 Publicity featuring Raquel Welch's fur bikini in One Million Years B.C. | |
| Designer | Carl Toms [1] |
|---|---|
| Year | 1966 |
| Type | Bikini/film costume |
| Material | Doe-skin/fur |
A fur/hide bikini was worn by Raquel Welch in the 1966 British-made prehistoric saga One Million Years B.C. In that bikini, she was described as "wearing mankind's first bikini" and the fur bikini was described as a "definitive look of the 1960s". [2] [3]
A publicity still of her in the bikini became a best-selling poster and turned her into an instant pin-up girl. [4] The bikini raised Welch's stature as a leading sex symbol of the era, [5] and the photograph became something of a cultural phenomenon as a best-selling pinup picture. [6] [7] [8] The iconic pose of Welch was taken by the unit still photographer as Welch recalled in a 2012 interview. [9] It was used by artist Tom Chantrell to create the film poster promoting the theatrical release of One Million Years B.C., on which Welch in her fur bikini is accompanied by the film's title in bold red lettering across a landscape populated with dinosaurs. [10] Publicity photos of Welch in the fur bikini became the biggest pin-up sensation since Betty Grable's famous pin-up photo taken by Frank Powolny in 1943, [11] which received 50,000 requests a month from World War II US soldiers. [12] One of her publicity photos in the fur bikini had her hanging from a crucifix. The photo taken by Terry O'Neill was deemed too scandalous and was suppressed, until it was published thirty years later by The Sunday Times Magazine . [13]
Hammer originally offered the role of Loana Shell, Welch's character, to Ursula Andress, who four years earlier became a sensation rising out of the sea in a white bikini in Dr. No , the first Bond movie. [14] [15] [16] When Andress passed on the project due to commitments and salary demands, a search for a replacement resulted in the selection of Welch. [17] Welch, who had finished doing Fantastic Voyage under a contract with 20th Century Fox and was touted as America's Ursula Andress, [18] was loaned out to Hammer Studios in Britain. In a 2012 interview she said she did not want to wear the fur bikini. [19] She believed it to be a "fate worse than death". [11] She declined an offer of $500,000 to take part in a sequel to the film. [20]
The bikini was designed by Carl Toms, an award-winning theatre costume designer (Tony Award, 1975) who also designed for nine mostly Hammer films. She said, "Carl just draped me in doe-skin, and I stood there while he worked on it with scissors." She stated in another interview in 2012 that three form-fitting bikinis were made for her, including two for a wet scene and a fight scene. [9] Created as kind of stone-age designer bikini, [21] it was an artfully cut fur bikini with shoulder straps. The furry part of the skin is on the inside, like a lining, and provides elegance to the edges. [22] The fur was sometimes touted as lion fur. [23] Toms recalled, "For One Million Years B.C. I designed a fur bikini for Raquel Welch. She had such a perfect body that I took a very soft doe skin, we stretched it on her and tied it together with thongs." [24] The Loana character also wore well groomed hair, waxed armpits and ankle high go-go styled boots. In the 1940 version of the film, Carole Landis had worn a soft-leather version of a one-piece swimsuit in the film with similar carefully cut "random" edges as Loana. [25]
The New York Times hailed her in its review of the film (which was released in the U.K. in 1966 and in the U.S. in 1967), "A marvelous breathing monument to womankind." [26] One author said, "Although she had only three lines in the film, her luscious figure in a fur bikini made her a star and the dream girl of millions of young moviegoers". [27] The European audience was delighted, leading to her being featured that year on the covers of more than 90 European magazines. [18] In 2011, Time listed Welch's B.C. bikini in the "Top Ten Bikinis in Pop Culture". [28] The fur bikini was voted the most iconic bikini, followed by the white bikini Ursula Andress wore in the film Dr. No in a poll conducted by Swimwear365 among 2,000 women. [29]
According to Filmfacts, Million Years gave rise to "the familiar quota of buxom starlets about to pop out of their animal skin bikinis, an awful lot of bleached hair" in films with a prehistoric setting. [6] The bikini was altered for Celeste Yarnall to be re-used in Eve (1968). [30] Hammer Studios tried to re-emulate the fur bikini in Slave Girls (1967) with Welch's Million Years co-star Martine Beswick, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) with Victoria Vetri, and Creatures the World Forgot (1971) with Julie Ege. But, the Raquel Welch fur bikini remained Hammer's biggest success. [31] Toms was the costume designer for Slave Girls and When Dinosaurs along with Million Years. [32] In 1970, a spoof of the bikini, worn by Valerie Leon, featured in the parody film Carry On Up the Jungle . [33]
The fur ensemble worn by Destiny's Child in the music video Survivor was inspired by Welch's fur bikini. [34] Barbara Bach's fur bikini in Caveman (1981) was a more revealing version of Welch's bikini. [25]
The iconic publicity poster was a story element in the film The Shawshank Redemption . [35] [36]
A bikini is a two-piece swimsuit primarily worn by girls and women that features one piece on top that covers the breasts, and a second piece on the bottom: the front covering the pelvis but usually exposing the navel, and the back generally covering the intergluteal cleft and a little, some, or all of the buttocks. The size of the top and bottom can vary, from bikinis that offer full coverage of the breasts, pelvis, and buttocks, to more revealing designs with a thong or G-string bottom that covers only the mons pubis, but exposes the buttocks, and a top that covers only the areolae. Bikini bottoms covering about half the buttocks may be described as "Brazilian-cut", while those covering about three-quarters of the buttocks may be described as "cheeky" or "cheeky-cut". In May 1946, Parisian fashion designer Jacques Heim released a two-piece swimsuit design that he named the Atome ('Atom') and advertised as "the smallest swimsuit in the world". Like swimsuits of the era, it covered the wearer's belly button, and it failed to attract much attention. Clothing designer Louis Réard introduced his new, smaller design in July. He named the swimsuit after the Bikini Atoll, where the first public test of a nuclear bomb had taken place four days before. His skimpy design was risqué, exposing the wearer's navel and much of her buttocks. No runway model would wear it, so he hired a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini to model it at a review of swimsuit fashions.
Jo Raquel Welch was an American actress and model.
Ursula Andress is a Swiss-German actress, former model and sex symbol who has appeared in American, British and Italian films. Her breakthrough role was as Bond girl Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962). She later starred as Vesper Lynd in the 1967 Bond parody Casino Royale. Other credits include Fun in Acapulco (1963), 4 for Texas (1963), She (1965), The 10th Victim (1965), The Blue Max (1966), The Southern Star (1969), Perfect Friday (1970), Red Sun (1971), The Sensuous Nurse (1975), Slave of the Cannibal God (1978), The Fifth Musketeer (1979), Clash of the Titans (1981), and Peter the Great (1986).
One Million Years B.C. is a 1966 British adventure fantasy film directed by Don Chaffey. The film was produced by Hammer Film Productions and Seven Arts, and is a remake of the 1940 American fantasy film One Million B.C.. The film stars Raquel Welch and John Richardson, set in a fictional age of cavemen and dinosaurs coexisting together. Location scenes were filmed on the Canary Islands in the middle of winter, in late 1965. The UK release prints of this film were printed in dye transfer Technicolor. The U.S. version released by 20th Century Fox was cut by nine minutes, printed in DeLuxe Color, and released in 1967.
John Richardson was an English actor who appeared in films from the late 1950s until the early 1990s. He was a male lead in Italian genre films, most notably Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) with Barbara Steele, but he was best known for playing the love interest of Ursula Andress in She (1965) and then of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966).
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Thomas William Chantrell was a British illustrator and cinema poster artist.
The modern bikini first appeared in 1946, and since then it has become a part of popular culture. It is one of the most widely worn women's swimsuits, used for swimming and in a variety of other contexts. Today, bikinis appear in competitions, films, magazines, music, literature, and video games. Despite the availability of more revealing glamour wear, bikini modeling remains popular and can still create controversy. Portrayals of the bikini in popular culture led, to a large extent, to its acceptance by Western society at large. In 1960, Brian Hyland's pop song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" inspired a bikini-buying spree. The white bikini worn by Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No has been cited as one of the most famous bikinis of all time. By 1963, the movie Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, led a wave of films that made the bikini a pop-culture symbol. Playboy first featured a bikini on its cover in 1962. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue debuted two years later. This increasing popularity was reinforced by its appearance in such contemporary films as How to Stuff a Wild Bikini featuring Annette Funicello and One Million Years B.C. (1966) featuring Raquel Welch. Raquel Welch's fur bikini in One Million Years B.C. became a famous moment in cinema history. Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida and Jane Russell further helped the growing popularity of bikinis. Pin up posters of Monroe and Mansfield, as well as Hayworth, Bardot and Raquel Welch distributed around the world contributed significantly to the popularity of the bikini.
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