MANHATTAN, New York — Phillip Picardi arrives carrying a black leather jacket and a paperback copy of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno—which he’s reading for the third time this year. Dante “meets people who are alive on Earth, but their souls are in hell,” Picardi tells me. “I think it’s a fitting metaphor for what’s happening to us in this time.” But we are in Hell’s Kitchen, not hell, and it’s happy hour. I order a gin and tonic.
Picardi, 35, was in some ways a strange choice to be the editor in chief of Playboy, the seven-decade-old soft-core porn magazine best known for its iconic bunny logo and nude centerfolds. He’s a devoutly Christian graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and therefore not the kind of guy you’d expect to be overseeing a publication whose recent headlines have included “She Pegged Her Husband. He Couldn’t Get Enough.” and “I Had Sex In A Hot-Air Balloon.” He’s also gay—which some people might say is a bit like letting a vegan run a steak house.
But Picardi, who’s been in the job since March, disagrees. “Gay men are responsible, in one way, shape, or form, for almost every iconic image that has been made since the dawn of photography,” he declares from across the dimly lit table, sipping a Vesper martini. “We are stylists, we are hairstylists, we are makeup artists,” he goes on. “If there is an image of a beautiful woman that has circulated throughout the globe, I can guarantee you that there was a gay man right off camera.”
Besides, the raison d’être of Playboy has changed, now that the internet exists. “Men are not masturbating to print mags. I mean—you can. I’m not going to police how people consume our product,” Picardi says, laughing. “But it is true that Playboy used to serve a specific purpose that is no longer needed.” He is trying to “make something that does not feel like pornography, but feels like something else.”
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