Was Bunny Yeager the original bunny girl? Born Eleanor Linnea Yeager in Pittsburgh, PA in 1929, Bunny died in 2014 in Miami, Florida. Her pin-ups – notably of the hymned Bettie Page who Bunny ‘discovered’ in 1954 when Irving Klaw’s fetish model who’d illustrated the guide to striptease was looking for new angles and a way in to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy – hark back to an era when less was more and gender roles were binary and starched hard.
Yeager was the woman photographer in a man’s world. Often she stayed in the picture, her presence asserting command over the scene and offering sororal guidance to her “girls”. Yeager’s spirited women were not simply an opening into someone’s fantasy.
- Flashbak
