The Pirelli Calendar

Why it works

In 1964 Pirelli's British subsidiary, looking for a way to stand out from local tyre rivals, hired art director Derek Forsyth and Beatles photographer Robert Freeman to shoot a calendar in Majorca. It was never put on sale. Copies went to tyre dealers and a short list of powerful people, and the scarcity did the marketing: the Los Angeles Times records that the Daily Mail was soon calling it the world's greatest office status symbol. The Guardian notes that Pirelli stopped it after 1974, partly because it was starting to overshadow the brand, that the Tate bought a 1973 edition at auction in 1980, and that it returned in the 1980s. It is studied as the classic case of a promotional giveaway becoming a cultural property, shot since by the likes of Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, whose 2016 portraits of accomplished women were read as a break with its pin-up past. Its framing as a record of the zeitgeist is largely Pirelli's own.