Anyone interested in the history of British men’s magazines and glamour photography in general should read this article by Terri White the former female editor of Nuts. She talks about the rise of the so-called “real girl” phenomenon:
We weren’t trying to discover a hidden gem who would transform swan-like into a professional. We made a virtue of the fact that they were everyday women. We rejected “professional” shots and encouraged them to submit pictures in day-to-day situations – their bedroom, garden, taking a shower, straddling the kitchen table, crawling on the bonnet of their boyfriend’s car. One imaginative girl took a picture of herself in a bush. We gently suggested that they might want to look a bit more “natural” and go easy on the hair extensions, razor-sharp talons and thick fake tan.
This led to a resurgence of a new kind of glamour modelling – previously seen as a 1980s, perm-based pursuit. (I touched on this subject in this previous post).
We’ve always had Page 3 in the newspapers, but I think the fact that you could model for a magazine made it upmarket. That made it attractive to young women – that it was mainstream and a little bit glossier than Page 3.
She re-examines her conviction that that they never exploited their models. Had she betrayed the sisterhood for her own gain?
I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. We went right into the young man’s stomping ground – bars and nightclubs – to take pictures of girls flashing. One windy Monday night in Kingston, I approached a girl to ask if she’d like to be photographed for Nuts. She nodded, put her hands up her skirt and started to pull down her knickers. I stopped her, horrified, and tried to tactfully explain that she didn’t need to bare her vagina to get into the magazine.
She goes on to meet some former Nuts models and asks them how they feel now about their experience. In passing she reveals that she once suggested that the magazine featured more bums – only to be knocked back by her (male) colleagues:
But as the fight for sales became fiercer, we needed to be bigger and bolder. The pictures became more outrageous (“First time topless!”), the volume higher (“100 Real Girls’ Breasts!”), the spin more novel (“Real girls in the bath!”). I once ran a brainstorm simply titled “New ways to do breasts”. A meeting in which I, and several educated, brilliant men, sat around, scratching our heads trying to “spin” boobs. I walked out of the room with “BUMS??” written in my notebook, believing we’d had an anatomy epiphany, only to be told that bums didn’t sell.
Bums don’t sell! Well tell that to the guys at FRONT who, as this site proves, have clearly had an “anatomy epiphany” of their own…and embraced it! Their “trainers and t-shirts” photoshoots took the new more natural style of glamour photography to a different level too. And their rejection of fake boobs along with the fake tan, plus a more relaxed approach to the use of digital manipulation, meant that their models appeared more “real” than the ones in Nuts ever did.
And I haven’t even mentioned their use of a much broader variety of girls, from tattooed goths to more mainstream types who wouldn’t be out of place on Page 3…minus the perms of course!
To finish here’s a recent photo of Inda Reynolds from Nuts. I’ve chosen it because I think it shows the influence that FRONT – which has enjoyed an increase in popularity whilst its peers have all declined – is now having on it’s rivals. Seems they’re gradually coming round to the view that bums DO sell after all. Especially when they’re as hot as this one! See more India here.
Frontbotties 