The Little Book of Bettie

WHAT IS IT ABOUT BETTIE?” is an all-too-common question that just about anyone who knows about her will ultimately ponder. The answer is both obvious and elusive at the same time. There are a million reasons to admire her, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the precise thing that fuels her fans’ intense allegiance. “When I first saw photos of Bettie Page when I was a teenager, she had such a magical quality that drew me to her. I saw a beautiful, radiant, and confident woman, and the more I learned about her the more she inspired me,” said Miss Lady Lace, a pinup model, burlesque artist, and vintage blogger in Perth, Australia. “She has a special element that’s difficult to put into words.”

Think about this: Is there any other person in history who has scores of devotees worldwide walking around looking just like them? And that includes several top icons of the current era. Katy Perry sported a straight-up Bettie look for a long stretch of her career, and Madonna has rocked the hair and other Bettie-inspired touches (fishnets-and-gloves combo, the cone bra, fetish boots) numerous times. In 2014, these two stars even teamed up for a Bettie-inspired photo shoot for V magazine.

Beyoncé has donned a full-on Bettie persona in three different music videos, first for the song “Video Phone” from her album I Am… Sasha Fierce, then again as a guest star in Lady Gaga’s video for “Telephone.” In a 2010 W magazine article in which she talks about the “seven looks that shaped her career,” her homages to Bettie make the list twice. She told the interviewer, “When I put on the Bettie Page wig, I got into the character. I started researching Bettie Page and tried to channel her pinups and poses.”

Queen Bey took it even further in her video for “Why Don’t You Love Me,” replicating the Queen of Pinups’s appearance and performance from a 1950s stag film produced by Irving Klaw. She recalled: “I was still thinking about Bettie Page, and wanted to do something that was inspired by her. This video was a secret: I paid for and codirected it and didn’t tell my label or my management. The clothes and jewelry are from my closet, the wigs are mine, and I did my own makeup.”

International burlesque sensation Dita Von Teese began her career as a Bettie look-alike before evolving into her own unique style. “Bettie Page was my very first inspiration. When I first saw her picture in a fetish shop in 1990, the first thing I noticed was her distinctive style,” she told me. “But what really fascinated me and kept my attention was much more than that. It was her sense of playfulness, her warmth and humor in those intense bondage and fetish scenes that really made me understand what captivates a viewer.”

Most likely it’s the combination of traits, including ones that seem conflicting, that contribute to that inexplicable Bettie magic. According to women who love Bettie, a huge part of her appeal is, in fact, this very ability to embody what we view as opposing qualities, to pull off something we are constantly told can’t be done.

To many of these gals, their love of Bettie extends beyond simple admiration or even fangirl adoration. They will tell you she has literally changed their lives—even helped them recover from their own struggles and deep-seated societal conditioning. When someone told a glammed-up BrittanyJean, a pinup model from North Carolina who runs a blog called Perfectly Pinned Up, that she looked like Bettie Page during a night out, she looked her up when she got home. “I was stunned! She wasn’t the initial idea of what I thought beauty was at the time. I had grown up wanting to model, I starved myself to keep my weight down, and thought I would never be beautiful because it seemed all the women considered beautiful were blonde, tan, and super thin,” she recalls. “And here was this woman who had dark hair, curves, and people loved her. It was at that exact moment that I started to give up all of those old, impossible ideals I had set for myself and began to accept myself as I was.”

How liberating to have an instant, explicit reminder that women have far more choices than we presumed, that we are not nearly as limited in what we can express or achieve as we were made to believe—that we don’t have to choose one or the other, after all. It was this surprising blend of traits that drew in Angelique Noire, a LA-based model. “Her down-to-earth vibe mixed with the naughty but girlish vibe, captivated me,” she explains. “She always seemed in control, even while tied up. She seemed to know how to communicate so many different feelings without saying a word.”

We have been told we can’t or shouldn’t be this and that at the same time, and yet there was Bettie—back in the even more sexist and stifling 1950s, mind you—plainly and rightfully calling bullshit on that notion simply by looking how she did and being exactly who she was. “I loved the way her attitude could easily shift from dominant to submissive, with each role an underlying sense of humor and amusement with herself,” says Von Teese. “Yes, she was beautiful, but there are so many more reasons that she’s managed to inspire generation after generation.”

It can be tremendously liberating to claim such a vast range of expression and emotion against the backdrop of restrictive gender expectations. It tells us there’s much more to explore beneath the surface—in both Bettie and ourselves. I doubt many women have learned about Bettie without also learning a lot about themselves.

“Learning more about her life and the way she tackled obstacles cheerfully—and without a care in the world about what others thought—has inspired me to have an optimistic attitude and, more importantly, to take everyone’s opinion with a grain of salt,” shares Young Sun Moon, an acupuncturist, yoga teacher, makeup artist, and model who also goes by the pinup name Sunny Moon. “Nobody will ever be happy all the time, but it is the attitude with which you face circumstances that makes the difference in how you feel about an outcome.”