Playgirl

Playgirl 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. 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 Playboy and Penthouse instead. In partnership with William Miles Jr., an area advertising executive, Lambert founded Playgirl in Century City, California, in 1973 with a $20,000 investment.

The Lambert years

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, 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. 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.

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 conservative time. 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. 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.

The Ritter years

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. 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. Results were mixed and in 1986, with readership declines 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 and was subsequently acquired by Drake Publishers, Inc.

Drake Publishers, Inc.

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. After Drake's acquisition of the title, the restructured magazine began featuring simplified beefcake-style covers (usually highlighting a model from the issue 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. 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.

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, repositioned as a niche, adult-oriented publication.

Crescent Publishing Group and Blue Horizon Media

The 1993 acquisition of Drake by Crescent Publishing Group, the owner of hardcore magazine like High Society and other pornographic titles, cemented Playgirl's reputation as an adult title and, as a result, the number of celebrities and newsmakers sitting for interviews or pictorials rapidly decreased.

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."