Once known to be the “nude elite” calendar, boasting the faces and bods of Gigi Hadid and icons like Carolyn Murphy, Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Gisele Bündchen, Sophia Loren, and Karolina Kurkova, Pirelli has shifted gears for the 2016 edition of their infamous Pirelli Calendar.

Amy Schumer: Millennial Pin-up Girl for Pirelli

The Pirelli Calendar is a trade calendar published by the Pirelli company’s U.K. subsidiary. It has become an annual publication that dates back to 1964. The calendar is famous for its limited availability, as it is only given as a corporate gift to a restricted number of important Pirelli customers and celebrity VIPs.* This year, Pirelli (Italian manufacturer of tires for motor vehicles, industrial vehicles, and motorcycles) and famed photographer Annie Leibovitz took a road less traveled and traded in boobs for brains. In fact, the iconic Ms. Leibovitz hand-picked each featured calendar woman herself.

“I started to think about the roles that women play, women who have achieved something,” Leibovitz said. “I wanted to make a classic set of portraits. I thought that the women should look strong but natural, and I decided to keep it a very simple exercise of shooting in the studio. This calendar is so completely different. It is a departure. The idea was not to have any pretense in these pictures and be very straightforward.”

The 2016 calendar features the most beautiful, smart, clothed women of distinction (well, almost clothed—Amy Schumer and Serena Williams both strike a pose, bare breasted in their undies). But the power is not in the nudity, the power is in the message of the image. As if I needed another reason to love Amy Schumer any more, she sits (as instructed by Leibovitz, an insider reports) on a stool with her latte, slumped posture and her stomach in natural form (i.e., not sucked in). Though I don’t normally drink coffee topless in my heels, there was something so relatable about this image that graces the December 2016 page. Leibovitz explained in the press release, “I’m a great admirer of comediennes. The Amy Schumer portrait added some fun. It’s as if she didn’t get the memo saying that she could keep her clothes on.” What an undeniable departure from the bent over Zimmermann of December 2015.

According to Stylecaster.com, the full list of women—who range in age from 19 to 77—featured for 2016 are: comedian Amy Schumer, artist Yoko Ono, tennis great Serena Williams, author Fran Lebowitz, writer and actress Tavi Gevinson, director Ava DuVernay, model and activist Natalia Vodianova, actress Yao Chen, musician Patti Smith, philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund, movie producer Kathleen Kennedy, chairman of the board of directors of Dreamworks Animation Mellody Hobson, and visual artist Shirin Neshat.

Credits:2015 Zimmermann/S. Meisel: 2016 Schumer & Williams/A.Leibovitz *Source: Wikipedia

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