A photograph of half-naked men, allegedly taken at a beauty contest in 1919, is being circulated on social networks. We checked whether this description corresponds to reality.

During 2021, a historical photograph with almost identical captions was posted by several million-plus publics on VKontakte. Among them - "5 interesting facts", "Interesting Facts", "Brainstorm", "Style. Fashion. Beauty. Vintage" And "Psychology". Users of other social networks also paid attention to the photo (for example, Facebook And Twitter), as well as blog authors on "Yandex.Zene", TJournal, Reddit, LiveJournal And Sports.ru.

Our colleagues from the American fact-checking project Snopes discoveredthat this photo first appeared on the Internet about ten years ago. At that time her used as an illustration in notes on swimsuits of the early 20th century. In the Russian-language segment of the Internet, the situation was similar - the picture can be found in 2017 publications about history men's briefs and 2018 about history swimwear. The authors of these publications did not write about any beauty contest.

Snopes with link to Angus Trumble, former director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, reportsthat the image that went viral was taken from a postcard. According to Trumble, a friend brought him a similar postcard from a museum store in Germany. The caption read: “Schöner durch Streifen. Mitteleuropa um 1910" ("Stripes made [men] more handsome. Central Europe, circa 1910"). Similar signature accompanies postcard, which is sold on a specialized German website. Trumble in his comment doesn't mentionthat the photograph was taken for a beauty contest.

Thus, although the photograph has been known for many years, it has only recently been circulated as a beauty pageant photograph. However, there is no evidence that such a signature is true. Apparently, the photograph was actually taken in the early 20th century and depicts six men in Central Europe around 1910. The beauty pageant caption was probably created to attract attention on social media.