Cover Story

The German Playboy’s February 2018 cover has Giuliana Farfalla on it, shot by Christopher von Steinbach, and she looks like she was born for exactly that photograph. If you followed the last season of Germany’s Next Top Model you already know her face. If you didn’t, you were about to—she was headed for the jungle camp show too, and 2018 had the feeling of a year that had decided to be hers.

What made this particular cover notable, beyond the obvious: Giuliana is the first trans woman to appear on the German Playboy’s cover. Editor-in-chief Florian Boitin framed it well—Giuliana Farfalla may be the first trans woman on the cover of the German Playboy, but first and foremost she’s a remarkable woman, and a beautiful demonstration of why the fight for the right to self-determination matters. He went further, invoking Hugh Hefner’s long-standing opposition to exclusion and intolerance, which could read as brand positioning but doesn’t feel wrong. The magazine has been around long enough to know when it’s doing something that actually means something.

Boitin’s sharpest line was the observation that if a naked trans woman on a mainstream cover still reads as transgressive in 2018, that says more about where society is than about the magazine’s willingness to push. He’s right. Giuliana is beautiful, the shoot is confident, and the whole thing feels less like a statement and more like a correction—a small, necessary adjustment to what a cover is allowed to look like.