Parrott, a photographer and mother of three, is the former editor of Dossier, a New York-based magazine that in a co-operative and hip fashion championed social and racial diversity, the female gaze, and other aspects of progressive 2020 enlightenment, well ahead of the media industry, and perhaps society at large.ĭossier played a part in launching the careers of Cass Bird, Harley Weir, Zoë Ghertner and Bibi Borthwick, who have come to define the post-male-gaze aesthetic in fashion photography. Indeed, the magazine’s opening essay, by writer T Cole Rachel, talks about the irony of a magazine that was intended for women being co-opted by men – even if those men were gay. It was interesting for a couple of years, then it was sold and resold, and it became what I thought of as a gay porn magazine.” “Everything they did in Playboy, they did in Playgirl. “They’re really fabulous in so many ways, but they do look like a man’s idea of what a feminist publication would be,” Playgirl’s editor-in-chief, Skye Parrott, told the Observer. Playgirl, a notionally feminist title, simply countered Playboy’s Norman Mailer with Maya Angelou, Hunter S Thompson with Margaret Atwood, and matched its male centrefolds – pose for pose, Speedos (or less) for lingerie (or less) – with those of Playboy’s women.
