Press photos show more than the celebrities of the day. They can also serve as gateways to moments in history that shape our experiences to this day. This photo is labeled “Sennett’s Bathing Girls.” Mack Sennett, an early film entrepreneur whose Keystone Studios launched the careers of movies stars like Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, and his namesake Keystone Cops.
The Bathing Girls were a marketing ploy Sennett created following the logic of the now classic advertising maxim “Sex Sells.” Anne Helen Petersen wrote an article called “Hollywood’s Bathing Beauties” for Lapham’s Quarterly, that traces the genesis of these knee-baring babes.
(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)