Fifty years ago this year, photographer Bruce McBroom draped a Mexican blanket from the back of his truck over a wall in Farrah Fawcett’s Los Angeles backyard, and the picture he took that afternoon became the best-selling poster in history. Fawcett did her own hair and makeup and wore a red one-piece pulled from her own closet — no stylist, no crew beyond McBroom, according to Biography.com‘s account of the shoot. The image turned a 29-year-old actress on the edge of stardom into one of the decade’s most recognized faces, and it was shot before Charlie’s Angels even premiered that September, meaning the poster made her famous before the show did. Half a century later, both the poster and the suit that made it are still around to prove it happened.

A Backyard, a Blanket, and No Plan

Fawcett had already sat for two other photographers and rejected both sets of pictures before recommending McBroom herself, per Biography.com. She directed her own hair and makeup, selected the final image herself, and, notably, owned the copyright to the photograph outright, according to the Smithsonian’s official account of the donation. The swimsuit itself wasn’t a stylist’s pull or a designer loan; it came out of her own closet, and records at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History identify it simply as a Harbour Casuals one-piece, nylon and lycra, the kind of suit sold in ordinary department stores that summer. She reportedly chose a one-piece over a bikini in part to cover a scar from childhood surgery, a practical decision that ended up shaping the whole image.

A Poster Nobody Could Stop Buying

Ohio-based Pro Arts released the shot as a 20-by-28-inch offset lithograph, and it did not slow down. By March of 1977, fewer than nine months after the shoot, it had already sold five million copies; total sales eventually passed 12 million, according to the Smithsonian, a figure the Poster House museum’s own catalog record repeats and calls “reputed to be the best-selling poster in history.” A separate retrospective from Antique Trader puts first-year sales at six million copies, sold at three dollars apiece. Because Fawcett owned the copyright, she collected royalties on every one of them, reportedly around $400,000 per Biography.com, a modest cut relative to the total, of a phenomenon that ended up on more American bedroom walls than almost anything else printed that decade.

The Whole Collection Ends Up in a Museum Case

The suit didn’t disappear into a landfill or a costume-shop bin, and it didn’t travel to the Smithsonian alone. In February 2011, Fawcett’s nephew Greg Walls and her longtime partner Ryan O’Neal donated the red swimsuit, the original poster itself, her personal Charlie’s Angels script book, a Farrah Fawcett swimsuit jigsaw puzzle, a 1976 “Farrah Phenomenon” issue of TV Guide, a 1976 Time cover, and both an original 1977 Farrah Fawcett doll and a “Farrah’s Glamour Center” hairstyling toy to the National Museum of American History, according to the museum’s official announcement of the gift. Then-museum director Brent D. Glass said in that same release that “Farrah Fawcett has made an enduring impression on American popular culture,” adding that the museum was “pleased to welcome this donation into our entertainment collections.” The swimsuit isn’t currently on public display, per the Smithsonian’s object record, but its place in the national collection is its own kind of confirmation — a three-dollar poster and a department-store swimsuit, both preserved as artifacts of a specific American moment. Even the poster’s paper trail has become collectible on its own: a copy that once belonged to Fawcett sold at Heritage Auctions for $1,000, Antique Trader reported.

Fifty years on, what’s kept the image alive isn’t a marketing push or a corporate reissue — nobody engineered this comeback. It’s that an unposed backyard photo, shot against a truck blanket with zero art direction and a suit from her own drawer, still reads as more genuine than most images produced with a full styling team today. That tends to be the pattern with the objects that outlast their decade: the ones with the least polish are usually the ones people keep coming back to.