I’ll admit that I happened upon a file with hundreds of .jpgs of of Playboy Playmates from every month in the 1960s.
Among the things that struck me was … well, how unusual many of the Playmates’ breasts were. They were large, but unusually pointy and perky, as if held up by an anti-gravity device. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, if it wasn’t for the fact that this was in an age before breast implants.
So, what was responsible for those perky Jet Age breasts? Incredibly supportive bras worn since childhood? More selectivity in choosing Playmates? Something else?
I think they still exist. I guess I didn’t get the Playmates angle. I was thinking of films from that era, where the bras seem to shape the breasts in a fashion that’s much different from what is common today. Something that I’d describe as perky 1960’s breasts. But looking at your link, were breasts just different then? Or have “common tastes” changed, meaning that what we’re exposed to (and such what we perceive as predominant or normal) has changed?
<snerk> I was fully prepared to come into the thread as a modern woman touting the beautiful variety of human bosomry, but the cite in the OP is… weird, in my experience. (And I, as I have noted in other threads, attended a women’s college.) But one imagines it takes all kinds; perhaps she is an outlier. The gravity defying kind.
Or, I have just thought, perhaps tape is involved. They had invented tape at the time.
That’s really not a typical Playboy pic of the era, and the pose makes the breasts seems extremely cantilevered. That pic is iconic because her breasts are so unusual looking. The “shelf” look she has is as much due to her relatively tiny rib cage as to her large breasts.
Women’s breasts have not changed all that much with the exception that there seem to be more bell curve outliers in the “fat” and “fit” ranges, and fewer in the typical female “soft body” median.
I will admit some degree of puzzlement as to Playboy’s decades long fascination and embracing of fake breasts from the 80’s onward. A woman with fake breasts is almost anti-sexual.
I think the descriptive term you’re looking for might be pneumatic, rather than perky. Or perhaps zeppelinesque. In any case, the girls were carefully selected for their, um, physical attributes. The ideal shape has changed, dramatically, over the years. That’s not to say you can’t find playmates from any decade with these particular attributes. Besides the many beauties from the 50’ and 60’s, such as your Fran Gerard of '67, I think you’ll find these women very, as you say, perky:
However, that type has become increasingly rare, I think due to the overall general better fitness of the playmates. Less body fat overall translates to less body fat in areas comprised mainly of fat.
By “current common breastage”, I meant the current breasts that show up in Playboy, et al. (check out the current Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, for example, since many of the photos are of women without a top).
I vote for the selection effect, too. Hefner and his photographers had a particular notion of what type of women he wanted for the centerfold and they sought those women out.
You see the same effect elsewhere. Russ Meyer made a long series of movies with enormously busty women of a sort you don’t see in films any more. He had earlier been a nude photographer in the 1950s, taking pictures of the same set of women. (Married three of them.) They also had gravity defying huge breasts. Find a nude picture of Candy Morrison or Tura Satana or Uschi Digard (easy to do) and compare.
Queen of the Pinups Betty Page’s breasts weren’t as large, but she had a stunningly huge ribcage and tiny waist that gives her a figure that Gretchen Mol couldn’t come close to duplicating when she played her in The Notorious Betty Page.
Women who look like this must still exist - they were too old for it to have been mutations from atomic bomb testing. They’re no longer in style. And some of them no doubt are using diet, exercise, and plastic surgery to get a more stylish look so we’ll never see what they might have developed into back in the 50s.
The lady is amply endowed in her pink-nosed puppies, but that’s not the only part that’s ample. Unlike some Playmates, this one is proportioned normally. She’s zaftig all over. The artful folding of her nightgown not only points out her nipplage, but it hides her belly.
