The first "Miss World Pageant" winner of 1951. From the Wall St Journal:
One evening in 1951, over dinner at their family’s home in Stockholm, Kiki Håkansson’s older brother—who had once told her she had “the face of an angel and the body of a pig—proposed entering her in a coming beauty pageant.
Håkansson said she wasn’t interested. Her brother entered her anyway.
Next thing Håkansson knew—and in retrospect, much of her life would unfold in this same, less-than-fully-autonomous way—she was at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, competing in the first-ever Miss World pageant.
Miss World is now the longest-running major international beauty competition in the world, having preceded Miss Universe by one year. It remains a glitzy annual event and has expanded its focus to include contestants’ humanitarian work. But that first summer, when it was a part of a much larger event, the point of the competition was simple: Its official title was “The Girl Bikini Contest of the Festival of Great Britain.” (Because contestants from various countries entered, the press nicknamed the contest “Miss World,” and the next year the pageant officially adopted that title.)
One evening in 1951, over dinner at their family’s home in Stockholm, Kiki Håkansson’s older brother—who had once told her she had “the face of an angel and the body of a pig—proposed entering her in a coming beauty pageant.
Håkansson said she wasn’t interested. Her brother entered her anyway.
Next thing Håkansson knew—and in retrospect, much of her life would unfold in this same, less-than-fully-autonomous way—she was at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, competing in the first-ever Miss World pageant.
Miss World is now the longest-running major international beauty competition in the world, having preceded Miss Universe by one year. It remains a glitzy annual event and has expanded its focus to include contestants’ humanitarian work. But that first summer, when it was a part of a much larger event, the point of the competition was simple: Its official title was “The Girl Bikini Contest of the Festival of Great Britain.” (Because contestants from various countries entered, the press nicknamed the contest “Miss World,” and the next year the pageant officially adopted that title.)