Cindy Crawford Says Her ‘Playboy’ Shoot Was “Empowering,” “Doubled” Her Audience in Apple TV+’s ‘The Super Models’

Apple TV+‘s excellent new docuseries The Super Models profiles four of the biggest icons in fashion history: Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington. While all four women covered Vogue and happily posed for tasteful nude portraits throughout their careers, Cindy Crawford was the only one to get a Playboy cover. In The Super Models Episode 2 “The Fame,” Crawford explains why she posed for Playboy — against the advice of “everyone” in her life at the time — and why she found the experience not only “empowering” but also a savvy business decision.

The Super Models is a four-part docuseries directed by Academy Award winner Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills that explores the rise of the super model in the ’80s and ’90s and these women’s continued influence on pop culture at large. While Cindy Crawford might joke in the show that she’s just “Kaia [Gerber]’s mom,” there was a time when Crawford was an omnipresence in American culture. According to Crawford, deciding to pose for Playboy in 1987 set her up for this gargantuan success.

“Everyone in my life at the time thought I shouldn’t do Playboy. My modeling agency didn’t feel that it fit into, you know, the type of jobs I should be doing. I think the brand still had a connotation to it that maybe scared some people off,” Crawford said. “I understood the platform of Playboy and what that symbolized. It was definitely outside the normal trajectory for a Vogue model at the time.”

Crawford said that what intrigued her about the offer was the fact that it came from Herb Ritts, a brilliant photographer she worked with a lot and whom she considered a “very good” friend.

“I don’t know. There was just something about it that intrigued me, so against the advice of my agents, I said yes,” Crawford said, before adding what her counteroffer to Playboy was. “But I said, ‘You don’t need to pay me a lot of money as long as I can have the control of the images.” And I wanted the right to kill the story if I don’t like it.” 

“That’s the whole thing for me. Even if I make choices that other people disagree with or don’t like, if they’re my decisions and I have control of it, that’s empowering to me, even if it’s doing Playboy. I never felt like a victim of that decision.” Crawford’s shared the flip side of this philosophy in the first episode of The Super Models, where she revealed she didn’t like how Oprah Winfrey treated her like “chattel” during an appearance on her talk show.

Circling back to Playboy, Ritts and Crawford combined the shoot for the men’s mag with a Hawaii trip for French Vogue.

“We would shoot a picture for French Vogue and we would shoot a picture for Playboy. I mean, you almost couldn’t tell which pictures were for French Vogue and which pictures were for Playboy,” Crawford said while The Super Models flipped between the shoots, showing just how similar they were. “It was very organic and I loved them.”

Later in the episode, Crawford reveals that by posing for Playboy, she was able to reach a whole new fanbase. “Fashion still was primarily female, and then all of a sudden, Playboy was, like, primarily guys,” she said. “I, like, doubled my audience by doing that.”

Because she was a fashion star beloved by men, MTV tapped her to host House of Style, which led to further reach and exposure for the rising star. All in all, Crawford had no regrets about posing for Playboy, a move that made her a megastar.