Playboy - The Celebrities - 2006

The enduring success story of Hugh Hefner's Playboy, which remains unbroken even after half a century, is not only due to the interesting interviews that are so often referred to. It is, of course, not only that, but above all the photos -- to put it plainly: the photos of naked women. Indeed, such photos can be found in various other more or less erotic glossy publications. And in some of these magazines you will surely find artistically demanding shots by renowned photographers that are hardly inferior to those in Playboy. But no one has managed to get so many stars to pose completely naked or in the most revealing erotic poses for them as Playboy. If you want to know why that is, you will find the answer in this magnificently equipped volume, which, based on these very photographs of prominent contemporaries, looks back over five decades of Playboy. It began with a bang: the first Playboy showed -- in the fifties! -- the naked Marilyn Monroe, writhing in a seductive pose on a red sheet. Hefner had the issue published in December 1953 without a date because he himself had the greatest doubts whether there would actually be a second issue. But the photograph by Tom Kelly from 1949, historically speaking, as Hugh Hefner summarizes in his foreword, came at the right moment. "Even if she hadn’t planned it, Marilyn revolutionized the nation’s attitude toward nakedness and self-promotion. She proved as the first actress that posing nude for Playboy can advance a career and not necessarily spell its end." And since then numerous stars have undressed for the magazine's photographers (among others: John Derek, Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, Richard Fegley) as well as Anita Ekberg (1956) or Ursula Andress (1965) as well as Melanie Griffith (1976), Raquel Welch (1979), Bo Derek (1980), Kim Basinger (1983), Madonna (1985), Brigitte Nielsen (1987), Farrah Fawcett (1995), Nancy Sinatra (1995), Naomi Campbell (1999) or Anna Nicole Smith (2001), to name only a few of the celebrities gathered here. Some have also posed for Playboy first and then became famous, such as Cindy Crawford (1988) or Pamela Anderson (1991, 1992, 1994). A successful retrospective