Front Page Panic yellow/black sleeve option
A collaboration between Mechanicalpencilgirl and Come On Strong!
In 100% cotton yellow baseball tees, black baseball tees and white t-shirts!
The design combines Mechanicalpencilgirl's non-digital illustration and hand-screen tone techniques with archival newspaper clippings from the mid-late 1950's. The sensational headlines of today echo those of McCarthy's America; In place of erotic photography, trans people and queer literature are being used by ideologues to sew moral panic around the corruption of youth!!
The photographs Bettie Page shot with siblings, Irving and Paula Klaw, made her the most famous fetish model in the world and helped bring BDSM into the public consciousness. Images of passive pin-up girls were common by the end of WWIll, but Page and Irving's work depicted a feminine power and level of sexual exploration that shocked the conservative-minded. In the thick of the McCarthy era, Page and Irving Klaw were summoned to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. This was part of a wave of moral panic, media censorship, and public pressure which ultimately caused Klaw to become barred from working in the state of New York. He burned of most of his photo negatives, luckily we have his sister to thank for saving some of them. Using a photograph of Page bound with rope as the only evidence, in 1955, the Kafauver sub-committee accused Page of causing a teenager's accidental death by auto-erotic asphyxiation. This seemed to be the last straw for her and Page vanished from the spotlight shortly after. In the decades to come, Page struggled with schizophrenia, and after a series of violent attacks she stayed in California's Patton State Hospital until her release in 1992. She emerged into a world where the public had become so curious about her that Penthouse Magazine had offered anyone who could prove if she was dead or alive $1,000. She lived privately on royalties and social security until her death in 2008 at the age of 82.
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