“Ward’s women reek of glamour and glitz. The opera length gloves, the diamond earrings that dangle to the shoulders, the stiletto heels, the tight satin dresses, the pronounced cleavage... it's all there. It's the best eye candy money can buy.” —Eric Kroll
Bill Ward’s long, prolific pin-up career began during World War II when he created a curvy distraction named Torchy for his fellow soldiers. His taste for impossibly buxom blondes—teetering on stiletto heels, legs encased in black nylon, torsos packed into satin gowns—precisely suited America’s collective postwar sex fantasy, and the late 50s men’s magazine boom made him the most popular girlie artist in the country. Through the 1960s, 70s, 80, and 90s, Ward broadened his range to embrace a variety of fetish subjects, but he never varied from his template of the Ultimate Woman — except to make her breasts a little bigger, her heels a little higher, or the satin and leather encasing her a little glossier.
