Style.com’s Beauty Icons feature is “a monthly look at the faces who have made history.” No doubt about it, these stunnahs will likely remain in our collective subconscious for years to come.
Here are some highlights.
Debbie Harry
Steven Sprouse knew it takes a certain type of woman to rock Day-Glo and Velcro, his cutting-edge additions to eighties fashion. Luckily for him, that woman—Harry—lived next door. The pair met in 1975 when Sprouse moved into her apartment building on the Bowery. Blondie’s self-titled debut album dropped the following year, and Sprouse decked the group’s frontwoman in slashed T-shirts, mini jumpers, and neon headbands. The asymmetrical one-strap dress she worked in the video for “Heart of Glass” was a Sprouse original, designed from a photo he took of static lines on his TV. In Harry, Sprouse found a figure whose downtown vibe was the real deal (this was before the Bowery came with a Whole Foods), and his experiments with the peroxide blonde vaulted her to icon status. Of course, that voice—and those cheekbones—didn’t hurt either.
Josephine Baker, a.k.a. La Baker, poses in her usual choice of attire for a Vanity Fair photo shoot in 1929.
Claudette Colbert leaves little to the imagination as Empress Poppaea in The Sign of the Cross, directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1932. Her equally unclad companion rocks some old-school gladiators.
Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s original Blonde Bombshell, vamps it up for the camera and shows off her namesake flaxen curls in 1933. Rarrh.
“Queen of the Movies” Myrna Loy in the film that made her famous, 1934′s The Thin Man. Loyal fans later formed “Men Must Marry Myrna” clubs after Loy’s performance as “the perfect wife” in The Best Years of Our Lives. “Some perfect wife I am,” Loy said about similarities with her character. “I’ve been married four times, divorced four times, have no children, and can’t boil an egg.”
Barbara Stanwyck, in 1937, gets ready to rumble in Breakfast for Two. Swing ‘em, sister.
Ginger Rogers glams up a soda fountain, in 1937. Bet you wish you were that straw, huh, gentlemen?
A timeless Carole Lombard, photographed in 1938, shows off her skeet-shooting style in frames to envy. Dick Cheney, watch your back.
Here I am. That was the only line uttered by Veruschka—famous enough in 1966 to play herself—in her classic scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. But here was a case where action—those three minutes of leggy writhing on the studio floor for David Hemmings’ Bailey-esque fashion photographer—truly spoke louder than words. Forty-odd years later, the enigmatic German supermodel still looms large over the zeitgeist. Outsize both in persona and physical person (vital stats: 6’1″, size 13 feet), she is now the subject of a limited-edition, cloth-bound monograph from Assouline that fully illuminates her career and impact on the fashion world.
When Harmony Korine was looking for an actress to play a Queen of England impersonator in his quirky new flick Mister Lonely, he settled on an unexpected but inspired choice: Anita Pallenberg. If ever there was a First Lady of Rock, it would be the hard-partying, Italian-born beauty who held court over the Rolling Stones’ entourage—where pretty girls were as disposable as guitar picks—for nearly two decades. “Anita is a Rolling Stone,” said Jo Bergman, the band’s one-time assistant. “Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.”
With her deep-set eyes and alabaster skin, Carolina Herrera—who will receive the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America this June—could have stepped straight out of a Goya painting. Back in the sixties and seventies, as she jet-setted around the world with her second husband, Reinaldo, and a pack of high-profile pals like Mick Jagger and Jackie Onassis, she favored dramatic ensembles by then emerging Italian designers like Giorgio Armani and Valentino and French couturiers Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro. Dubbed “la bombe” by Diana Vreeland, Herrera’s patented blend of classic formality and Latin theatricality—heavy on the Latin theatricality—landed her in the International Best-Dressed List’s Hall of Fame.
“Back in Detroit I wasn’t considered beautiful or anything, but here I’m different,” Luna explained of her success. “They were looking for a new kind of model, a girl who is beautiful like you’ve never seen before.” With her spellbinding features, ultramarine contact lenses, and seemingly endless limbs (she was 6′ 2″), she certainly fit the bill. And at the height of her career, she charged a hefty day rate of $60 because, as she succinctly put it, “Being what I am, I can get what I ask.”
As much a child of the sixties as the face of it, Luna spent her off-hours partying at Andy Warhol’s Factory and canoodling with the likes of Rolling Stones rocker Brian Jones and sometime paramour Klaus Kinski.
More Beauty Icons including Clémence Poésy and Vivian Westwood after the jump.
Keep reading: Continue reading Beauty Icons of the Century: A Painfully Beauteous Photoblog (pt. deux)
