Available now on Amazon Books. Just Google "Amazon books Fashion Industry Broadcast", and buy, just $39.99.
SEXBOMBS Vol 2 SIRENS
To be a star you need to rouse the senses, but to be a siren you must touch the heart. The intensity of human beauty concentrated in the most famous female sex symbols of the twentieth century is matched by their vulnerability, their daring and their sheer courage. To say they had real social power would be an injustice. Mata Hari, wrongly accused of espionage, wound up decapitated after her execution, with her head embalmed and kept in the museum of anatomy in Paris. It's hardly a state funeral or a fitting homage to a woman who wriggled public consciousness out of the Victorian era dressed as Hindu priestess. Many wanted to be 'real' actresses but had to be content with nude modeling or diminished roles. Some had lives that were larger than the screen (Ava Gardener lived like a hero from a Hemingway novel) and others chose Christianity or even a royal wedding over stardom. Whatever their fate the fact remains that we know a siren by one distinguishing factor: we cannot stop looking at them. The most incandescent example is Marilyn Monroe. Her strange combination of ghostly pale skin, childlike face and innate erotic cunning render her hard to date. Unlike modern actresses we can't sense the stylist in her clothes, the heavy hand of a makeup artist or a photographer's over bearing concept. Clearly and hauntingly, her image belongs to her and it is equal parts spectral nymph, mid century beach bunny, haughty heiress and child star. With an hourglass body and a face like Shirley Temple the oddity of Monroe is her wholesomeness. She could sell diamonds or milk. She looked naked in a white cotton dress or perfectly dignified in the nude. She didn't wear a bra (or underwear) and preferred to be stitched into her clothes. Some say she sawed off one stiletto shoe heel a fraction lower to deepen the sway of her hips. Clearly she wasn't happy, and this just serves to deepen the myth and her lure. Her own words "Being a sex symbol is heavy load" could speak for all of the women who traded infamy for scandal and some scrap of security. Bettie Page, the underground queen of silk stockings, light bondage and leopard skin bikinis claimed very practical reasons for being a pin-up model, preferring the work to "pounding a typewriter eight hours a day". Hollywood royalty such as Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor seemed to exercise more choice; having come from cultivated backgrounds and targeted their ambitions on the "costumed" work of big screen acting and the social mobility of ambitious marriages.
Yet it is rarely the controlled, the groomed or the ice cool sirens who continue move or haunt us. Marlene Dietrich had chic but Jean Harlow had fire. Garbo had aloof intellect but Bardot had the selfish grace of a cat, that thrilling license for destruction that only belongs to the very beautiful. And in this last century beauty was different too. Quite often the assets of the famous were original. Jayne Mansfield might have been famously augmented but BB's body was honed from ballet training and her light French bone structure. Betty Grable's famous pins were firm from years of treading the boards and her unconventional nose was left un-touched. Unlike modern actresses we know nothing of these siren's diets (Sophia Loren famously quipped "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti!"), exercise routines or discipline. If anything the classic sex symbol of old Hollywood was anything but ascetic, Ava preferred gin to yoga! And frankly we love them like that. If the modern starlet is a highly manufactured minx shrunk to fit sample size clothes for the red carpet, the original sirens were using primal alchemy rather than cosmetic science. Some fools still argue about Marilyn's actual dress size, or worse her body fat index, but one look at her walking into a room in kitten heels makes all the contrived mathematics of beauty dissolve. For all their sacrifice, for all of the social prejudice, for all the sheer bravado of being the first sex symbols one thing these women taught us is that desire is never about the parts, but always the whole.
Loading...
4:12
Release Me: Sophia Lorenby WhatTheFrenchToast00910 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)