Cindy Crawford Explains Why She Posed Nude for 'Playboy' Against Everyone's Advice

In Apple TV+'s documentary 'The Super Models,' Crawford reveals how the risky photo shoot led to her job hosting MTV's 'House of Style'

Coming up in her career, Cindy Crawford was branded as the all-American girl next door. She rebelled against this reputation when she decided to pose nude for Playboy magazine in 1988 — a controversial choice that also ended up launching her to even greater heights of success.

In the second episode of Apple TV+'s The Super Models docuseries, Crawford explains that becoming the face of Revlon offered her a certain level of job security and freedom to pursue more adventurous projects.

In 1988, she was asked to do Playboy and, she says, "Everyone in my life at the time thought I shouldn't do Playboy. My modeling agency didn't feel that that fit into the types of jobs I should be doing. I think the brand still had a connotation to it that maybe scared some people off."

Related: Cindy Crawford Says She 'Never Even Thought About Modeling' in Sneak Peek of New Supermodel TV Series

The supermodel goes on to share that while she "understood the platform of Playboy and what that symbolized" and that posing for the magazine "was definitely outside the normal trajectory for a Vogue model at the time," she still felt drawn to the project.

"I don't know, there was just something about it that intrigued me. So against the advice of my agents, I said 'yes.'"

It certainly helped that the offer to do the shoot came through Herb Ritts, the famed fashion photographer.

"Herb Ritts was someone that I worked with a lot," Crawford says. "I stayed at his house and we were very good friends."

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She also stipulated to the publication that they didn't need to pay her a lot to do it, "as long as I can have control of the images and I wanted the right to kill the story if I don't like it."

"Herb and I combined it with another trip that we were doing for French Vogue to Hawaii. We'd shoot a picture for French Vogue and then we'd shoot a picture for Playboy," she says in the doc. "I mean, you almost couldn't tell which pictures were for French Vogue and which pictures were for Playboy, it was very organic and I loved them."

She concludes, "That's the whole thing for me is, 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."

Besides as Crawford and her fellow supers point out, nudity is very much something baked into their business and in most situations they often have far less or no control over how their body is portrayed.

Looking through a book featuring nude photos of herself, Naomi Campbell explains, "I don't feel like when I'm nude that I'm nude. It really depends who I'm shooting for. I could feel totally clothed. It's the concept and the way when it's tastefully done that you don't feel like you're nude."

She continues, "It might have made people think, 'Oh, she really feels comfortable in her skin.' Not necessarily, I didn't. Just because I was not thinking of me Naomi showing myself, I felt I was in some other character...I felt dressed, if you can believe that."

Related: Naomi Campbell on Being Labeled 'Difficult': 'It's Hard to Be an Outspoken Black Woman'

Christy Turlington adds, "I respect and admire people who can be comfortable in their bodies and comfortable naked. If I'm working with somebody that I trust and I have respect for and I understand their vision, then I can take some risks. If I can trust that person capturing it and I know what they see and I know that my comfort is going to make that image that much more exciting, interesting, whatever, then I can go there. But if that trust isn't there and there's this sense of, well, you know, 'Go. Do it. You do your thing, I'm going to capture it,' I can't do that. I can't just do all the things that take time and trust for any camera."

And ultimately, Crawford's professional risk with Playboy paid off in a big way. In the late 80s, MTV decided it wanted to launch a show focused on what was up-and-coming in fashion and was looking for someone in the industry to be the host of it.

"Fashion still was primarily female, and then all of a sudden Playboy was primarily guys," Crawford explains. "It was a very different thing. I doubled my audience by doing that. And those two things together led to MTV. They wanted someone, like a model or someone from fashion, but they also wanted someone who had male fans."

The model adds, "I had no training in broadcasting. It was bringing together music and fashion and pop culture and putting it into a mixing bowl and we didn't really care what came out."

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In the end, the TV gig helped her showcase more of her personality.

"It gave me an opportunity to talk and I was able to bring a little bit more of myself to my public persona," she shares. "That all felt very empowering to me."

The Super Models four-part documentary series, spotlighting the extraordinary careers of Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, debuts Sept. 20th exclusively on Apple TV+.

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