Pirelli calendar 2015

The 42nd Pirelli Calendar was entitled simply Calendar Girls 2015. Shot by Steven Meisel, one of the world's leading fashion photographers, it had no external locations but was instead created in a studio in New York in five days. Here Meisel's cast of 12 top and emerging models were transformed by a star team, with styling by the former editor of French Vogue Carine Roitfeld, make-up by Pat McGrath and hair by Guido.

American model and magazine founder Cameron Russell was the ukulele-strumming beach girl from July in the 2015 Pirelli Calendar shot by Steven Meisel. She joined a series of pin-up “stereotypes” including a military cadet (played by Carolyn Murphy), a boxing ring girl (Joan Smalls) and a screen siren (Karen Elson).


A modern-day pin-up calendar
With a minimum of clothes and accessories the focus was on the women and Meisel played with modern notions of beauty – enhanced by the use of latex, which gave a glossy, sensual feel to the pictures. Having picked “the key aesthetic models of today's world,” he said he wanted them to represent “the stereotypes that the fashion and star system impose upon us right now.” His aim: “to create 12 posters in which women, in all their sensuality, are the absolute protagonists of 12 very different images.”

Among the pin-up girl images Meisel created were Anna Ewers as a Brigitte Bardot-inspired bombshell; Sasha Luss as a sailor girl; Candice Huffine holding a whip and wearing a leather bodice as a dominatrix; and Natalia Vodianova in a bubble bath, looking like the ultimate baby doll. Other models featured were Gigi Hadid, Carolyn Murphy, Isabeli Fontana, Adriana Lima, Cameron Russell, Raquel Zimmermann, Karen Elson and Joan Small. The pictures are undeniably sexy, but they are also knowing – fantasies realised to the highest artistic standards featuring women who took relish in playing those roles. For all of its throwback references, the end result was a slick and seductive modern-day pin-up calendar.