The return of the bushy Venus: Britany Nola

Triple P just picked up November's Playboy in the village shop and was immediately struck by the uncluttered cover featuring Shera Bechard (November 2010) which was not covered with the usual distracting blurb.

Inside we had a (rather dull) pictorial of an unnamed girl who, nonetheless, in a retro-themed Italian feature had a discernible waist, a natural bust and even a hint of bush with her eighties-style landing strip.

A bigger shock awaits in the Playmate pictorial in the shape of Canadian-born Britany Nola.  She has proper fur!  She has a natural bust!  She has no tattoos or piercings!  She is lovely!  What with the feature on Hugh Hefner's girlfriends as well we have more thatched girl's than not for the first time in years.  Hooray!  Let's hope that this continues!

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Flexible Venus 2: Kristine Winder

We have had quite a few messages of appreciation regarding our ballet dancer post so, encouraged by S in Vancouver, we will be putting more of these ladies up over the next few weeks.

In fact we had a Skype video call from S only two nights ago where she had put on a blue leotard and legwarmers and gave us an impressive stretch routine across cyberspace. She had drunk nearly a bottle of Quail's Gate Dry Reisling earlier so was particularly flexible.  Most diverting!

So what more appropriate subject for our next dancer than the lovely Kristine Winder from Vancouver who appeared as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in October 1977.

Her original pictorial contained four ballet pictures but we have tracked down some more including some different shots which appeared in French Playboy.

Kristine had spent seventeen years doing up to five hours dance training a day but given the then lack of artistic opportunity in the British Columbia city (it's still a bit light on classical arts compared with Toronto and Montreal - the Vancouver Art Gallery collection is pitiful, for example) she ended up as a receptionist.

She still looked nicely limber when she posed, at the age of 21, for the magazine. It's not possible to find out who took these dance photos as her pictorial had no less than four photographers: Mario Casilli (centrefold), Arny Freytag, Ken Honey and Ken Marcus.

The whole sequence is really a paean to the erotic charge of legwarmers, which work visually for exactly the same reason as stockings do but have the extra tactile quality of ribbed wool.

At 5'6" Kristine would have been rather tall for a ballerina and her 34-24-34 figure would have been rather curvier than the norm but Triple P thinks she had perfect proportions and looks superb in these pictures.

Legwarmers can have a truncating effect on the limbs but Kristine had such long legs that she still manages to look elegant in hers.

Usually Playboy used their Playmates' real names but Kristine Winder is a pseudonym as she didn't want her father to find out she had posed for the magazine. Unfortunately he did, as a number of crank, heavy breathing calls were made to people called Winder in Vancouver, trying to seek her out, and the press got hold of the story.

Sadly, Playboy reported in this year's June edition that Kristine had died earlier this year at the comparatively young age of 57.  We are happy to celebrate her loveliness and dance-schooled elegance here.

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Calendar Girl Venus: Daria Werbowy

So, you are a trendy fashion conscious femme in Paris (aren't they all?) and you buy French Vogue every month.  The magazine issues a calendar for you to put up in your kitchen so that you don't miss that vital appointment at the manicurist.

Janvier

So, what would be appropriate for a calendar for a top womens' magazine?  A selection from their best fashion pictures over the decades, some French actors in immaculate suits, clothes as still life, perhaps?

Février

No, lets use pictures of a naked woman in bed draped in jewellery!  That's just what our readers would like!

Mars

Hence, here we have Daria Werbowy, a Polish born Ukrainian/Canadian model, sprawled about looking like a Penthouse Pet from the early seventies, in a set of photographs by Mikael Jannson..

Avril

5'11" tall Daria exposes pretty much everything in this set of pictures which are, we should remind you, for a womens magazine!  She even goes full frontal on the cover.

Mai

She also appeared in the 2011 Pirelli calendar which is, of course, aimed at men (or at least it is in principle;  we suspect that these days it is more aimed at art directors and other photographers than people who sell tyres in garages).

Juin

Now of course, Agent Triple P has observed that women are much more interested in looking at pictures of nice looking naked women that men are of men.

Juillet

Even given that, these images are surprisingly sexualised for their target market.  They are much more explicit, for example, than calendars produced for the likes of FHM or Maxim.

 Août

We aren't saying that we don't like them, just that we are bit surprised by them.  We can't imagine Vogue in the US publishing something like this.

 Septembre

We only became aware of this calendar, which was released nearly a year ago as our French friend N was talking about it the other day.  She told me that she has it up in her kitchen!  Ah well, French women.  That is why they are so fascinating!

 Octobre

Daria is one of the highest paid models in the world (ranks no 6 2020-2011) and still holds the record for opening the most runway shows in a year.

 Novembre

Triple P would be very happy to have these images of her on his kitchen wall but is surprised so many French women do as well!  Good for them, we suppose, or perhaps they only see the jewellery not the girl. 

Décembre

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Freckled Venus: 100 followers...and Pamela Anne Gordon

Pamela Ann Gordon's centrefold from March 1962

Shortly following on from hitting 1 million visits we now have reached, today, the milestone of having 100 followers.  So thank you to you all; your existence means that we do try to keep up the regular posting.

What better way to celebrate the 100th follower than examining the 100th Playboy Playmate who, if our calculations are correct, was Pamela Ann Gordon from March 1962.

Pamela was the first Canadian Playmate and came from Vancouver where, as Triple P well knows, they have more than their fair share of attractive women.

Time for a cocktail or two in Vancouver.  In the background can be seen the  Bayshore Inn (now the Westin Bayshore).  A view very similar to the one from our particular friend S's apartment in Coal Harbour

At the time of her pictorial she was working as a receptionist at a Vancouver construction firm but the nineteen year old Pamela was planning to go to the University of British Columbia.

Petite at 5'1", she measured a rather awe inspiring 39-23-35.

A lot of freckles on this one

The really unique thing about her was, of course, her amazing freckles.  Now in her centrefold they aren't that apparent but in some of the pictures of her, before retouching, it can be seen that she has a huge amount of them.  This was from the days when people didn't use suntan lotion, of course.

In fact there was limited retouching on Playmate centrefolds.  That is not to say that they weren't manipulated, they were, but this was done at the printing stage when the engraving was being made. 

A rare early sixties pubic shot.  It didn't appear in the magazine, of course

Playboy centrefolds were printed seperately from the rest of the magazine by Regensteiner Printing in Chicago.  Theodore Regensteiner, of course, invented the four colour lithographic process in 1894 using red, yellow, blue and, his addition, black, to develop the four colour process that is still in use to this day.

It was at the printers that the Playboy centrefold pictures, taken on the 8x10 Deardorff, would be turned into a lithographic engraving.  Any adjustments to the image were made at this stage. 

Playboy had strict guidelines and liked to push the reds and restrict the blacks in their centrefolds and remove natural skin tone.  It was quite deliberate that the centrefold image didn't look too realistic as they wanted to avoid a too sexy image.

In an interview in 1970 Art Johnson, the supervisor of the process at Regensteiner said that "Depending on the word from Hefner, freckles either stay or come off.  Or we can leave some freckles on and take others off."

In Pamela's case they have dialled back on her freckles, particularly in the centrefold as these other non-published, non manipulated images show.

Pamela the Bunny Girl

Pamela went on to work as a Bunny in the Chicago club and lived at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.

She appeared in two Playboy calendars in 1963 and 1964.

Pamela also featured in this advertisement for the magazine but then disappeared from the Playboy radar.

 In Capilano Gardens

Here she is in the other photographs from her actual magazine pictorial; putting her blouses under some serious strain.

Her centrefold and the nude shots were taken by Mario Casilli.  The clothed ones from her pictorial were by Vancouver photographer Ken Honey.  He became one of Playboy's top scouts; Pamela was his first discovery.

So we hope our followers think that the lovely Miss Gordon is an appropriate offering for today's milestone!

Splendid!

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Venus seated by the sea: The Little Mermaid and Girl in a Wetsuit

Den lille havfrue (1913)

HMS asked us recently if the pose of the statue of Andromeda by Takanen link was inspired by the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen or whether indeed, it had any classical antecedents. We are not aware of any classical statues in this pose; most Greek and Roman figures being sculpted standing. I suppose the short answer is that there are only a certain number of poses a girl seated on the ground can adopt.

Edvard Eriksen (1876-1859)

The original Little Mermaid was commissioned by Carl Jacobsen, the son of the founder of Carlsberg, after he saw a theatrical version of the Hans Christian Andersen story in a Copenhagen theatre.

Ellen Price (1878-1968)

It was sculpted by Edvard Eriksen who modelled the figure’s head on the Danish prima ballerina Ellen Price and, because the dancer refused to pose nude, the body on his wife Eline.

Eline Eriksen (1881-1963)

It was unveiled in 1913. In fact, the much vandalised statue, which sits on small rock close to the sea wall just down from the ferry terminal, has always been a copy. The original version is kept by the family in secret. It is still a copyrighted piece; Eriksen’s family sell authorised copies of it for large sums of money and woe betide anyone who tries to copy it without their permission.

Elek Imredy

It was this issue which saw the development of Vancouver’s similar Girl in a Wetsuit statue. A Vancouver lawyer, Douglas Brown, discussed with the Hungarian sculptor Elek Imredy (1912-1994) about commissioning a copy of the Little Mermaid to sit atop a particular boulder off the northern shore of Stanley Park.

Girl in a Wetsuit prior to installation

Much to Imredy’s satisfaction the application to produce a copy was turned down by Eriksen’s heirs in Denmark, allowing Imredy to come up with a similar but different sculpture. His girl looks out towards the ocean to emphasise its importance to the city. Surprisingly, given that it is very much a part of the scenery in Vancouver today, it was not universally popular when it was unveiled in June 1972.

Girl in a Wetsuit (1972)

Having seen both many times (these are both Triple P's photographs) we have to say that we prefer Imredy’s sculpture; partly because it has a more spectacular setting compared with the rather dreary industrial backdrop which The Little Mermaid suffers from.

The Little Mermaid in Shanghai this year

Over the last few months, The Little Mermaid, for the first time, left her rock and was transported to Shanghai to sit in the Danish pavilion during Expo 2010.  Only today the Mayor of Copenhagen said that she had arrived back in Denmark and will be back in place on 20th November,

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