My guess would be generational fashions. As old fashions flame out and die, people forget about them and then the new generation thinks it’s hip and original because they don’t know about it’s history, so it becomes fashionable again.
One example: male earrings
“Early evidence of earrings worn by men can be seen in archeological evidence from Persepolis in ancient Persia. The carved images of soldiers of the Persian Empire, displayed on some of the surviving walls of the palace, show them wearing an earring.” (Wikipedia)
This. Shaving, threading, or just ‘grooming’ pubic hair also been heard of for thousands of years in many non-Muslin cultures and countries. The opposite of a modern phenomenon.
Just to throw something random into the thread, I remember a movie I watched in which a French and a Japanese company were negotiating plans for a website or a computer game or something and they had a problem with female pubic hair. The Japanese didn’t want hair because it can’t be shown in Japan, and the French didn’t want hairless because they can’t show prepubenscent girls. No idea if that’s based on fact, but it suggests that tends can begin in strange ways.
But the odd thing is that even going back to classical Greek times, not only is the female depicted merkin-less, but also there is no visible genitalia - even though for women (based on a random sampling of internet displays) The genitalia are much more often than not, visible when there’s no obscurative bushiness.
As I said earlier, there seems to be no such bashfulness with showing male parts from the BC era to today, yet classical and renaissance art seems to hide the detail on women. Since art seems to be an excuse for male titillation, why hide an important detail?
I mean, obviously it’s custom, but is there any hint over the years why the custom was set and slavishly followed so long through so many cultures? Or are we just imitating the classical Greeks who had less interest in such display?
(I recall an interview I read with the designers of the Voyager plaque, who talked about this; their initial design included a small extra line on the female drawing, and they got the word from above - not space, that is - that the extra line was a deal-breaker. Either it got taken out or the plaque was cancelled. )
My persian girlfriend says it is the custom for Persians to be hairless down there - women AND men! Consequently I am now as smooth and hairless as my pre-pubescent self! And loving it!
My dad was for a time a graphic artist in the 50’s, they used to do a lot of ladies under wear adverts. The ladies would be photographed nude, shaved and the clothes painted on the photo’s. So a lot of desired “looks” were only achievable if bare and probably only with a paint brush!
looking at adverts of the time, the undies do look painted on. And take it from me painting on knickers is easier than painting a whole lady/ Really what i’m saying is that there have been unrealistic adverts for many many years telling people how their body should be but never can be.
unfortunately i cant ask him if he was pulling my leg now…
Regarding medieval statues, it’s not unusual for a media product to have an unrealistic depiction of women. A future historian might conclude from our own magazines that we regularly engaged in all kinds of cosmetic modifications.
Did advertising laws not exist in the 50s? Nowadays the actual product has to be depicted-- I don’t think that painted clothes on a photographed model would be legal.
My guess is that whatever laws existed didn’t cover this. Most of the famous cases - the soup that put marbles at the bottom of the bowl to drive all the solids to the surface; the blade that could even cut sandpaper but really shaved off a glass base - occurred in the 1960s. In addition, it would be rare to have a panty advertisement with a photograph of a women in the 1950s. Underwear ads were predominantly drawn in their entirety. Nor were panties the size they are today. They were the size of girdles. I can’t tell if this 1950 advertisement is a stylized photo or a drawing, but there is no suggestion of a bulge at the pubis. There couldn’t be in those days. Some retouching would certainly be done or else the model would wear something constricting under the underwear. I’ve never heard the paint-on-nude story before.
Retouching’s an issue with many vintage nude shots as well. The whole pubic area is obviously retouched. This makes it difficult to tell whether hair was present or not. Probably the majority of subjects in these early photos were prostitutes or performers, though, and their hairlessness would be associated with low society. Trimming, if not shaving, certainly picked up in the 1950s when bathing suits and bikinis became briefer and more revealing. Ironically, the 70s emphasized hairiness because the first magazines and movies that could show public hair wanted to show pubic hair, not the lack of it. (50s and 60s nudist movies mostly used ingenious camera angles to avoid dealing with the issue.) Marilyn Chambers was noted as one of the earliest porn stars to be bare or nearly bare in the 1970s. She was an exception.
Overall, though, shaving was always done by some but always rare and confined to narrow segments of society. Nice girls didn’t do it, except that some girls are nice and naughty.
I’m not sure where you got this idea. Commercial illustration has always been a mainstay of advertising, and violates no laws. Here is a brochure for the 1953 line of Buick automobiles, without a single photograph, it is all illustrations.
I’m not really farmilair with 1950s ladies underwear adverts but, a lot of older literature encyclopedias and 1940’s war photographs were heavily retouched by “artists” . It is not unknown for illustrations to be basically drawn or overlayed on photographs. Dan Dare comic were for example, Picasso, Degas, Cazanne, all used photographs. Saves a lot of brain work drawing stuff! Examples of commercial pin ups may be seen here ( Webodysseum.com is for sale | HugeDomains ) alongside the photographs that they are based on, so one might see that even a seemingly fully painted scene might well be entirely the result of a posed model and a dark room.
Well, in the 50s, the Wonder Bread commercials were claiming that Wonder Bread helped build strong bodies twelve ways. It wasn’t until some time in the 70s that someone asked them to specify what those twelve ways were, and they had to stop.
So it’s not too implausible to suggest that a painted depiction of a product was perfectly kosher in the 50s.