Today the calendars are much more than teasing PR gifts - browsing old editions is more of an amusing journey through the fads and fashions of the decades. From relatively chaste pictures in the 1960s, through the soft-focus eroticism of the early 1970s that seems so artistically tasteless today, to the powerful, visually arresting images of the 1980s and on to the high-fashion looks of the 1990s, we are taken on a tour of the times. Incidentally, the 50th anniversary of the Pirelli calendar does not mark the 50th edition. Between 1974 and 1984, the publication was interrupted due to the Yom Kippur War and the oil crisis, but after that hiatus the calendar moved back into the spotlight. However, its success as The Cal' only really blossomed from 1994, when Herb Ritts put such supermodels as Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss in front of the camera.