Lipstick Stains on Your Pillow

I have been cleaning out my archive of letters as I continue to pull together Elusive. Last night I came across a letter from Dian Hanson, inviting me in to her office, dated August of 1995.

Dian was the editor of Leg Show Magazine at the time. As a young, alternative model my dream was to be in Leg Show. The images were always sexy as hell, you could find a variety of types of women in the pages and the photos were not as lewd as many of the other publications out there.  My preference was to do flirtatious photos over nudity. Leg Show was just my thing.

The beauty and success of the magazine could be contributed to the lush, erotic mind of Dian Hanson. (She’s now an editor for Taschen.) And meeting her was a real treat for me. Her office alone was like a dirty sideshow museum. Art crawled up the walls and her desk was covered in potential nudie girl spreads for upcoming issues. She’s long, tall and beautiful.  I was in heaven!

She was known for her aloofness. And I had seen a guy chase after her in the rudest way at a party once, trying to introduce his model girlfriend to her. It was easy to chalk her attitude up to professionalism.

I remember just a few other details from that meeting. She asked to see the tops and bottoms of my feet. She had me try on a pair of size 4 shoes to see just how little my feet were. And then we talked about settings and how we would dress the shoot.

She explained to me that she liked to use contrasting colors as men were attracted to them. She picked up an image on her desk of a woman posing in front of a blue seamless backdrop, near a fire hydrant, wearing yellow heels, red stockings, yellow panties, a red bra and a yellow rain slicker.

The color combinations were damn near painful to my eyes. Red and yellow? I might mix black stockings with grey panties. Or a light pink bra with white panties… but red and yellow? We both sat there smirking over it. She insisted it was true. This was a color combination that would light men up.

And who was I to argue with Dian Hanson? New York Magazine did a piece on her where she states, ”I’ve made this magazine successful by listening to guys,” Hanson says. “I probe them for the subtleties of their lust.” No one knew legs, panties and men better than Dian.

Yet all these years later I still sit with that image of red and yellow underthings and wonder,  really guys? Really?

And so I ask you if you… do you find extremely contrasting colors of lingerie to be sexy? It’s just pure curiosity that has me asking.

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