I give you the real models (not actresses) featured in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" (1966), posing in the actual fashion studio of John Cowan, one of London's leading photographers at the time the movie was made.



The scenes set at Cowan's place (which took five weeks to shoot) are where too-hip-for-school glamour photog "Thomas" (David Hemmings) does his thing (aped histrionically by Mike Myers in at least the first two "Austin Powers" movies). The Thomas character was inspired by David Bailey, effectively one of the "house" photographers of the Swingin' London era. Along with Terence Donovan, Bailey recorded, and in many ways helped create, London's cults of personality and fashion between 1964 and 1970.

Along with Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles, actresses (and quintessential British birds) Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills play models in "Blow Up," so I'm not including them here (soon, my MooT-lings, soon). Hmmm, playing a model seems like one of the Circles of Hell, but I'm not sure which one.

The wardrobe for all of the fashionistas in "Blow Up" was specially designed for the film by Oscar winner Jocelyn Rickards. Rickards was one of Britain's finest film costume designers in the Fifties and Sixties. Her clothes were featured in some of the most gritty and affecting films of the "New Wave" period in British cinema, including "Look Back in Anger" (1958) and "The Entertainer" (1960).

In the film, Thomas follows a young woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, to her rendezvous with her older lover in a London park, and he takes several pictures of them. After developing the film, he spots what appears to be a dead body in one of the photographs. However, the more he enlarges the image, the more blurred and unrecognizeable the body becomes.

What follows is a stylized and sexy thriller that moves through the worlds of Swingin' London fashion, music, and art — in which Thomas starts to doubt (get it?) both what he actually saw, and his photographic record of it, as fact and fiction become ambiguously intertwined.

The connections to the visual record of the JFK assassination and the endless examination of it 45 years on are obvious, yeah?

But this was more about babes than bullets, right?

Time for some closeups, then, with more to come ...