Marcel Winatschek

Giuliana Farfalla

When Giuliana Farfalla showed up on Germany’s Next Topmodel, she had something—the kind of presence that stays with you. The sort of certainty that reads through a TV screen. I thought she was going somewhere. Then she was on the jungle show, the big German one everyone watches. Then Playboy.

The German edition put her on the cover in February 2018—the first trans woman they’d ever run on it. The editor made the expected speech about Hugh Hefner and freedom and self-determination, about how it’s strange that in 2018 this still counts as boundary-pushing. Which it does. Which is weird. But he had a point.

There’s something about a magazine cover, even as magazines are dying. It’s a statement. It says: this person belongs here. This body, this existence—we’re saying it’s normal. You look at her the way you’d look at anyone else.

What I noticed wasn’t the politics of it. It was her comfort. No defensive energy, no posturing, no sense of needing to prove anything. Just someone existing on a magazine cover the way anyone else would. That simplicity is what made it matter.