Posted on by Taylor
“The warning comes early, in the editorial of the very first issue of Playboy magazine with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and the promise of her naked body inside:
“‘We don’t mind telling you in advance––we plan on spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.’
“The playboy man is an indoors man. But why ‘we don’t mind’? Why would they mind? What’s there to mind? The editorial is clear. Other magazines for men ‘spend all their time out-of-doors––thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams.’ The playboy is a different kind of animal. He is also a hunter but the metropolitan apartment is his natural habitat. He knows everything about it and keeps adjusting it to better catch his prey. In fact, he cares more about the lure than the catch. It is the apartment itself that is the ultimate object of desire. The playboy and his magazine are all about architecture.”
Beatrix Colomina. “Radical Interiority: Playboy Architecture 1953-79.” Volume Fall 2012: 50. Print.