As all latex wearers know (and latex designer certainly) there is a fine line to skirt between reveal and conceal with our fantasy couture. As you will find with just these two examples of our outfits-Marble Jeans and our Textured Underbust Bra-there is a precipice we all skip showing just enough skin or displaying curves and bulges. But in this day and age of the ubiquitous ‘wardrobe malfunction’ and the ‘side-boob’ God knows many common wardrobes have latex frock-ery beat in all-out sexiness. And even from times past you can catch a picture or some video where the people shown seem to be daring even more than we ever try. Just this week Sophia Loren spoke to one of these iconic moments of the reveal.
At a dinner party arranged over half a century ago by Paramount Pictures Sophia Loren was caught in the iconic picture above ogling Jayne Mansfield’s attributes. As the 80 year-old Oscar winner Italian actress told Entertainment Weekly on the eve of her new book, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: My Life being published: “All of cinema was there, it was incredible. And then comes in Jayne Mansfield, the last one to come. For me, that was when it got amazing. She came right for my table. She knew everyone was watching. She sat down.”
“In my face you can see the fear. I’m so frightened that everything in her dress is going to blow—BOOM!—and spill all over the table. There may be other photos, but this is the picture. This is the one that shows how it was. This is the only picture.”
With Keira Knightley posing topless in Interview Magazine to protest photo-shopping one tends to forget that way back when it was hard to manipulate a picture. And to be sure, a photo could become iconic simply because, unlike today, half a century ago there weren’t half naked selfies being posted every day. But whether Mansfield would have popped out or even did later out of camera range, one fact is true today and it was then: some of us are certainly more daring in what we wear, no matter if what we are wearing is daring or not.
