Vintage Pulp | Nov 20 2015 |
Folies de Paris et de Hollywood rarely identifies its cover models, which is a shame, as the front of this issue spécial published today in 1966 treats readers to a vision of a sleek and slick motorcycle rider wearing a red—what is it?—faux snakeskin made from vinyl, we’re guessing. While it probably isn’t great for safety, it does make her look a bit like a superhero. The image fits, because she has a superpower—the ability to inspire us to take to the road, for a day, anyway. Which means we’re headed out to enjoy the sun and warmth and, somewhere along the way we’re sure, a nice bottle of cold white wine. We suggest you do something similar.
Vintage Pulp | Jun 27 2015 |
Here are a few scans from the cover and interior of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood #174, which appeared in 1960. It’s a “numéro exceptionnel,” or special issue of the magazine, and is devoted secrets and spies. All that means is that the photo features are entitled things like “Paola Mystere,” and “Le Rendez-vous Secret.” You get the usual assortment of glamour models, including Sally Douglas, who we've featured before, and lots of showgirls. We bought twenty of these a while back but have been lazy about sharing them because, well, it’s really time intensive. We have to scan each page in two halves, which already amounts to twice the normal work, then Photoshop the pieces together, which is a whole new realm of effort. But we’ll get more issues up soon. In the meantime you can our previous shares by clicking here.
Vintage Pulp | Oct 9 2014 |
Below you see an issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood that was published yesterday in 1966. The cover star is popular glamour model Margaret Nolan, aka Vicki Kennedy, who also appears inside. More on her and Folies later.
Vintage Pulp | Jul 2 2014 |
You know when you get hit on the head real hard and your hear bells and see stars? Today, you don’t have to risk a concussion—this issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood, which is number 200 and was published in 1960, has rare photos of burlesque dancers Virginia Bell and Blaze Starr. Both women rose to prominence in the 1950s, both appeared in movies, and Starr then became entangled in a political scandal by bedding the governor of Louisiana. We talked about that a few years ago when we shared a cover of Hush-Hush that featured her. We also had something quite interesting about her sent in by a visitor to Pulp Intl. and we recommend you take a look at it here. Folies de Paris et de Hollywood also offers a great but unidentified cover model, and the usual assortment of showgirls and models in the interior, whom you can see along with Bell and Starr below.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 16 2014 |
Above, a familiar looking but as yet unidentified model posing for one of Corp. A. Fox’s Technicolor pin-ups. This makes the eleventh one of these we’ve shared and you can see the others by clicking its keywords below.
Vintage Pulp | Aug 31 2013 |
Published this month in 1966, this issue of the French pin-up magazine Folies de Paris et de Hollywood features the usual assortment of burlesque queens from Parisian cabarets, except with their private parts airbrushed away even more drastically than usual. But it was flirting with an obscenity charge to show pubic hair in French magazines in 1966, so the editors had little choice, though we suspect pubes may have been accepted in art circles. Not sure about that.
It’s a bit amazing to us that the editors can find so much to say about each of these dancers, literally paragraphs of info about Gladys, Lisette, Penny, Ursula, et. al., their habits, their ambitions, their likes and dislikes. We wonder if one of those dislikes was encountering men at their shows who were armed with all this biographical information: “Ursula, I tell you, we are truly peas in a pod, because I love being kissed on the backs of my knees too! Quelle coïncidence!” Fifteen scans below.
Vintage Pulp | Jul 18 2013 |
Folies de Paris et de Hollywood often published themed issues, and this one—Vedettes du Strip-Tease 1966—is reserved entirely for dancers from Paris cabarets such as Clair de Lune (Moonlight), La Boule Noire (The Black Ball), Moulin a Poivre (The Pepper Mill), La Tomate, and Alain Bernardin’s famed Crazy-Horse Saloon. We love some of the dancers’ stage names (aspiring strippers take note)—there’s Franca Germanicus, Kitty Tam-Tam, Salammbo, Dailly Holliday, cover star Bijoux, from club Sexy, and Bella Remington, who occupies the coveted centerfold position and two more pages later in the issue. We researched all of them, and the only dancer mentioned online more than in passing was Dailly Holliday. She had already appeared on a Folies de Paris et de Hollywood cover from 1962, and was written of in a New Yorker article in October 1966, having apparently moved on from Moulin a Poivre to dance at a club in Montparnasse called Dolce Vita. Kitty Tam-Tam was briefly mentioned in François des Aulnoyes’ book Histoire et philosophie du strip-tease, and Bella Remington’s name appeared in an online list of former Crazy Horse dancers, but those instances hardly count because no actual information was attached. With the exception of Holliday there were no photos out there at all. We’ve remedied that today, and we were happy to do our part for history. We didn’t scan the entire issue, because the dimensions of the magazine meant scanning the pages in two pieces and joining them in Photoshop. But we did manage nineteen of the thirty-two pages before we gave up. All below.
Vintage Pulp | Apr 30 2013 |
Today on Britain’s respected Guardian webpage, writer Mariella Frostrup muses about the prevalence of pornography in modern society and asks whether it’s harmful. At Pulp Intl., with few exceptions, our nude images are merely quaint, which raises the questions of whether they were ever considered harmful, and if so, why and when they came to be seen as artful. We are well aware that the airbrushing away of womens’ genitalia—something that was general practice at the time these images appeared—was seen by many rights advocates as a type of violence against women. After all, what was so dirty about female genitalia? Didn’t their erasure peel back the mask from a male-dominated society’s desperate efforts to control female sexuality?
Then along came Playboy, which challenged archaic laws designed to prevent mass production and mass mailing of pornography. Compared to what you see here today, Playboy represented a quantum leap. Its women looked less like Renaissance paintings and more like real human beings. By increments it beat back legal challenges, and eventually Penthouse, Playboy, and other newsstand magazines began toshow pubic hair, and then actual sex organs. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was hailed as a First Amendment hero as well as a defender of womens' right to control their own sexuality. But pretty soon it was clear that women had won only the right to sell their sexuality—the control remained exclusively male.
Mariella Frostrup’s Guardian piece is like others written before. It suggests, like all those articles from earlier decades, that there’s a bright white line in erotica that has been crossed and that society is suffering for it. We can’t comment on the harm aspect, but we do see a line. Basically, old porn, because of its paper format, depended upon the labor of dozens of outside people—printers, film developers, pre-press personnel, postal workers, newsstand owners—and required such an investment of capital that 95% of its producers served the middle ground of taste and depicted acts that, with perhaps the added twist of one or two extra participants, were taking place in private anyway.
The internet changed all that. So if there’s a bright line, it lies where the internet atomized porn and turned much of it into a performance art, a sideshow that somehow has taken over center stage with acts that are most certainly not already occurring in private. Call us crazy, but even though these images were produced before we were born weprefer them to the new stuff. They don’t depict merely bodies or an act, but an entire lifestyle of beaches and gardens and all the warm thoughts and simple desires such places entail. This issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood appeared today in 1966. If it was ever offensive or harmful it isn’t anymore, so enjoy it as an artifact of an earlier age—not a better one by any means, but certainly a more artful one.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 2 2013 |
Vintage Pulp | Jan 4 2013 |
Above, the cover and ten interior scans from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood #50, published 1955. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we posted one of these. It’ll be a lot sooner than that when we post our next.