Written by Kristi Beck
One thing I’ve learned in my time at Playboy is that without evolution nothing will succeed. I like to say, “If it ain’t broke, make it better,” a concept that has challenged our team ever since the magazine went quarterly in the winter of 2019. How can we take the beloved moments that Playboy has so famously presented for 66 years and push them to even greater heights?
As we closed out 2019, chatter began in our office around who would be our next Playmate of the Year. While we knew and still know what an honor the title is, we found ourselves looking at 12 fantastic women, each of whom we had spent an enormous amount of time with, and we knew all of them embodied the Playmate persona — equally and exceptionally. We wanted to make sure the brand was handling something so precious with caution and care.
Playmate of the Year (or PMOY) is a celebration I’ve seen evolve since I started at Playboy. I’ve been here almost four years, and I’ve seen several iterations of the past, sat in countless brainstorms and been a deeply invested part of this evolution. My role was initially in event planning, and I got to meet many of the Playmates early in my days at the company. I’d heard all of the stories of the previous PMOY announcements: fancy cars, massive monetary gifts, luncheons at the Mansion.
It’s a historic tradition, and I loved seeing how it came together each year. After the sale of the Mansion in 2016 we spent a few years trying out new things and figuring out what this announcement truly meant without the venue that had traditionally hosted it. We took over a nightclub, a ballroom and a hotel. The events were beautiful, special and of course fun celebrations of their respective Playmates of the Year, but we lacked continuity. The team started to wonder if this celebration would continue to change each year or if we could find a more enduring format for the PMOY event.
More broadly, I started to wonder about the Playmate of the Year franchise itself. What would this long-running tradition look like in 3, 5, 50 years? What role did it play in today’s landscape of fast-paced cultural change? As a brand, we have looked back, looked forward, reinvented and rediscovered ourselves many times throughout the years, but we’ve always tried to retain the most important elements of our identity and our history — and we’ve worked hard in the past few years to re-establish a strong and lasting foundation for the future of the company. We’ve set and met milestones and brought some of our core beliefs — self-expression, sexual liberty and personal freedoms — to the forefront of what we do while maintaining the playfulness we are famous for. We also began to seek out Playmates based on their personal stories in relation to each of our core editorial themes: Equality, Speech, Gender & Sexuality and Pleasure.
We decided to hold an internal conceptathon around the PMOY franchise, gathering an expansive group of team members of all backgrounds, tenures and levels of investment in the brand’s past. We began with some tough questions: What does the franchise represent today? Why does it matter? What do we love about it? How could it be better? How should we select our winners? Did we think taking away a public vote years prior was the right thing to do? Should it continue to be an internal decision? On what criteria? (Lately, we’ve determined winners based on their involvement in our various initiatives over the course of the year.) How should we celebrate the winner?
At the end of the workshops, we came to a final question: What if there were no Playmate of the Year in 2020? This idea was met with silence. Even I hadn’t really considered it to be a viable option. It seemed to be too big a statement and too big a shift. But some people liked the idea, saying that it would take away the element of competition intrinsic to the franchise (regardless of how we know it to be). We heard everything from knee-jerk reactions to quiet musings, but all of it sparked thought and discussion far beyond the conference room.
After absorbing all of the debates from the workshops, we took a moment to reflect. There had been many surprises. We talked through key learnings, interesting anecdotes and several different routes we could go in order to pull off a successful Playmate of the Year plan. The option of eliminating Playmate of the Year altogether came up again, but we decided we still weren’t ready for so drastic a change (or so we thought) and left it at that. Still, nothing we had talked about in the meeting got us excited enough to run with.
The conversation continued after hours. We tossed out more ideas and just as quickly discarded them. Oddly, everything kept going back to Playmate of the Year going away altogether. If we didn’t feel strongly about how to do it, should we do it at all? Slowly, the potential to create something new became exciting rather than frightening. Evolution began to overtake nostalgia. Then an idea arose.
Three months earlier, when we had been ideating a pictorial entitled “Once A Playmate, Always A Playmate,” featuring five Playmates of different decades for the Spring 2020 Equality Issue, someone had mentioned that although the five women represented different eras, they still presented as “Playmates of 2020” together. That pictorial expressed the continued relevance and commitment of these women, years and even decades later, to Playboy in its current form. They still represented so much of what we value today: complexity, individuality, freedom. We let the idea sink it a bit more… If not one, what about all?
The next day, we went into the office with the beginnings of a plan.
We started by speaking with the people whom we suspected might be most apprehensive about this kind of change. I was surprised: The idea was met with positivity and an eagerness to get started. Even the most nerve-wrecking step of them all — letting the Playmates of 2019 know of our new idea — was met with enthusiasm. All 12 women wrote back saying they couldn’t wait to be a part of it. I finally knew we had gotten it right.
The creative process for the shoot was thrilling. We worked with a formidable creative trio consisting of photographer Chloe Chippendale, photographer and director Ali Mitton and stylist Kelley Ash. The shoot took place on January 4, 2020. We brought the Playmates together, some of whom only knew each other from comments on each other’s Instagram posts. It was also the first time we all, including Playboy staff, saw each other in the year 2020. I kept looking around and pinching myself. Every single one of these women had shaped the brand in a unique way over the past year. Seeing them all together, standing strong, in celebration of each and all, the idea truly came to life.
The shoot itself was a femme-fatale-meets-James-Bond concept. Each Playmate took on a different role as they sought the “treasure”: the coveted title of Playmate of the Year symbolized by a valise with a gold key. At the end of the short video, the camera angle shifts and they’re all bathed in light. In that moment, all of them make up the 2020 Playmates of the Year.
To Vendela, Megan, Miki, Fo, Abigail, Yoli, Teela, Geena, Sophie, Hilda, Gillian and Jordy, we could not have more gratitude and love. Thank you for being brave enough to try something new with us. We are immensely excited to see how you continue to shape the Playboy endeavor — and the world.
