We actually know exactly what the occasion is. This amazing photo of British actress and model Margaret Nolan, aka Vicky Kennedy, shows her at the 1968 British Film Awards wearing what has to be one of the coolest outfits of all time. Nolan came to mainstream attention in the opening credits for the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, and made a quick appearance as Bond's masseuse, but she's also much beloved as a prolific nude model and star of occasional nudie loops. We've featured her photos in two issues of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood, which you can see here and here. Those represent a tiny fraction of her output, but we'll circle back to that later. As an actress she appeared in A Hard Day's Night and more than a dozen other films, but worked mainly on television, including on such shows as Mystery and Imagination, The Newcomers, and Take a Pair of Private Eyes. This shot was originally black and white, but has been colorized by an unknown. It's very nice work. 

Folies de Paris et de Hollywood is one of our favorite vintage magazines, and though we have a tall stack of them we don't share them nearly as often as we should. The scanning and painstaking reassembly of the pages in Photoshop has something to do with that, but one of our upcoming New Year's resolutions is to try and get more of these up on the site. Today you're seeing the front and rear cover plus assorted interior bits from issue #506, which appeared in 1972. You get the usual burlesque dancers, prancers, and vixens, along with a centerfold featuring Margaret Nolan not looking quite her normal self (but it's her). See more from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood by clicking its keywords just below. 

Below you see an issue of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood that was published yesterday in 1966. The cover star is popular glamour model Margaret Nolan, aka Vicki Kennedy, who also appears inside. More on her and Folies later. 

 

We’ve never seen this one before. It’s the American tabloid Limelight, published today in 1966, with someone who looks quite a bit like famed nude model Margaret Nolan on the cover posing as the title story’s jilted lover. This is an example of what we like to think of as editorial economy—i.e., the process of getting from raw material to end story in the most concise way possible. You have a photo of a woman wearing a man’s suit jacket and—voilà!—you write a story that the jacket is all she has left of a boyfriend who (this is where “tabloid” comes in) changed his sex. Ingenious, really. Actually, it might have been even more economical to write that the woman used to be a man and wears the jacket out of sadness and nostalgia: Woman Who Was Once Man Says Sex Change Was a Mistake. We have a feeling sleaze publisher nonpareil Myron Fass was behind this newspaper. Limelight is not listed anywhere as one of his publications, but we doubt those lists are complete. We’ll dig for more info. 

We’ve now posted eighteen issues of the great Australian men’s magazine Adam. But there was an American Adam too, unaffiliated with the Aussie mag (as far as we know) that published identical content during the same period. There were three major differences, though—the American Adam did not have painted pulp-style covers like Aussie Adam, it had access to more widely known actors and authors, and it showcased nude photography years earlier. For example, the above American Adam, from August 1966, has rising star Raquel Welch, famous glamour babe June Wilkinson, fiction from John Steinbeck and Harlan Ellison, and an extensive and revealing feature on burlesque. It also has a centerfold of Vicky Kennedy, aka Margaret Nolan, who appeared in Goldfinger, among numerous other films, and was one of the more popular nude models of the 1960s. We have thirty scans of all this below.