Natalie Blair in Bizarre
Natalie Blair appears in Bizarre, a British magazine that took glamour well away from the usual lads'-mag look.
Most glamour features of the late 2000s and early 2010s ran in a handful of predictable places: the men's weeklies, the men's monthlies and their European editions. Bizarre was something else. A UK magazine devoted to offbeat and alternative culture, it covered subjects the mainstream titles ignored, and when it ran photography it tended to bring its own sensibility to it.
That makes Natalie Blair’s feature an interesting detour: glamour photography in a title with such a different identity shows how flexible the genre could be. The same model, photographed for a different audience, could look and feel quite different on the page.
A different kind of styling
Where a weekly favoured bright studios and simple sets, a magazine like Bizarre was more likely to lean into theatrical styling: bold make-up, unusual costumes or props, darker colour palettes and locations with some character. The aim was a picture that fitted the rest of the magazine rather than one that could have run anywhere.
For readers who followed glamour mainly through Nuts, Zoo or Loaded, features in titles such as Bizarre were a reminder that the genre stretched further than the newsstand's top shelf of lads' magazines suggested.
The original photographs belong to the publisher and are not reproduced on this page.
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