It isn’t always the case that we should mourn the disappearance of things. Some things that disappear were best gone in the first place. Sometimes things best gone have stayed in plain view for so long that we’ve come to view them as part of the landscape, as fixed in place as a mountain. It’s strange, then, when they disappear and we don’t even notice they’re missing.
One of those things is the Breitling Bombshell. To adapt a phrase from T. S. Eliot, I might describe the Breitling Bombshell as an objective correlative, the physical manifestation of a broader—and perhaps mostly unconscious—cultural trend. She has an emotional heft to her that means so much more than just a girl in a skimpy red dress straddling a bomb. For the boys in the service, she was hope and freedom, and she presaged the sexual hope and freedom of the 60’s that arrived courtesy of second wave feminism and the birth control pill.
One evening late in 2015, I stand by the window of Breitling’s store on Bloor Street long after closing. A cleaning lady appears with her duster, a little stooped as she works her way around the perky blonde. Seventy years ago, Breitling provided the fly boys with precision timepieces so they could coordinate their flying missions, and it adopted, as part of its branding, the fly boy practice of painting pinups on the noses and the sides of their machines. Now, most of those fly boys are gone. And so is the world and way of life they thought they were defending. This is a new world now, one in which timepieces no longer serve a practical function when an iPhone tied to an atomic clock is more accurate; instead, their chief function is to declare the wealth of the wearer. Meanwhile, the vendors rely on wage labour that creeps out after dark like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
After making this photo, I get home and post it along with my usual commentary. Call it cultural criticism if you like. A few months later, they’ve removed the bombshell. A cursory search on YouTube suggests they’ve taken down all their classic nose-art nostalgic commercial spots featuring fly boys with wrist watches. Maybe you remember them; they doubled as breast augmentation ads. I find it highly unlikely that anybody at Breitling saw, much less heeded, my post. But I do think there’s something in the air, something Breitling understood and acted on.
Lately, on social media, a certain subgroup of white men has been going on about how it is being discriminated against by others who want their fair share too. They say the white male gaze is being threatened. I hate to be the bearer of bad news: but when major corporations have, for years now, been treating the white male gaze as over, it’s time to accept it as a certainty.
