5. Real Person in a Feminine Hygiene Ad

Even during the scandalous Roaring 20s, when women were bobbing their hair and baring their arms, products for “that time of the month” were advertised only very discreetly in women’s magazines. And until 1928, those ads featured line drawings or pastel paintings of females, never real women. But that taboo ended when photographer Edward Steichen sold a photo he’d shot of model and Vogue cover girl Lee Miller to the Kotex Company. Miller’s modeling career in the U.S. was essentially kaput thanks to the scandalous placement of her photograph, and she fled to Paris where she studied photography and eventually became a renowned photographer in her own right.