This photo is called "In the Gymnasium - Household Cavalry, 1960," and it was prominently featured in a 2019 exhibition of Royale/Hussar work at the Colville Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
Royale used actual servicemen, and not professional models, for most of their photos.
The lighting in this shot is so very cleverly done. The models are sporting a retread of the original "box cut" swimming trunk, even with coloured borders and belted waistband, which first saw the light of day in the late 1920s. Swimming trunks had become very much higher cut and briefer in the mid- to late-1930s and '40s, but a post-war wave of moral conservatism hit the English-speaking world in the 1950s, and the box cut, belted trunk was its last shout before the Australian sportswear manufacturer in fact debuted the new Nylon Speedo brief in the Melbourne Summer Olympic Games of 1956. Speedo - which uses a stylized boomerang as its logo - launched the briefer "racer" we know today in 1963. As period piece, this photograph is absolutely of its time and place.
ReplyDeleteThat lighting is indeed quite good. I also find the composition of the models to be quite fetching, as is the dead on stare of the fellow on the floor. This is my favorite of today's series, partly because it is so very sexy without any nudity. "Sometimes less is more."
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