|
Playboy changes with the times... sort of In a crowded hotel suite on the 25th floor of the Westin Hotel this week, women came to be considered candidates for Playboy's Playmate of the Millennium. They came on lucite heels, with deep tans, glittering bikinis and eyeshadow, opalescent lipstick and dustings of glitter on cleavage. Some had practised smiles and banter, others sat by themselves and seemed tired. Some emphatically didn't want their pictures taken by journalists: "People have their secrets in life," one explained. "She has to be a beautiful woman with a well-proportioned body," Playboy special projects publicist Karen Ring Borgstrom told the Mirror. "And she should be self-confident enough to talk to people like you." Borgstrom, 46, was once a Bunny herself, and looks it. Her high school girlfriends in Bethany, Oklahoma, double-dared her to try out on a Bunny hunt in 1971: "I had the biggest breasts." To her surprise she was chosen, and posed in the October 1974 and December 1982 issues. She attended the infamous Playboy Mansion parties in the '70s, at the height of the famous culture of bachelor hedonism that Playboy invented. Borgstrom said she had the time of her life. Now, Playboy has become a respectable institution. Julia Lavell, 21, who was also dared by her friends to try out, says her mother recommended she pose: "'It's Playboy. It's classy,' she told me." Would she feel weird about posing nude? Not at all: "I think it's empowering. You do it because, wow! you look so beautiful." --Jacquie Charlton
|