Lucy Pinder: The 2012 Calendar Shoot
Lucy Pinder's 2012 calendar, and a look at how a twelve-month glamour set comes together.
Rather than walk through the pictures, this write-up looks at the format behind them. A glamour calendar is a strange object in publishing: it has to hold attention for a full year, hang on a wall for weeks at a time, and still feel fresh when the page is turned in October. That puts more pressure on variety than a single magazine spread ever faces.
Twelve pages, one model
With a single model across every month, the work of keeping things interesting falls to the stylist, the location scout and the photographer. Calendars of this period tended to move through the seasons in a loose way: bright swimwear and outdoor light for the summer pages, softer interiors and knitwear or lingerie for the winter months, and a cover image designed to sell the whole thing from a shop shelf in the autumn.
A named model's calendar was the kind of release that the lads' magazines would preview in their pages ahead of the Christmas shopping season, and Lucy Pinder's 2012 edition belongs to that tradition. It sat alongside a crowded field of rival calendars, all competing for the same few weeks of retail attention.
Why calendars mattered
For readers who followed the weeklies and monthlies, the annual calendar was a fixed point in the glamour year, much like a magazine's anniversary issue or its readers' poll. It was also a product that outlived the news cycle: a magazine shoot was gone in seven days, a calendar stayed up until December.
The original photographs belong to their publisher and are not reproduced here.
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