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Suicide Girls: Beauty Redefined is a big book of naked ladies

January 13, 2009 at 2:56 pm by Brian Ries

When we received Suicide Girls: Beauty Redefined in the mail this morning, I had to fight Leilani for ownership. She saw the “Beauty Redefined” tag and thought it would be an exploration of feminist art. Uhm, no.

The Suicide Girls site has been doing their very own style of highly profitable beauty defining since 2001 by featuring pictures of naked ladies that aren’t your typical porn-tastically plastic adult entertainers. Most look like the girl next door, if the girl next door was into lots of ink and piercings. Many were goth-y, punk-y, or alt-y. Different, but only in relation to other porn models.

And though they were beautiful, Suicide Girls also seemed comfortingly normal. Better yet, many of the girls would actually talk to people who viewed their pictures, either via a blog or through message boards. Like getting a lap dance from an especially talkative stripper, Suicide Girls made it easy for an average Joe to imagine that he actually has a chance.

Its had an impact, sure, and pretty much single-handedly launched the alt-porn movement, but saying that Suicide Girls has redefined beauty is more than a stretch.

More (likely nsfw pics, depending on where you work) after the jump:

Almost all the girls featured on the website these days — and in this book — are thin and busty. No fat chicks allowed in SG’s brave new beauty. Hell, no average chicks allowed.

And that’s the biggest problem with this massive Suicide Girls art book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s chock full of gorgeous photography of stunning women, but whoever designed and shot the girls managed to subtly redefine the Suicide Girls aesthetic in the process. Much of the appeal of the website, especially in the first few years, was the amateur-quality of the pictures. Not only did the girls look like people you might meet in the street, they were often shot on rooftops, in kitchens and in bedrooms that felt like everyday places. Comfortable. Familiar.

The book, however, (and increasingly, the website) is too fucking slick for that. These girls are posed, coiffed and made up just like the mainstream models they were supposed to be redefining, and all too often in slicker environments than before. Some of the girls manage to look stilted and uncomfortable. Little of it has the natural look of Suicide Girls’ early days. The pictures feel like all artsy nudes — beautiful, but entirely unapproachable.