Playgirl

History[edit]

The magazine was founded in 1973 by Los Angeles-based nightclub owner Douglas Lambert, who'd initially explored creating a men's lifestyle magazine featuring nude women to compete with Hugh Hefner's Playboy.^[4] At the suggestion of his wife, and inspired by the success of Helen Gurley Brown's use of male nudes in Cosmopolitan magazine (including a shoot featuring film star Burt Reynolds), Lambert refashioned his idea as a feminist response to movement as a response to Playboy and Penthouse instead.^[4][5] In partnership with William Miles Jr., an area advertising executive, Lambert founded Playgirl in Century City, California, in 1973 with a $20,000 investment.^[4]


After two test issues (featuring race car driver Mike Hiss and the Hager Twins, country singers and stars of TV's Hee Haw, in seminude centerfolds), the magazine, initially styled as Playgirl: The Magazine for Women formally debuted in June 1973,^[4][6] featuring television and film star Lyle Waggoner as centerfold and an interview and nude photoshoot with actor Ryan McDonald. Editorial in the issue included a travel pictorial on Hong Kong, long-form interview with actress Cloris Leachman, original fiction by Jillian Charles, and a guide to selecting artwork for the home.^[7][6] The first issue sold out quickly, selling 600,000 copies in four days, and for the rest of the 1970s, the magazine would sell, on average, 1.5 million copies each month.^[4]


From its inception, Playgirl has featured full frontal nude and semi-nude (rear and obscured frontal) pictorials of men, except for a 10-month period in 1986 and 1987, when following the sale and reorganization of the magazine, new ownership mandated a new approach in the hopes of appealing to a wider readership in an increasingly politically and culturally time.^[4][8] Editorially, the magazine covered hot-button sociopolitical issues like abortion and equal rights for the majority of its print run. In the magazine's first decade, it typically did so via long-form journalism, commentary, and feature interviews from well-regarded staff and freelance writers.^[4][6] Through the mid-1980s, in-depth interviews with A-list celebrities and newsmakers, including Maya Angelou, Larry Flynt, Barbra Streisand, and Jane Fonda, were frequently paired with commentary from cultural essayists such as Angelou, and original fiction from both emergent and established writers, including Erica Jong and Truman Capote.^[5][6]


In 1977, Lambert sold Playgirl to Ira Ritter who took over as publisher, continuing the magazine's editorial style and direction (including male nude pictorials) but leaning more publicly into the magazine's feminist and journalistic bona fides.^[4][5] Covers in Ritter's first years centered women, often alone, to highlight female perspectives on politics and other cultural issues, deemphasizing the nude photography and erotic themes still central to the magazine, in terms of magazine's public-facing image and newsstand presence.^[6] Ironically during this period the magazine featured its first pictorial with an erection, when 21-year-old man of the month model Geoff Minger became the magazine's first centerfold to display a full erection in the historic January 1980 issue.^[9] Results were mixed and in 1986, compounded by bad investments by the owners (including the launch of an unsuccessful spin-off publication, Playgirl Advisor, with a more direct focus on sex, sexuality, and couples), Playgirl filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection^[10] and was subsequently acquired by Drake Publishers, Inc.^[11][5] The magazine was published by Drake from 1986 until 1993, when Drake was merged into Crescent Publishing Group, Inc.^[12]


Until the 1986 change of ownership, Playgirl's interviews, journalism, and original fiction were central to the magazine's identity and featured and promoted as such.^[13][14] Post restructuring, the magazine began featuring simplified beefcake-style covers (usually featuring a model from the issue, often in underwear or speedo-style swimwear), and implemented changes to cut costs and expand readership in an increasingly conservative and less feminist-friendly cultural environment of the late Reagan era.^[13][15] This resulted in substantial reductions in the in-depth, substantive journalism, political and social feminist commentary the magazine was known for, a decrease in non-pictorial pages, and an increase in advertising space.^[5][13]


Ultimately, the 1986-87 reorganization of the magazine failed to significantly increase general readership or improve the magazine's cultural palatability in the new environment, but did have the effect of eroding the magazine's credibility as a substantive mainstream publication that blended erotic content with substantive journalism, repositioning it as a niche, adult-oriented publication.^[4][5] The 1993 acquisition of the title by Crescent Publishing Group, the owner of hardcore magazine like High Society and other pornographic titles, cemented this reputation and, as a result, the number of celebrities and newsmakers sitting for interviews or pictorials rapidly decreased.^[5]


Crescent's experiments in the 1990s with the publication of celebrity nudes acquired from external sources -- including art nudes alleged to be actor Antonio Banderas and intrusive paparazzi photos of actor Brad Pitt (both presented as cover stories), proved short-lived after a series of expensive legal losses and settlements with Banderas, Pitt, and others. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio successfully sued to stop publication of photographs taken without his knowledge, and the pressure from Crescent to publish the photos led to the resignation of Editor-in-Chief, Ceslie Armstrong, who called the photographs "an invasion of privacy [that] I can't be associated with."^[16]


By the 2000s, Crescent had fully repositioned the title as an adult brand, relaunching Playgirl's website as a pay site primarily featuring co-branded hardcore straight pornography, and increasing explicit content in the print magazine.^[4][5] In August 2000, Crescent was charged by the Federal Trade Commission with over $180 million of online credit card fraud, some of which was alleged by the FTC to have taken place on their new Playgirl website.^[17][18] In November 2001, Crescent agreed to pay $30 million in refunds and subsequently changed its name to Blue Horizon Media, Inc.^[19]


In August 2008, the magazine announced that it would cease publication of its print edition as of the January 2009 issue.^[5] The last print issue of the magazine's initial print run was published as a January/February issue and sold on newsstands through March 2009.^[8] Playgirl was then published online through February 2010, when print publication resumed with a March issue featuring political celebrity Levi Johnston, shot by longtime Playgirl photographer Greg Weiner.^[20] In 2011, Blue Horizon sold the print rights for Playgirl and other titles to Magna Publishing Group, Inc. of Paramus, New Jersey,^[21][22] and the magazine continued to publish as a print title, approximately quarterly, until 2016, when with print subscriptions dwindling to approximately 3,000 the title ceased regular print operations.^[23][13]


In 2020, new owner Jack Lindley Kuhns, a gay man, revived the title, relaunching the "New Playgirl Magazine" with a special print edition, featuring a pregnant and nude actress Chloe Sevigny on the cover (a nod to both Playgirl's feminist roots and the magazine's early issues, which often featured women on the cover), edited by Skye Parrott.^[1][24] The issue, described by Kuhns as "part political magazine and part art magazine" featured images of nude bodies of all ethnicities and genders, as well as writing about racial injustice, trans empowerment, and body positivity and sold out immediately.^[1][25]


Since the 2020 relaunch, the magazine has moved to a regular publishing cycle as an online-only title split across two domains: Playgirl.com, a free site featuring a mix of news, features, and photo essays reside, and PlaygirlPlus.com, a subscription site where access to the publication's archives and the magazine's traditional "Man of the Month" nude photospread, modernized with additional video and multimedia content, are hosted.^[26][27] Nicole Caldwell, a former editor-in-chief during the magazine's print run, oversees the online iteration in the same capacity. Under the direction Caldwell, Boardman, and production director Daniel McKernan, the brand has refocused on the traditional male physique and art nude composition the magazine is historically known for, incorporating additional video and multi-media content, moving away from the more explicit depictions of the print magazine's final years and reembracing the magazine's roots.^[26] Both domains highlight the decades of substantive journalism, commentary, fiction, and pictorials from the magazine's archives, presenting them in newly digitized formats.^[26][27]