Bridget Hall

Pin-ups, Manhattan NY, 1994. Back in ‘94, I had a contract with Esquire magazine shooting celebrities for covers. They came to me and asked if I knew who Vargas was. Of course I did—the illustrator of the famed provocative pin-ups. They wanted to bring back his drawings, but this time as photographs, and asked if I was interested in taking on the task. I was in.

Vargas’ work was all about fantasy, and illustration has total creative license. His pin-ups featured transparent clothes that revealed every nuance of a woman’s body—the contours of the muscle, the texture of the skin. When I brought in my stylist Wayne Scot Lukas, we realized a photo with real clothing couldn’t capture that level of detail. This was right around the time of the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover where she was entirely painted. It was beautiful, but it looked just that…painted. It was missing something. We did a test shoot—played around with body paint, glued bits of fabric to the body—but it still felt too real. So we added digital retouching to take it to the next level. We found the sweet spot: illusions so polished they looked like an illustration…but not.

I’d enhance their eye color, straighten their teeth, take in a waistline or add a curve to their thigh—even change a pedicure. I looked more closely at every single aspect of the body. No, it’s not reality—none of it is. They’re true illusions. Today the fine-tuned tweaking might not seem like such a big deal, but back then I would have never retouched my celebrity portraits in such a way.

It all started with this wonderful model, Amber Smith. 8 hours of being painted naked wasn’t exactly an easy sell, but that was only at the beginning. Once the first pin-up was released, the press was everywhere. We had Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and Stephanie Seymour, all wanting to be the next Vargas Esquire centerfold. What was meant to be a one-time thing went on for 18 issues.

Each image took 40+ hours of post production. It was so subjective, so time-consuming, so work-intensive. It was total control. It was sculpture, really. And when we were done, the image wasn’t real—but it felt perfect.