Bettie Page

In 1950 a New York police officer named Jerry Tibbs met a young woman from Tennessee at Coney Island and told her she would make a good pin-up model. Bettie Page, born in Nashville on April 22, 1923, became the defining lingerie and pin-up model of 1950s America, posing in stockings, garter belts and high heels for camera clubs, men's magazines and the mail-order photographer Irving Klaw until she quit modeling in 1957.

The bangs were a lighting fix

Page had moved to New York in late 1947. Tibbs shot her first portfolio for free, and he suggested she wear bangs to solve a lighting problem in the photos. The black fringe became her signature and is still copied by burlesque performers and vintage dressers.

Camera clubs and men's magazines

Her early work came through the camera clubs of the late 1940s, groups that hired models for what was billed as artistic photography and was often closer to glamour or erotica. By 1951 her picture was running in small men's magazines such as Wink and Titter.

Lingerie for the Klaw mail-order catalog

From late 1951 or early 1952 until 1957, Page posed for Irving Klaw, who ran a mail-order business called Movie Star News from Manhattan. Klaw's photographs and short silent films dressed women in lingerie and high heels and staged bondage and spanking scenes, and Page became the first famous bondage model. She also appeared in his burlesque features Striporama (1953), Varietease (1954) and Teaserama (1955).

The lingerie in those pictures was the standard erotic wardrobe of the decade: seamed stockings, garter belts and pointed bras. Some of what Page wore came from Frederick's of Hollywood, the Los Angeles mail-order house that Frederick Mellinger had founded in the late 1940s.

The Playboy centerfold and the Senate

In Florida, the photographer Bunny Yeager shot Page at a wildlife park, and Hugh Hefner used one of Yeager's photos as the Playboy centerfold for January 1955, with Page wearing only a Santa hat. Klaw's material was investigated by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency under Estes Kefauver, which treated him as a pornographer, and more than 80 percent of his negatives were destroyed. Page stopped modeling in 1957, and her reasons have never been fully established.

Revival in the 1980s

Her pictures resurfaced in the early 1980s, when the comic artist Dave Stevens modeled a character in The Rocketeer on her. In 1993 she signed with Curtis Management Group, later CMG Worldwide, to manage her image. She died in Los Angeles on December 11, 2008. The 2012 authorized documentary Bettie Page Reveals All included commentary from Dita Von Teese, whose own act draws heavily on the pin-up lingerie Page made famous.

Last updated October 7, 2026