100 Glamour Models: The Countdown Format
Few formats were as reliable for the lads' magazines as the big numbered list, and a hundred names was the classic length.
Every year, somewhere between the summer specials and the Christmas issues, the men's magazines reached for the countdown. A list of a hundred models was ambitious enough to feel like an event, long enough to fill a special issue or a supplement, and open enough to spark arguments among readers about who was missing and who had been placed too high.
How the lists were made
Most countdowns of the era drew on one of three sources, and often a mix of all of them:
- Reader votes, collected by post, text message or an online poll.
- Editorial picks, where the magazine's own staff ranked the year's features.
- Back-catalogue highlights, reusing the best images from shoots already published.
The third point explains why the lists were so popular with publishers. A hundred-entry countdown could be built largely from existing material, with a short caption for each model and a fresh cover, which made it an efficient way to produce a bumper issue.
Why they still get searched
Countdowns travelled well online. Blogs of the time would reproduce or summarise them, and readers would come back to compare one year's list with the next. Long after the magazines stopped printing, these lists remain a kind of snapshot of who was prominent in glamour at a particular moment.
The original list and its pictures belong to their publisher and are not reproduced on this page.
More: Calendars & lists