Pirelli's Hot Dates

For years, sophisticates and auto mechanics on the Continent have ogled the annual photographic miracle known as The Pirelli Calendar. The tire company has become as well known for its taste in women as for its products. Whenever one had the tires rotated on one's Aston Martin, one could spend a few moments reflecting on the state of womankind. It made paying the bill a bit easier, we suppose. In 1975, for some unknown reason, the company ceased publishing a calendar. Fans had to go to auctions at Christie's to fight for old copies. Western civilization as we knew it had come to an end. No less a personage than actor David Niven mourned the passing of the calendar: "Pirelli gave our dreams form and once we saw them, we knew that standards had been set that would last us a long, possibly a life, time." Say amen.

1984 For some, 1984 will be remembered as the title of a George Orwell novel. For others, it will be remembered as the year of the second coming, the return of The Pirelli Calendar. Art director/designer Martyn Walsh took it upon himself to persuade the company to revive the calendar. "I proposed a series of abstract ideas that featured the tread pattern of Pirelli's P6 tire. I contacted Uwe Ommer to take the photos, and off we set for the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas." The results of the Eleuthera shoot were stunning, as you can see from these three pictures. Once again, The Pirelli Calendar gladdened people with bald heads and bald tires. "The calendar is unique," says Walsh, "in that it has to satisfy the man who changes the tires in the garage and the captains of industry. The managing director of Pirelli said to me before the shoot, 'I want a calendar that I can feel proud to take home and show to my wife.' And he did." Perhaps she realized, as did the rest of the world, just how erotic the concepts of traction and handling are. Just skidding, folks.

1985 Pirelli liked Walsh's efforts in 1984, so it asked for an encore: "I proposed an idea that had grown out of the 1984 calendar, for which I had stenciled a girl's body to make it look as though she were wearing a swimsuit. This set me thinking of clothes made with a tire-tread design in them. Why not real clothes made by real designers? Why not a Pirelli collection?" If someone came to us with the idea of designing a line of clothes that looked as if they had been run over by a truck, we might balk. But Walsh managed to enlist the aid of Zandra Rhodes, Jasper Conran, Bruce Oldfield (a favorite designer of Princess Di's), Patricia Roberts, and others. "In all, I got the top 12 fashion designers, plus Butler & Wilson, the foremost jewelry designers in London, to make originals for the calendar. Norman Parkinson photographed the results. He brought to the shooting a look that was glamorous but never erotic." We don't know about that. Whatever it is, The Pirelli Calendar beats a flat tire.

1986 Who cares if Harvard M.B.A.s make $50,000 a year? Art students still have all the fun. Hef has turned Chicago's Playboy Mansion into Hefner Hall, a dormitory for students from The Art Institute of Chicago, and Walsh has come up with an idea for the newest Pirelli Calendar. "I hired 12 students from the Royal College of Art to produce paintings that would appear in the photos. Their assignment was to produce a painting of any subject they wanted. There was only one stipulation, and that was that the painting should include a nude girl and the tire tread." Walsh contacted American Bert Stern to do the photography; it was the first time someone from the colonies had participated in a Pirelli project. "We took over a quaint old Elizabethan hotel outside Stroud, England. At night, over dinner and some reasonable bottles of claret, the ideas for the following day's photo would start to evolve, with everyone throwing in ideas." We can't wait for next year. What does Pirelli have in store for us---Princess Di, naked, wearing a tiara of tires?