Phill’s New Playmate

0:00Whether you're renting or paying a mortgage, one of your biggest monthly expenses should be working harder for you. That's where BILT comes in. BILT is the membership for where you live that rewards you with points on every housing payment, wherever you live. BILT started by rewarding rent, but now you can earn points on mortgage payments too. So every time you make a housing payment, you're earning points you can redeem toward flights with partners like United or Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and more. Because I travel so much for work, I use my points toward a hotel stay, anything that turns a regular month into something to look forward to.

0:39And one of the most underrated perks, the neighborhood concierge. They can help you lock in restaurant reservations, book workout classes, or discover new local spots, all while you're being rewarded at more than 45 ,000 partners. It really does feel like an added layer to your day-to-day life. It's simple. Being a renter or a homeowner is better with Built. Join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com slash fashion. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash fashion. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you.

1:43average 12-month savings of$946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary.

1:56Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Sherman Ritter Puck's fashion and beauty memo line sheet and today with me on the show is Philip Bacardi, editor-in-chief of Playboy. We chat about his life as a digital native making magazines, Carol G, Katie Grand, The Sex Recession, and so much more.

2:22Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries. Line Sheet is scoopy, analytical, and above all, fun. Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment, media, sports, politics, finance, the art world, and much more. If you're interested, listeners of Fashion People get a discount.

2:58Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join Puck or start a free trial. happy friday everyone hope you're having a great week it was certainly a gorgeous one in pretty much every place that any of you exist oh actually didn't it wasn't there a freak snow storm in italy last last week anyway this week in line sheet there is just so much happening We have Devil Wears Prada discourse, new intel on the future of Armani, Met Gala table reveals, the inside story on the relaunch of Gap Beauty. Lots of scoops, lots of fun stuff, just a whole lot. Enjoy it and enjoy this conversation with Phil, who spells his name with two L's FYI.

3:48Philip Picardi, welcome to Fashion People. I can't believe you've never been on. It's crazy. I mean, I can. I haven't been a fashion person for a minute. I know, but you could have, you know, the Tuesday show is just commentary. It's, you would have been, you could have dipped in. Before we get started, what did you have for breakfast this morning? What time is it in LA? It's, what time is it in LA? It's 12.50 PM. 12.50, okay. I'm eating a salmon rice bowl currently. This morning I had an RX bar, two beef jerky sticks and protein with 50 grams of whey protein in it. And PB2, peanut butter powder.

4:23Does that mean so I don't want to I don't want to reveal your weight if you don't want people to know you're very, very buff. I weigh 200 grams of protein. Do you eat 220 grams of protein a day? 255 right now. And that is Katie Grant's fault. Actually, I'm on a really strict diet because of her, because she asked me to appear in perfect, which I'm not even sure I'm allowed to say. but I'm letting you all know that I'm torturing myself for Katie Grant at the moment. So Phil, without getting graphic, how do you process that in your body? You have to have fiber. Like is it, do you, fiber. Okay, that's the answer.

5:07Fiber is the macro that is like probably the most important macro for overall health and wellness. But you have to make sure you are taking, if I take psyllium husk in my smoothies, which saves my life. Otherwise, I would have a hard day. Or a soft day, depending. Oh my God, I love it. Okay. The reason that you are on this week, you could be on any week. Honestly, Phil, I just read the new issue of Playboy. It's so good. You're really, really good oh my god you're really good i was worried you were gonna i love it i love it also but is it only for gay men and straight women no it's no i actually don't think it is well and we don't have a lot of time with you so i want to get into every but phil it's awesome i like it so much so first of all a lot of people who are listening to this know you and know your background but can you give your like elevator pitch of who you are and lead that into how you ended up running Playboy magazine and the relaunch of it and all of that.

6:16Sure. I grew up at Condé Nast. I moved to New York specifically with the express intention of working for Anna Wintour one day. So I interned at Teen Vogue at the age of 18 and ended up the chief content officer by the time I was 25. I led an editorial revolution at Teen Vogue, not like to over or self-aggrandize, but I pivoted Teen Vogue's content strategy away from just fashion and beauty and towards covering politics, wellness, sexual health, and social movements, things that I thought were more reflective of the actual audience that Teen Vogue was targeting at the time. And we became one of the fastest growing women's magazines in America.

6:54We won many awards and got a lot of attention for an article called Donald Trump is Gaslighting America. From there, I founded Condé Nast's first dedicated brand launch in 13 years since Portfolio shuttered, which was called Them, an LGBTQ platform that I launched with Anna and Pam Druckerman. And then I decamped from Condé to be the editor-in-chief of Out Magazine. That was not a great idea. Ill-fated. I worked with a great team and did some beautiful work. But wow. I left out after a year of numerous scandals of them not paying their freelancers, and I decided to find God. I ended up enrolling in Harvard Divinity School.

7:32I was working in the nonprofit sector for a couple of years after Divinity School, randomly was the chief brand officer of Weight Watchers for a year. Let's not talk about it. And Playboy called right as I was exiting Weight Watchers, and they were asking for help. And I had been in touch with Cooper Hefner and Ben Cohn many, many, many times over the past few years. And finally, the time was right, and it felt right and exciting. And so I've been consulting with them since November and joined in March. So can you just explain who owns Playboy now and what the sort of business model is? Playboy is a publicly traded company.

8:10So Ben Cohn is a CEO here. He hired me. And I best understand Playboy's business model as a global consumer lifestyle brand. Like we are we are much better known, I would say, right now for our licensing businesses and the products that we sell, especially to Gen Z. And I look at the role of reviving media as actually sort of a top of funnel strategy to drive cultural awareness and conversation for the brand that helps to enhance the licensing portfolio while also building back our literary tradition and our subscriber base. Okay, so it's interesting because there has been so much like Playboy jewelry, Playboy fake tattoos, like it's just, it's everywhere.

8:53And what was their pitch to you to start to relaunch the media itself and what this first issue like is it being widely distributed on newsstands that still exists like what's the distribution strategy what's the cadence going to be as you know now like what can you say about the strategy for the media platform specifically okay so their pitch to me initially was we need help because we're trying to bring the magazine back and make it something that people talk about. And we also eventually want to apply that same philosophy to audio, podcasts, and of course, video. And so I found that to be a pretty compelling challenge for Playboy in this day and age.

9:40And I just think that right now, when you read the literature about Gen Z and the sex recession, and you read about the male loneliness epidemic in particular. Playboy has a very important and interesting role to play as a provocateur. It's like at a moment when we are more alone than ever and we're more distant from each other than ever, this is a magazine that is saying, please go touch each other. Like as in don't just touch grass, but like, please fuck. You know what I mean? And enjoy it. And also make sure the woman that you're having with it enjoys it too. So I really love that premise. I think it's very provocative.

10:14And I also think it is high time that we understand wholeheartedly sex as a cultural and political force. And that's something as a queer person I've had to understand. But I don't know that that's something that all heterosexual people, especially men, understand so innately. Yeah. So Playboy traditionally was for straight men, I would assume. It can't just be for that. Now, in the same way that GQ and Esquire and these magazines for men aren't really just for men anymore. And there was always that whole thing of like, I replay boy for the articles. It was like a big joke in the 80s or whatever.

10:53Yeah. Taking all that history. What do you think? Like, I understand what you're saying about. We don't talk about sex in the right way in media or culture at all. I think it's like the sort of puritanical extremism that has come out that has affected everyone. And it does feel like everything is just so sanitized now. Even looking back at, I don't know, sex comedies from 10 years ago. When there's one now, it's like this big deal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you thought about like, who is this magazine going to be for? Or how am I going to speak to straight men, people of all interests?

11:43Because that's the other thing is like, it's not just like gay, straight, bisexual now. There are like a million different, a lot of the next generation like Gen Alpha, they might not even consider that. I mean, you know, especially on the coasts. coasts but like who who are you like this is who is this for is it still primarily for straight men are you do you feel like you have a mission to make straight men more comfortable with sex or or look at better art because the because then we need to get into the like actual imagery which is really great and and some of the um some of the features you did I thought it was just really interesting and it was so on point and I'm curious how fast the turnaround was because so much of what is in there is like really in the water right now online.

12:35And you did a good job at pinpointing that stuff. But yeah, like, who do you think this is for? Do you think it's like, do you want to make like young straight guys better at, at like dealing with women? Like, what is your, what is your mission with it? I definitely don't want to position our mission as anything that's like paternalistic towards men. But I do think Playboy has to be unabashed about wanting men to own their desire and at the same time about men owning their desire to understand what that feels like for women has always been a part of Playboy's moat, right? And so, like, for a long time, the magazine in the 60s and 70s was the vanguard of sexual liberation as a movement.

13:17But they started to understand you can't stand for sexual liberation unless you stand for other kinds of liberation, which is why we published the interview with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. And we had Gore Vidal and James Baldwin writing for us. And Betty Friedan sat down for the Playboy interview, you know, culture and sex are absolutely intertwined. And Playboy was just kind of at the vanguard of making that super clear in a super artistic and compelling way. But, you know, I interviewed the curator at Salon 94 for a piece that I did for the issue on John Cassere, the erotic artist.

13:49And she had a great quote, which was like, we live in both a prudish, right, and pornographic era, where on the one hand, we're rolling back abortion, and we have beauty queens in the White House, and it's about the trad wife. And on the other hand, you have never been able to access a naked body being penetrated more easily than you can right now. And so I think restoring the art form to sex and desire has been a really interesting and compelling moat that definitely men are the target audience. 25 to 45 is my sweet spot for sure. but you know women have always been a part of the playboy universe and i would argue they've always been the center of it so um women are make up a large percent of our audience and we want them to feel good about what we're publishing too for sure yeah the john cassari thing was the thing that really like struck me because that imagery i don't know if there's an exhibit of his work up right now or somewhere it was just been around on yeah so it's just been online a lot recently and I think like him and and Ro Etheridge the photographer artist like that work it all is of the same it's all connected and I feel like on my Instagram there's just a lot of re regramming of of that kind of work and those kinds of images right now like it's very intimate but it's not and that and that's the thing I mean the porn epidemic of like kids who have been online since I don't know the early 2000s and like how that's transformed their sexual lives that's a whole I'm sure you're gonna get into that every single issue in some way or another maybe not directly but I thought that the imagery that you put together through all of the different editorials and pulling in even on stuff that had nothing, doesn't like directly have to do with sex.

15:53It felt to me, it's interesting because it felt like you were on the internet in a print publication. That's the goal. Phil, give this man some advertising money. it's amazing like it just I'm tired it's it's 9 30 at night I just looked at this an hour ago who knows but um but it I really felt like okay this feels like literally was popping up on my Instagram suggested for you every day because there's a there's a lot of in fashion right now a there's a lot of lingerie brands that are emerging which I noticed like you have very interesting advertising so one I saw Luar which I thought was interesting um so it's like a lot of brands that maybe wouldn't typically have an advertising page you have Lure the new Melanie Bender fragrance which I'm supposed to interview her for the podcast some point at some point soon oh she's a good interview FYI I can't wait but um but like Cuckoo Intimates is it you you used it I could see some of the like underwear and stuff that was used in editorials was also like advertisers, things like that.

17:12And so it's an interesting, I don't know. There's just like a lot happening in the lingerie market right now. So it feels like a big opportunity for you. Victoria's Secret should obviously advertise in Playboy. um but that part of it too there's just something happening in fashion right now where people are starting to be more interested in sex in a real way whereas I think post-covid it felt like rum springa-esque and it was just like sex sex sex and that felt extreme and not real either and now people are trying to like get back to something real and I think that you really captured it in this issue of like sex can be fashion.

17:53In fact, you know, all of that that we all know, it can still exist even in this like super sanitized times. Yeah, I thank you so much. I think one of the things that I set out to do with this issue was I worked with Marie Souter, who I've worked with basically my whole career. And she was most recently the chief creative officer of Glossier, but worked with me at Teen Vogue. And we were really intentional about casting women photographers for a lot of the issue. So all of the playmates are photographed by women for the issue. And of course, the cover is photographed by Grace Sorrenti. And so what I found by being on set with, for the first time in my life with naked women, I've never been on a nude shoot before ever in my career.

18:33As you can imagine, between Teen Vogue and Weight Watchers, not a lot of space for that. But I found that there was this really, there was a desire to be sexually untethered and to be sexually free. And there was also a desire at the same time to be treated respectfully and taken seriously while you do it. And I'll never forget when we shot Lauren Summer with Alana Herlihy, Lauren popped off her bra to start her topless shots. And all of the crew started applauding for her and hooting and hollering and stuff. And it was all mostly women on set. But Lauren just felt so good. You know what I mean?

19:08Like it was a dream come true for her. And that like there was a tenderness and I think a sensuality to the images that still conveyed fantasy. But but that I think invite you to think about sex differently. And we have to think really hard about that because you can get sex anywhere. And so the reason you buy this magazine, it has to be a different view of sex that you can't just find by tapping on your phone. And it still has to feel like it belongs to this incredible artistic canon of this 70, like almost 75 year old publication.

19:41Listen up. I need your attention for a moment. Chevy Drive Chicago has a massive opportunity for you. They're giving you the chance to win the Chevy you actually want. There's no mystery here and no luck of the draw. Surprise, prize. You choose the Chevy. You pick it, you win it, and you drive it. Chevy's lineup is built for whatever the road throws at you. If you need a truck that's as dependable as they come, the Silverado is ready to work hard and play even harder. If you've been thinking about making the switch to electric, the Equinox EV makes it a seamless transition. Quiet, powerful, and big on tech features.

20:14From the capability of the Equinox to the striking design of the Blazer, there's a Chevy that fits your life perfectly. Whether you want gas or electric, the choice is entirely yours. Entering is simple. Just head to chevydrivechicago.com to sign up. While you're there, check out the Chevy Truck Month incentives and find your local dealer. Chevy Drive Chicago, official partner of the Chicago Bears. Don't just dream about it. Go win it at ChevyDriveChicago.com.

21:05We're all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts. I thought your contributor list was interesting because it was a lot of people I had never heard of. How did you and your team kind of, A, how did you put your team together? Marie, for sure, is your ride or die. and I noticed her agency a lot of her creative people were were part of putting it together but how did you put the team together and how did you find the journalists because you talk about some of the sort of bigger features that you have in there because it it's an interesting mix that again just feels like it could be an online conversation but felt really rich and alive in imprint?

21:54Yeah. There's no full-time editorial staff at Playboy. I have to build them over the course of the next year or two, right? And so I'm working with an army of freelancers and kind of like contract permalancers, basically. And so Marie and her agency staffed most of the creative department. We have a couple of in-house creatives here at Playboy. And then I retained a couple of people from their past issue in November, mostly and namely Magdalene Taylor, who's a sub-stack, you know pseudo celebrity who's our senior editor and jesse um with jesse will who comes from esquire and rolling stone background who is our executive editor so you talk about the feature packages and the builds like it was really the two of them or the three of us working on stuff and also we made to your point we made a lot of last minute cuts to the issue to crash other stories in because they felt more relevant or it felt like we could just run those stories on digital sooner and get more wind on it but i am a digital native like i grew up in digital media not print media.

22:49So that's kind of how I think anyway. And so the features that really stuck out to me were Magdalene led a Playboy guide to meeting women in 2026. And it's a phone free guide to hooking up or dating. And three women really captained it. And it's just an advice section for guys. But we also did this incredible story called Vanished in Venezuela about a young man who got an American who got kidnapped by like basically the secret police and was held in international prison for six months and just reunited with his family at the end of the piece, which was an extraordinary work of journalism. And also we did a great, great package was on AI and intimacy.

23:29My favorite thing about that package was the first one is about AI and porn. And I notoriously have been holding the line against AI and creative fields, but there's this porn star in the piece who talks about how most of her revenue comes from chatting with guys. They pay to chat with her. They pay for custom content from her. And it causes a lot of friction and a lot of time for her. So she's using AI to build her own version of herself as a chatbot. And so there's a whole tier of subscribers that she now has and a whole new revenue stream she has that's just the AI self that they can talk to.

24:03And she builds boundaries with it. But then now they're paying and she's charging a super premium only for high paying customers to actually access her and her personal time. So I was like, this is a cool labor rights piece. You know what I mean? Like I hadn't thought of it. So I was surprised reading a lot of the stuff. And that's definitely a testament to Jesse and Magdalene and Ellen Carpenter who were on the features team. Yeah, I thought it was it felt really. When did you start putting this issue together? So mid to late November is when we is when we officially started. And then it went to print, I think, just a few weeks ago.

24:38I mean, it's still that's still pretty fast given. It really does feel, I thought one of the headlines that really caught me was this zombie law threatens the right to choose. And the deck is the law that nearly killed Playboy is back and is now it's targeting abortion pills by mail. We don't have to go into it in depth, but just the idea that you were able to find history, playboy history in a new topic I thought was really, really smart to position it, frame it that way. Yeah, I loved that piece too. That's a new column we have called Dust Bunny, where we ask a journalist to go into the archive and find a contemporary lens on something.

25:19So we're doing a lot of fun stuff with that one. And artists are actually pitching us for that too, which is cool. I was just on the phone with Jess Cuevas. I don't know if you know him, but he has something exciting for that one. Phil, you're so smart. Thank you. Thank you for reading. I also will just say it's 200 pages do you know what I mean like yeah it looks so good it was a big book so let's talk editorials and and spreads and like how did you decide who you want to Katie Grand having her style that cover to me Katie is just like makes everything look sexy so it's so obvious but like how did you start don't reveal too much because I obviously don't want anyone to be mad at me but I had to call her like five days before the shoot because I was like I need a favor and I was like I know you're in the UK but I need you to come to the Pacific Palisades and she was like yeah sure darling like you know I can just got on the plane so anyways I owe Katie a solid and I love her dearly but yeah having let's let's talk about the cover and that and the concept and what you wanted to achieve there because I thought I think the photos look amazing thank you yeah I'm super proud of the cover.

26:34Carol was just the right, Carol G was just the right person. She's headlining Coachella on Sunday. We dropped the cover on Tuesday. I mean, and she, the one thing I knew about Carol was that we, I knew we could get sexy from her. Sexiness has been a part of her image. So she understands sex as an art form and sexuality as an expression. So I knew that we were in safe territory trying to push it with her and have a conversation artistically with her. And she wanted gray, you know what I mean? Like she, she felt comfortable with, with gray. And so when we had Gray and Carol on board, I was like, it's going to be beautiful.

27:07What also really added depth to the shoot was that it was mostly just the two of them together on set, right? Like these are very intimate photos. And so Carol needed to feel safe. And so we wanted her to feel safe. So I think that was also a part of what made it special. But we did say we wanted to be careful about the line between objectification and adoration. and I wanted it to lean more into adoration. And with Marie, you know, all of Marie's pictures that she's produced throughout her career have really lent into a rawness, right? Something that's not hyper-produced or overly done. And I think that's what feels so special to me about the cover.

27:47And then Paola Ramos is an old friend of mine. My friend Cleo told me to, actually told me, I was with Cleo when we confirmed Carol. And she was like, you have to get Paola to write it. And so I called Paola and she said yes right away. but she's an Emmy award-winning journalist right and Jorge Ross's daughter you know what I mean like there's a royalty to Paola and the ability to conduct the interview in Spanish was huge and so we got some great soundbites from Carol about what it means to be Latina at this moment in time and her upcoming Coachella performance and her recent breakup and so the the story went went pretty wide when you talk with Marie about like what is as you know I wrote a book about Victoria's secret oh so and playboy did come up in it but not because there was at one point hugh hefner's daughter invited people from victoria's secret to chicago and we talked to some of them and and it was interesting but the victoria's secret they were always always talking about what is sexy now and i think i think about it all the time especially as our culture has gotten so extreme and chat bots and dolls and you know what I mean like it's just become so extreme that like the idea that people actually still have sex like it's it's this new generation it's like will they have sex we like they are not having as much sex right so you're not that's right when you and Marie talked about like what you wanted because the images are all different and I thought it was interesting.

29:23There's tons of close-ups on like mouths and shoes and I love that. And it feels very fashion and very fashion right now. Like it is in conversation with the new Stephen Maizel, Alaya and Versace, both Maizel. Like it's in conversation with some of the more raw is not the right word but like tangible imagery that's coming out of fashion because so much of it is intangible how did you all talk about like what you wanted the feeling of it to be because I just I thought it was like really really fun and and great to look at and there's just so few I'm reading being in Paris I'm buying more magazines and I'm looking at more editorials but I just find most of it so uninspiring now what what were you all like what words did you put around the images that you that you made every playmate had different words um so every playmate had a different mood so Carlotta was like our classic blonde and we wanted her in the jungle of Costa Rica and we really wanted it to be lush she's the first playmate to ever photograph herself.

30:41So it was like more in the classic Playboy tradition for January, but still felt fashion to me because Carlotta reads that way. But then when we got to Miss February, Lauren is so sexy and she's in lingerie on her Instagram all the time. She has like two million followers for it. So we actually wanted to take her into a completely different territory, which was the Vargas pinup girl, 50s like nod to old sex and let her play as sort of a performer there. And so that was like more about vintage and a soft glamour. Then Taylor Hale is this like the first black woman to win Big Brother. She wrote this crazy essay for that accompanied her piece.