“The picture is antithetical to the male gaze. I hope it’s now a woman’s idea of what a feminist publication can be, what feminist values are, and how a magazine can elevate them.”įor the relaunch cover, the actress Chloë Sevigny, 45 and nine months pregnant, posed naked for her friend Mario Sorrenti, a visitor from the male spectrum. I thought deeply about what a feminist publication could be, what it could achieve, what stories it should tell and how they’re told. “Who creates images is important, and the politics of gender has been woven through my work. I wanted to create a magazine that could offer an alternate point of view – the feminine,” Parrott says.

“The world we all live in was created by men, and so it is centred around male values. The latest Playgirl centrefold features nudity, but from the perspective of vulnerability. It carries a lightness of touch, refreshing without being oblivious, and redolent of a surrendered but not abandoned life as much else teeters. It’s best seen as a creative enterprise, hopefully to be repeated, headed by Parrott and executed over two years with the backing of neophyte publisher Jack Lindley Kuhns. Playgirl, almost by definition, is an oddity at this juncture when the publishing business is in a precarious state. Women wrote about losing their virginity Dossier talked to the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat Parrott, who once ran art photographer Nan Goldin’s studio, went to photograph fashion in Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast. Parrott, a photographer and mother of three, is the former editor of Dossier, a New York-based magazine that in a co-operative and hip fashion championed social and racial diversity, the female gaze, and other aspects of progressive 2020 enlightenment, well ahead of the media industry, and perhaps society at large.ĭossier played a part in launching the careers of Cass Bird, Harley Weir, Zoë Ghertner and Bibi Borthwick, who have come to define the post-male-gaze aesthetic in fashion photography. Indeed, the magazine’s opening essay, by writer T Cole Rachel, talks about the irony of a magazine that was intended for women being co-opted by men – even if those men were gay. It was interesting for a couple of years, then it was sold and resold, and it became what I thought of as a gay porn magazine.” “Everything they did in Playboy, they did in Playgirl. “They’re really fabulous in so many ways, but they do look like a man’s idea of what a feminist publication would be,” Playgirl’s editor-in-chief, Skye Parrott, told the Observer. Playgirl, a notionally feminist title, simply countered Playboy’s Norman Mailer with Maya Angelou, Hunter S Thompson with Margaret Atwood, and matched its male centrefolds – pose for pose, Speedos (or less) for lingerie (or less) – with those of Playboy’s women.

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