Boy, who would have thought that tires and women could have such an intense relationship? Most of us don’t even like to change them.
Pirelli, the Italian tire manufacturer, has been producing a celebrated calendar featuring women for more than 50 years, but for 2016, many observers are calling the approach revolutionary. In the past, the main attraction of the female subjects in the Pirelli calendar, which has been the subject of several high-end coffee table books, was that they had a certain, er, pneumatic quality.
This time, the women have a cultural traction.
The 2016 pin-up selections are all highly accomplished – cultural exemplars of individuality, of success on their own terms.
They include Fran Lebowitz, the sardonic cultural commentator and author; Yoko Ono, the artist who, at 82, is still provoking and relevant; Kathleen Kennedy, film producer (Lincoln, ET, Jurassic Park) who is second only to Steven Spielberg in domestic box office receipts; Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist; Tavi Gevinson, the 19-year-old writer, magazine editor and actress who came to fame at 12 for her blog, Fashion Rookie; Patti Smith, the iconic American singer-songwriter; Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, a $10-billion money management firm; Serena Williams, considered the world’s greatest tennis player, male or female; and Amy Schumer, the comedian known for her frank depiction of modern life as a woman.
Only two of the women are posed semi-nude. Williams stands with her back to the camera, wearing only underwear. And Schumer sits on a stool, also in underwear, covering her bare breasts. The rest are all clothed.
It’s the work of Annie Leibovitz, the famous photographer of the powerful and iconic. It’s as if she is saying that, should measurements be applied to a woman’s appeal, use the ones that have more significance than simply the three circumferences of her physical form.
But is it all that revolutionary?
The calendars each year are conceived and shot by well-known photographers. Last year, Steven Meisel shot the “Pirelli girls,” all beautiful models, who wore latex – which felt like an amusing wink at all things rubbery. Let’s remember, it’s the photographer’s job to think of how to portray women differently; how to break through. Leibovitz, in fact, has taken the Pirelli calendar photographs before. In 2000, she posed famous models as classic Greek nudes. She has said the latest calendar approach of black-and-white photographs, shot in a simple studio setting, was her idea, conceived without influence from Pirelli. “I started to think about the roles that women play, women who have achieved something,” she explained in a video about the shoot. “I wanted to make a classic set of portraits. I thought that the women should look strong but natural.”
In a hyper-visual culture, in which nudity has long since lost its shock value, the most subversive thing you can do is create a pin-up calendar with real people in regular clothes. Earlier this year, Playboy magazine announced the end of nudity in its pages. To me, that decision and the new Pirelli calendar are less about “a flexion point in the public objectification of female sexuality” – which is how one observer put it – and more about the simple imperative to be different from the rest.
So, yes, it’s a shift – a reprieve from more breasts and bottoms and sexually explicit images. Perhaps, as a culture, we’re suffering from porn fatigue – for the moment, anyway. As Gevinson explained to The New York Times about the 2016 Pirelli calendar, “a white, able-bodied cis-gendered woman being naked is just not revolutionary any more.” That traditional pin-up doesn’t make headlines, produce column inches or create chatter about the brand she is representing.
The images of semi-nude Williams and Schumer are also shrewd marketing strategies when you consider what each woman stands for.
Williams is her body. After her latest court triumphs in 2015 – winning the Australian Open, the French Open and Wimbledon – onlookers, once again, discussed her bulk and strength and perceived masculinity. Leibovitz’s shot of her is an unapologetic celebration of her Atlas-like strength, arms splayed against the wall, as if she, by herself, is holding back the crush of the world’s often uncharitable attention.
Similarly, that lovely, wobbly tummy on Schumer, which has also been widely discussed, is key to her appeal. She is the approachable girlfriend, who will confess her most embarrassing escapades, who is wonderfully imperfect and non-intimidating. As her boss says in Trainwreck, the movie Schumer wrote and starred in, she is “pretty-ish.” If she had a perfect body, she wouldn’t be as popular. She is becoming iconic for her love-hate relationship with her body, something all women understand. Her arms read as legs in Hollywood, she has joked, repeatedly, to much hilarity. She is not a stick figure, at least not on film or in photographs. She is a size 6, which is considered large only in Hollywood.
Analysis of the women in this calendar selection is interesting and, sure, it’s reflective of society’s continuing discussion about what female power looks like. It’s also refreshing to be reminded that women, just like men, are sexually attractive because of what they do in their professional lives. Power is an aphrodisiac for all genders.
But “The Cal,” as it is called, is not used to mark the months. Nor it is likely pinned up on the walls of a garage, no matter how luxe the garage may be. It is never sold. It is “given to an exclusive group of 20,000 VIPs – musicians, politicians and royalty,” according to a company spokesman. It is a marketing tool that uses women in that retrograde tradition of sleek car bodies alongside curvy female ones. If women can use the calendar for their own purposes, well, that’s good news. But let’s not give too much mileage to a tire company for shifting the cultural perception of women. The women are doing that on their own.