The Complete Pirelli Calendar Book

The Complete Pirelli Calendar Book collects the legendary Pirelli calendars from their first appearance in 1964 through to 1974, bringing together more than a decade of fashion, photography, travel and unclothed elegance in one substantial volume. It is introduced by David Niven, whose chief qualification appears to have been an internationally recognised ability to sound impeccably civilised in the presence of beautiful women.

The Pirelli Calendar began as a promotional gift produced by the British arm of the Italian tyre company. Rather than filling it with tread patterns, motorway safety advice and photographs of dependable radial construction, Pirelli commissioned leading photographers to travel to exotic locations with fashionable models. This did little to explain the manufacture of tyres, but proved considerably more effective at persuading important clients to hang corporate publicity on their walls.

The calendars were never offered for ordinary retail sale. They were distributed to favoured customers, celebrities and selected members of the international elite, allowing the recipients to enjoy both the photographs and the knowledge that other people had not received one. Scarcity duly transformed an advertising giveaway into a coveted cultural object, which may be the purest achievement in marketing after convincing the public to pay for bottled water.

This volume reproduces the work of photographers including Robert Freeman, Brian Duffy, Harri Peccinotti, Francis Giacobetti, Sarah Moon and Hans Feurer. Each brought a different visual style, moving the calendar from straightforward glamour towards increasingly sophisticated experiments in colour, composition, fashion and atmosphere. Beaches, tropical landscapes, studios and European locations provide the settings, although scholarly attention may occasionally be distracted from the scenery.

The changing images form an accidental history of the 1960s and early 1970s. Hairstyles rise and fall, makeup becomes bolder, swimsuits become less administratively burdensome and the polished conventions of fashion photography give way to something freer, stranger and more self-consciously artistic. The models are presented not merely as pin-ups but as elements within carefully designed visual fantasies—although Pirelli wisely avoided testing whether the calendar would have achieved equal fame using twelve beautifully lit wheel alignments.

Sarah Moon’s haunting, nostalgic photographs for 1972 differ sharply from the sunlit sensuality of earlier years, while Brian Duffy and Hans Feurer bring the series into the more assertive visual world of the 1970s. Across the collection, commercial photography repeatedly attempts to become art while art appears perfectly willing to accept accommodation expenses somewhere warm.

David Niven’s introduction supplies the appropriate tone of urbane amusement. He guides the reader into a world of glamour without pretending that the calendar’s success resulted entirely from technical innovation in photographic printing. His presence lends the project a dinner-jacket respectability, as though the entire collection has been properly introduced at a cocktail party and may therefore remove its clothes without causing a scene.

Publication of the calendar was suspended after the 1974 edition amid economic difficulties, making this 1975 book a complete record of its original run. At over three hundred pages, it preserves the images in a more permanent form than calendars normally enjoy, rescuing them from the traditional January-to-December journey towards the wastepaper basket.

This Pan Books edition is in Good condition and comes complete with its original hard slipcase, providing suitable protection for a volume in which protective covering is otherwise applied somewhat selectively. A collectable book for admirers of photography, fashion, 1960s and 1970s design, David Niven and the extraordinary moment when a tyre manufacturer became one of the world’s most famous publishers of tasteful nudity.

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