Pirelli Cancels 2021 Calendar and Donates €100,000 to Coronavirus Research
It's the first time the project has been put on pause since 1983.
The star-studded Pirelli calendar has undergone quite the evolution over the past few years, transforming from a compilation of artistically sexy pin-up images to a series of photo projects that have explored everything from a reimagined Romeo and Juliet narrative, to a celebration of women leaders, to an all-Black pictorial retelling of "Alice in Wonderland."
For 2021, the Pirelli calendar, a.k.a. the "the Cal," is evolving once again — this time, in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. Rather than producing the calendar at all this year, Pirelli is canceling the endeavor and instead donating €100,000 ($107,906 at current exchange) to "the fight against and research into coronavirus," the organization said in a release.
Considering that last year's calendar took six months to shoot and produce — and featured, as the Cal so often does, bigwigs from the worlds of styling, photography and cinema — it's no small decision to cancel its creation this year. Still, Pirelli says, it's not the first time the Cal has been put on pause.
"The production of the Pirelli Calendar has been stopped before, in 1967 and then from 1975 to 1983," said the executive vice chairman and CEO of Pirelli, Marco Tronchetti Provera, in a release. "The unprecedented Covid-19 emergency has forced us to do so again today. We will return to the project when the time is right, together with the people who today were working on it with us."
