the gas-burners, and sometimes lying on-top of the sacred cast-case itself.”[4] Understanding the power of photographic advertisements to promote their shows, burlesque women self-constructed their identity to make themselves visible.
Being recognized not only within the theater itself but as well outside, challenged the conventions of women’s place and women’s potential in the public sphere.[5] From mid. 19th century burlesque performers and their adverts/business card cresting their photo to early 20th century photographed oriental dancers in which were highly desired to female caricatures performing ‘ordinary’ things, like the Gibson Girl became popular. The ‘ordinariness’ that these drawn pictures suggested, was erotic. The fact that, unlike the photographed actresses and dancers generations earlier, fantasy gave artists the freedom to draw women, in particular the Gibson Girl in many different ways he would like.[6] This is where the popular “pin-up girls” from the 1920’s era begins.“As sexual images of women multiplied in the popular culture, women participated actively in constructing arguments to endorse as well as protest them.”[12] In the early 20th century, where these drawings of women helped define certain body images such as being clean, being healthy, being wholesome and enjoyed by both “normal” men and women as time progressed it is no surprise that these images changed from respectable to illicit. [13] As early as 1869, women have been supporters and protestors of the pin-up. Women supporters of early pin-up content considered these to be a “positive post-Victorian rejection of bodily shame and a healthy respect for female beauty.”[14] On the contrary, women protesters argued that these images were corrupting societal morality and saw these public sexual displays of women as lowering the standards of womanhood, destroying their dignity and harmful to both women and young adolescence.[15]
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