Stockland Martel

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Melvin Sokolsky had a ball with his 1963 Harper's Bazaar fashion shoot.

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If you’re a September issue kind of person, stop by the Los Angeles Times‘ website, which has posted a photo-driven “trip through fashions and styles of yesteryear.” It kicks off with Beverly Johnson recalling her Vogue photo shoot with Francesco Scavullo 35 years ago and includes Sharon Tate (“a flower child all the way down to her toes” is how the writer describes her), as well as a charmingly bizarre photo from Mevlin Sokolsky’s “bubbles series.” He shot it in Paris, “with the help of…a not-yet-famous personal assistant, producer and stylist named Ali MacGraw,” the Times notes, adding that Sokolsky “pulled off the March 1963 Harper’s Bazaar cover shoot for $18,000.”

If you click on image no. 5, you’ll find a portrait from Timothy White’s Hollywood Pinups coffee-table book. “Something about the scantily clad women who wink from the classic pinups of Alberto Vargas stuck in photographer Timothy White’s mind for years after he was hired by Esquire to create a tribute to the illustrator: The ‘Vargas girls’ weren’t sex objects at all—they were confident, empowered and definitely in on the joke,” explains Times staff writer Adam Tschorn in a story originally published last November.

The women in the book are all celebrities, but they are not all young. (Though regardless of how old she is, Susan Sarandon is not exactly your basic mortal. But let’s not get off topic.) White explains that his sole criterion was to show a variety of bodies, not just the expected flaw-free ones.

“These weren’t meant as titillation,” he tells Tschorn. “They are a homage to the pinup artists like Vargas and George Petty. The women they portrayed didn’t look objectified. They were strong women who looked sexy and confident and projected that confidence.”

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Susan Sarandon, from Timothy White's book Hollywood Pinups.

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You can read more of Tschorn’s story on Hollywood Pinups, and view the entire Times fashion slideshow, here.

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