Monday, February 01, 2010

The pageboy girls

I never get tired of looking at pictures of Bettie Page, the pin-up model of the late 1940s and early-to-mid 1950s. Bettie was on the covers of hundreds of girly magazines of the era. Bettie quit being a photographer's model in 1957,* but I saw her pictures for the first time in the early 1960s and was taken by her and her distinctive hairstyle. I don't think she ever changed it. It was always pageboy-styled, which, considering her last name, seems appropriate.

Looking through some old Life magazines of the late 1940s I found this cover girl, identified as Katrina Van Oss, then appearing on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Allegro. I was taken by her face and hairstyle. A search on Google turned up that Katrina had appeared in two musicals on Broadway and then there isn't any more information. In 1947 she was 22, so if Katrina is still around she'd be about 84.

The hairstyle doesn't seem to ever go out of style. Some modern pin-up models, like this one, aspire to look like 60-year-old pictures of Bettie Page.

Going back 60 years we have another Bettie lookalike, identified as Kevin (yes, a girl named Kevin) Daley, "Miss Army Day 1949."

Miss "Army Day" Daley may also be the girl on the cover of Authentic Detective, also from 1949.

There is something irresistible about this hairstyle and the way it frames the face.


*Bettie died a couple of years ago, in her eighties.

1 comment:

Postino said...

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