The Pirelli calendar’s bringing sexy back – but is it actually sexy?
A man, naked aside from a pair of tiny briefs kneels in the sea as waves crash into his muscled torso. A woman stands on a shoreline, nude except for a fallen palm tree covering her chest and pelvis. Another kneels unclothed in the sand, covering herself with a broken frond. These scenes may sound as if they’re ripped from a Jilly Cooper novel, but they are, in fact, shots from another emblem of unabashed sexuality: the latest Pirelli calendar.
Launched on Tuesday and featuring celebrities including John Boyega, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hunter Schafer and Simone Ashley, it is the latest calendar by an Italian tyre company that, for all its flaws, has become an unlikely cultural bellwether. It is not available to buy, but is sent to corporate clients and friends of the brand.
While recent iterations have seen models fully clothed - or shot by Annie Leibovitz through the so-called female gaze, with a nod to humour - the company has brought nudity back for 2025. Albeit with the occasional semi-naked man and in another inclusive move, two trans women.
Speaking to me in August, the American fashion photographer Ethan James Green, who shot the 2025 edition, described it as a return to sexy. “My initial thoughts when I was approached were: ‘If I’m going to do Pirelli, I want to do Pirelli.’ I wanted to go back to the sexy classic, like what we think of when we think of Pirelli.”
Green who has previously captured covers for Vogue and i-D magazine, says he was inspired by the 1994 calendar, shot by Herb Ritts, in which 1990s supermodels Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford frolicked naked on a beach. As well as Richard Avedon’s 1995 calendar, which featured Christy Turlington with her hands bound and a metal corset below her exposed breasts.
The timing felt right, Green explained, because it is both “a post #MeToo era” and social media users had redefined sexiness. “#MeToo really forced everyone to pause,” he said, “and a lot of what sexy has become is what we started seeing on people’s social media, usually through selfies.”
“People have full control of what they’re putting out there,” he continued, “in showing how skin is captured, and not doing anything they’re not comfortable with. And my work has always been about collaborating with the subject.”
However, not everyone agrees. Michaela Stark, a visual artist and couturier who creates pieces that challenge beauty norms, as well as briefly helping to engineer a body-positive rebrand for the thin-centric lingerie company Victoria’s Secret last year, picks holes with this idea of control on social media. Instagram, for example, has strict rules when it comes to showing pictures with female nipples. Plus she has first-hand experience of being trolled for her physical appearance: in the wake of collaborating with Victoria’s Secret, she became the subject of a string of fat phobic comments.
Online, Stark feels tethered to male beauty ideals and the male gaze “in the way that I’m not allowed to show my body [how] I want because it might be considered too sexual for men”.
When the behind-the-scenes images of this year’s Pirelli calendar were released, the columnist Barbara Ellen, writing in the Observer, described it as “a perfect example of post #MeToo creep” and the i newspaper called it “the death knell of #MeToo”. It makes sense: “Pirelli built their name and money on presenting naked young women for the pleasure of men,” Stark says. “Don’t get me wrong, I think the calendar used to have very high artistic value, and produce stunning imagery, but at what cost?”
The return of “The Cal”, as it was trademarked in the noughties, taps into a wider cultural shift. The catwalks and red carpets have been dominated by “naked dressing”. After a five-year hiatus, the Victoria Secret’s show returned to television screens in November, with angel wings and, presumably, the reported starvation diets to match. But rather than being hailed as a comeback, the online reaction was lukewarm in some quarters. Many questioned if parading around in a lacy thong could legitimately be branded as empowerment in 2024, if it ever could.
“In the past few years, it feels like companies such as Pirelli are beating a dead horse,” Stark says. “I think it’s time for companies like this to retire or to just stop the calendar. I don’t think they are actually adding anything of value to our culture.”
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