Say cheese

Fifty years ago, before fetish clothing became high fashion, Bettie Page could scarcely have imagined her influence on women of Jenny Langer's generation.

Page, dubbed the Pinup Queen of the Universe for her photogenic charms and playful sexiness, was a devout Christian from small-town Tennessee who modeled leather and leopard skin -- and little else -- in dozens of '50s-era cheesecake magazines. It was Page's naughty bondage photos, however, even more than her revealing 1955 Playboy centerfold, that cemented her place in pinup history and made her a target of a Cong r essional smut-peddling investigation.

Now in her 80s, Page has been rediscovered by Hollywood filmmakers and biographers in recent years, after decades away from the limelight. Even so, few Americans under age 50 know her from Satchel Paige .

So it's surprising to hear Langer, a 23-year-old Bostonian who models and performs under the name Black Betty , cite Page as a lodestar and role model.

"For my generation, figures like Elvis [Presley] and Bettie Page have become cultural icons," Langer explains during an interview in a Back Bay coffee shop. "It's not a backlash, exactly. But as the rest of society becomes more overtly sexual, people want something classier."

Pinup models like herself who have stepped into Page's high heels -- if not literally, metaphorically -- are self-consciously sexy, says Langer. But they're not relying on nudity to establish their appeal.

"You don't have to be naked to be sexy," she says. "Pinups don't have to be a size-zero, either. I have curves. I'll never be in a New York fashion runway show. That's OK."

The comeback of pinup culture coincides with mounting criticism of the fashion industry for glamorizing ultra - thin (read: unhealthy) models. Last weekend, organizers of a fashion show in Spain banned five models for being too skinny, a move prompted in part by the deaths of two models who suffered from anorexia. In Milan, another world fashion capital, models with a too-low body-mass index are already kept from the catwalk.

Meanwhile, across a different kind of platform sashayed Anna Nicole Smith , the former jeans model and Playboy centerfold whose death last week made front-page news across the country. Smith's buxom figure, yo-yo ing weight, and soap-opera life, right down to her labored channeling of Marilyn Monroe, seemed almost a caricature of Page's career.

"To the extent [Smith] was a real woman with real curves made her career kind of eye-opening," says Langer. The tawdrier aspects of Smith's personal life, however, "made it hard to look at her as a role model," she adds.

The subculture to which Langer belongs is hardly homogenous, though its contours are as distinctive as the tail fins on a '59 Cadillac Eldorado.

Musically, it gravitates toward pop's rockabilly/punkabilly wing, where bands such as Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys carry on the blue-suede legacy of Elvis and Carl Perkins . In the fashion realm, it's pompadoured guys in bowling shirts and leather jackets digging the same classic cars their dads might have lusted over. For gals, the look is lots of red lipstick, seamed stockings, garter belts, and spiky shoes -- a look perfected by pinup goddesses like Page and updated by models such as Dita Von Teese , a retro-pinup queen whose marriage to rocker Marilyn Manson went the way of the Edsel a couple of months ago.

Culturally, devotees flock to websites such as Atomicpinup.com and events like the upcoming Great Boston Burlesque Expo (this weekend at the John Hancock Conference Center ) and Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend , held annually in April.

Fundamentally, it's a scene as much character-driven as it is fashion-driven. Black Betty, for instance, a name borrowed from an old blues song, is a persona Langer slips into as comfortably as a sequined peasant blouse. Fronting her band the Bad Habits , which she formed at Berklee College of Music in 2004, she draws inspiration from Janis Joplin and Koko Taylor . But she layers on plenty of cheesecake, too, creating a vibe at once sonic and sartorial.

"To me, it's more about the art of it than it is the Maxim magazine element," says Langer, whose daytime job is worki ng as a promoter relations rep for Sonic bids , a Web-based music community linking artists and promoters. She also hosts a blues show on BIRN , the Berklee Internet radio station. "There's an emotional component to the pinup-queen stuff, but it's really not about arousal. It's more tongue- in- cheek than serious."

It's also a bit "Little Miss Sunshine," at least in Langer's case.

She grew up in San Jose, Calif., where her father runs a computer-design firm and her mother was once a professional belly dancer. Langer was 5 when she started modeling and acting. By grade school, she'd appeared in a Vogue ad and her first junior beauty pageant. Until her teenage years, she continued to compete on the local pageant circuit, learning public speaking along with prepubescent posing.

"Sunshine," a film Langer loves, takes a cockeyed view of pageant competit i ons and their effect on participants, families included. Yet Langer looks back on her pageant days as mostly positive.

"They get a bad rap, mostly because of the whole JonBenet [Ramsey ] thing," she says, referring to the young Colorado beauty queen whose 1996 murder shocked the nation. "I'd never do any competition based strictly on looks. Once they started to emphasize swimsuit competitions, I shied away from them."

Her mother never pushed her to compete, Langer says , and was only disappointed when her daughter gave up pageants to sing rock 'n' roll. By junior high, though, Langer had branched into theater and dance and eschewing what she calls the "plastic personality" aspect of teen pageants. "I was not just a geek but the geek at my school," she laughs.

After high school, Langer applied to Berklee and moved east. "Coming out of the pageant world, I knew how to put on makeup and use a curling iron," she says. "The whole Black Betty persona was really born there."

Langer spent two years studying music-business management at Berklee, then dropped out in 2005 to work as a cruise-ship crooner on the Spirit of Boston . Last year she went back to school, earning a degree in business management from Northeastern. She joined Sonicbids this winter, and in the meantime, she -- or Betty -- got into clothes modeling .

One of her main connections to the vintage-clothing market is Angela Zampell , proprietress of Mode Merr in Rochester, N.H. After Langer posted a notice on craigslist.org , Zampell replied with an offer to supply clothing and accessories (flame skirts , devil-theme bustiers, etc.) in exchange for free promotion at Black Betty concerts. As a sideline, Langer models for Mode Merr at fashion shows and promotes its line on her websites, blackbettyrocks.com and jennylanger.com .

"Jenny may be young in age, but she's really an old soul," says Zampell, a former prop master and costumer for the Boston Lyric Opera. "She takes the business seriously. But she's also totally into dress-up and pretend."

Langer is just as serious about exploring the roots and rituals of pinup culture, much as a young guitarist might mine old LPs for vintage Delta blues riffs.

"It's almost humorous to look back at the artists and artwork of the '50s, when Bettie Page was considered insanely risque with her corsets and whips," muses Langer. "But it wasn't strange, either, to see pinups of women wearing kitchen aprons. Today, you'd never expect a pinup model to look like a housewife. The ways women are depicted have totally changed."

There's more of a punk edge to today's pinup culture, she acknowledges. A change Bettie Page herself might embrace .

"We like the term cheesecake," Langer says. "It's all in good fun."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.