10 Things I Learned from the Kate Moss Issue of Playboy (NSFW-ish)
SUNDAY MORNING.
TEXTING:
HIM: Do you want coffee?
ME: Yes! Lots. And also. Would you please get me a copy of the Kate Moss Playboy?
HIM: Sure. Where would I get that?
ME: I don’t know? Barnes and Noble?
I don’t usually read Playboy. Actually, I never read Playboy. Not even for the articles! Which, some people claim to totally read it for the articles, but I never have. Well, that’s not entirely true. In high school, I once plowed through a stack of Playboys from the 60s that I found (as one does in corny coming-of-age movies and also, apparently, real life) in the closet of my father’s childhood bedroom. I did, in fact, read some of the articles in those, because Vladimir Nabokov was interviewed more than once, and I was going through the most intense time of my infatuation with all things Nabokov. I don’t want to romanticize my Nabokov-love, though, because it was really a pretty grim period of my life during which I went around espousing his opinions as my own (i.e. the oh-so-delicate snort-and-eye-roll combo I’d pull out whenever someone mentioned Dostoyevsky, or any writer who wrote in dialect, even Faulkner). I was pretty terrible back then. But not terrible enough not to look at the photos. Which, I liked them! I have eyes. And those eyes respond well to soft focus and gentle smiles and round, pink things—all of which were in abundance in those decades-old magazines.
But nothing about the Playboy of the 60s seemed to have anything to do with the Playboy I came of age with, the Playboy of the late 90s and early 2000s, when it seemed like those awful Playboy Bunny, Swarovski crystal, stick-on tattoos were on the too-tan shoulder of every Stern student walking the streets of New York. Playboy wasn’t relevant anymore, at least not to anyone I knew. Every generation gets the Playboy it deserves, I guess, and it seemed we deserved crazy amounts of air-brushing and smooth, hair-free bodies. Our generation, it seemed, was boring as fuck. Boring as a really bad, bad fuck.
But so, Kate Moss. As soon as I heard that Kate Moss was going to be on the cover of the 60th Anniversary Issue of Playboy, I got really excited. It’s Kate Moss! It would have to be good, right? Once the cover was teased, I was even more excited because she even made the old Bunny costume look fresh again. And while Playboy centerfolds were never that interesting to me, Kate Moss has always been incredibly interesting to me and, well, to everyone, right? And she was going to be interviewed! By Tom Jones! How fucking weird! The sphinx would speak. I had to have this magazine. Maybe I’d even wind up liking the articles in the issue and subscribe like some other people I work with just know in general. So I took some initiative in the form of having a friend buy the issue for me (now that’s initiative!) and bring it to my apartment on the kind of cold, gray morning where I’m uninclined to do anything other than look at porn and drink coffee (so basically, every fall/winter/spring Sunday…summers I drink iced coffee), and I opened my mind in the hopes that maybe I had found a new magazine to read. After all, I love magazines. So I would also be reading Playboy because of my love of journalism. And also for the naked pictures. But so, open mind! What would I learn with my open mind?