Check out some photos from the event below and come visit us on 424 Fairfax, LA—we'll be here for a while.
What is your ideal office?
Any space filled with natural light and positive people.
What is the greatest object you own?
My passport.
Do you have any rituals?
I drink English Breakfast tea and a matcha latte every single morning.
Is there a superstition that your family passes down through generations?
Superstitions passed down from my family all contain items that I have in my home. A cross at my entry, an evil eye on the wall, my grandmother's rosary kept in my bedroom (which I wore around my neck when I had my daughter).
What’s the last thing in your search bar?
Searching for vintage furniture.
Do you have a lucky number?
I gravitate toward anything with a "5" in it.
If you could have a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who would they be?
Princess Diana, Martha Stewart, Dolly Parton.
What is the ideal setting for stargazing?
Being by the sea and staring up at a beautiful night sky. Grand Cayman has particularly stunning nights to stargaze.
What role does art play in your life?
Art is a huge part of my life with work and personally. I studied contemporary art and it has played a big role in creating interiors, working with artists for residencies and also something in general I enjoy for my personal spaces.
What’s something you hope to learn in the next year?
I want to learn to speak Italian this year. It has been a dream my entire life.
Now in their late 60s, my parents are still writing, navigating an increasingly unrecognizable media landscape. The remaining magazines they freelance for have smaller budgets, and book advances are typically a fraction of what they once were, making it harder to eke out a living as a full-time writer.
While Playboy remains an influential brand, its business model has changed too: in 2020, new CEO Ben Kohn announced that like so many other publications, the magazine would be shuttering its print editions and move entirely online. That same year, it became a public company, trading on the NASDAQ exchange as “PLBY.”
From its inception in 1953, Hugh Hefner steered Playboy into a brand that represented many different things to different people. Some saw it as a roadmap towards an aspirational lifestyle; to others it was an emblem of free speech and expression; to still others it represented all that was wrong with modern heterosexual culture and was a symbol of the exploitation of women under patriarchy.
However people felt about Playboy, its journalism was always central to its cultural relevance: where else could you get an in-depth interview with Martin Luther King Jr. (1965) or Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat (1988) and read fiction by Joyce Carol Oates (1970), all alongside centerfolds starring the likes of Marilyn Monroe (1953), Anna Nicole Smith (1992), and Dita Von Teese (2002)?
To see a publication with such an extensive history shutter its print magazine in 2020 felt like a real loss.
Since then, I’d been mulling over a new angle for Playboy. Is there a way to revive the magazine and be financially soluble? Can the magazine retain its core tenets while expanding inclusion along the axes of race and gender? I had some ideas for a path forward, so I set up a meeting earlier this year with Playboy CEO Ben Kohn, who I had been indirectly introduced to (more on that here).
Before our meeting, I had poured over all of Playboy’s publicly available financial records and had a working idea of where the company stood. At the restaurant in Brentwood, Kohn ordered a stack of pancakes and spent the hour regurgitating one liners I had heard him say in countless interviews. (“The brand is popular among the Gen Z crowd…”) But I knew that Playboy was in debt and that its stock was down. From personal experience, I knew that Gen Z didn’t really register the brand as "cool," and that the cheap clothes they license with PacSun weren’t anything I’d ever wear.
Ben — who has a background in private equity — didn’t seem to share in my enthusiasm about the value of resuscitating the magazine. Instead, he talked about the digital platform Playboy Club, which is comparable to a thoroughly unexceptional version of OnlyFans.
In the past, Kohn has stated that Playboy is “the one platform that has a true brand that stands behind it.” But the brand was built on journalism. Once you sacrifice that, what’s left?
‘I read Playboy for the articles’ was a common refrain to justify buying the magazine. The subtext is that a person must create an excuse in order to consume pornography. But the double movement of the phrase was always dependent on the veracity of the claim that one could reasonably read Playboy for the articles. Remove the journalism and fast forward to a cultural moment when pornography is more readily available and less taboo, and there’s really nothing special about a Playboy devoid of journalism.
Nothing came out of my meeting with Kohn, so I decided to stop pursuing the old Playboy and to write about it instead. I started at the very beginning, by calling my mother. I asked if she could send me some photos from her Playboy days, and maybe a few quotes about what her and my Dad think of the fate of the company.
My plan for the article at the time was simple: a couple paragraphs up top introducing my parents’ former roles at Playboy for context, launch into a discussion of the company at present, wrap up with a call to arms about saving journalism, etc. Over and out in a tight 2500 words. Almost immediately, I sensed hesitation. “Is office a real magazine, or is it online?” my mom asked.
Her next question regarded the scope of my article. Would it reference my prior work as an escort? If so, she had a “hard line” about being involved. Given that I hadn’t started writing yet, I responded that I couldn’t guarantee what would be covered, but that escorting didn’t seem directly relevant to the piece and that it likely wouldn’t be discussed.
That didn’t seem to assuage her concern. The next day, I woke up to an email in which my parents declined to give a comment for the article. Their explicit reasoning was a preference for digital privacy in the age of social media. Implicitly, however, was the implication that print media is somehow more reputable than online publications, and that public association with ‘sex work’ made them uncomfortable.
I am so grateful to have two parents who love me deeply, and their approval means so much to me; I couldn’t help feeling this as rejection of me as both a writer and a person. It felt ironic that a part of my life regarding sexuality and labor was off-limits as a condition for their involvement, since I was ostensibly writing an article whose subject was their own former workplace at a men’s lifestyle magazine known for its centerfolds of nude and semi-nude models. Furthermore, the distinction between print and online media privacy felt arbitrary: my mother wrote a memoir about her life in 2005 (the year after Facebook debuted) in which I — as a toddler — am discussed. Why is digital space perceived as more exposed, when similar disclosures of personal information happen across both mediums?
Ultimately, Playboy’s failure to make an effective transition from print to digital journalism doesn’t indicate that good reporting doesn’t happen in online spaces. It just means that writers have to work harder to find them, to make them themselves, and to sometimes waste their time at meetings with corporate CEOs just to ultimately arrive at publication of their work elsewhere.
I believe in the transformative power of good writing. I believe in free sexual expression. For better or for worse, this is the state of Playboy in 2024, the state of journalism, and the state of my family.
Will it always be this way?
"a child of Playboy"
photos courtesy of the author
We all lose a sense of wonder as the world hardens us. But within her work, there’s this magical allure that draws you in. An undefinable quality that everyone can connect to. Channeling her inner teenage self, Wonders never strays away from visual choices that make her audiences wonder themselves — “Why does this make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside?”
Whether she is creating fashion films for some of the girlys’ favorite brands — from Sandy Liang to Anna Sui — or directing her own short films, Wonders’ work really fabricates an inviting universe of its own.
office caught up with Wonders between projects to talk her filmmaking inspiration and favorite movies.
What originally got you interested in filmmaking?
Almost every night my brothers would be watching action movies so I grew up on a lot of those. And then my siblings and I would make movies — pretty unwatchable action movies. I don’t think I realized it was something I could do as a career until I got to college and started studying filmmaking. I thought the most fun version of my life would be spent making movies, so that’s what I wanted to do.
What was the first short film you ever created and what inspired its story?
I went to Harvard and there was a tiny but strong documentary program that felt cloistered off from the rest of the school. So I started off with documentaries and going around Cambridge and Boston. I like that the camera gives you a nice shield and an excuse to enter spaces you wouldn’t normally enter. And I like how the world can unfold in beautiful, intriguing ways if you’re just present and observing. It gave me a nice starting point and taught me to ground a lot of my work in realism. And then my senior year, a visiting filmmaker, Athina Tsangari, taught a fiction filmmaking class and that sort of changed everything. She was the first person to really believe in me.
A couple of years ago, you had the incredible opportunity to direct the short film I <3 NYC under Sofia Coppola’s supervision. What was that like? Are you inspired by the very distinct aesthetic that Coppola embraces?
I remember seeing Marie Antoinette when it came out in theaters when I was young, and I think that was the first movie where I was like, 'Oh, this is art that expresses something that I feel and can relate to.' She's a big reference for me and working with her when I was her assistant on The Beguiled, she carried herself on set with a soft power that cultivated a sense of calm on set for everyone. I love that she owns her version of femininity and owns the things that she's interested in. Even if some people think those things are frivolous or soft. I think that's something that Sandy has too.
I agree with there being so much attention to detail in Sofia Coppola's work. I love her use of really major storytelling elements told through these subtle details. Do you live in New York?
Yeah, I've been in the East Village for seven years.
What inspires you creatively about the city?
Visually, I think there are more beautiful, interesting places in America that I’m drawn to. But really, it's just people here in the firmament. I get a lot of energy from my friends who do different things from me — visual artists, journalists, designers, writers. I love drawing inspiration from different worlds and not just from a monolithic source.
And I love filmmaking because it requires heuristics beyond just writing. The writing part is very much you and the page. But filmmaking requires people. I spent the majority of my life in school where you’re forced to look at the world with a reverent distance, with an academic lens. And I love that in filmmaking you’re part of the world and you need other people to do it, even if you’re constructing a fabricated reality of the world through the process of making movies.
I think the people are what make the city. And I also agree that the creative synergy that can pop up when you have people around you who are creating through so many different mediums is really beautiful. How would you describe the aesthetic that your work takes on?
I don’t know if I can. People always tell me, 'You have such a specific point of view,' but I don't know how to describe it. Some people have said it's heightened realism. With my Sandy stuff, I think we have a lot of the same references and we're both really connected to our teenage Kawaii aesthetic-loving selves.
Do you think about connecting to your inner child or teen a lot within your work?
I think so. I'm consciously connected to those years. It's a time when the world feels like it’s emerging and you're discovering things you like culturally. So I feel like I'm always excavating and trying to recapture the feeling of that time — the excitement of discovering things. I loved reading about and consuming New York’s cultural output at that age, but it all felt so far away and now it doesn't, which has a cool, predestined feeling to it.
What’s your go-to, on-the-run outfit that you would throw on if you were busy and working?
Usually a black skirt and a zip-up hoodie.
On that same day, what would be in your bag?
I like having Tulsi Tea with me. I usually have a satellite version of my makeup bag, mints, and headphones. Some of my makeup go-to’s are Anna Sui powder and this Japanese eyelash curler my friend showed me, the Relevée Lash Curler.
I have to ask — your favorite movies?
Currently: Welcome to the Dollhouse -Todd Solandz, Boy - Nagisa Oshima, Earrings Of Madame De - Max Ophuls, and Lovers on the Bridge - Leos Carax
I was originally going to ask you what movie you'd like to play yourself in. But then I thought that may be too derivative. If you could drop into a movie and swap places with a character, who would you pick and why?
Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Imagine being able to move like her.
Do you have a dream project to work on in the future?
I made a short film set in Michigan about a girl's middle school sleepover that's coming out soon. I'm working on a feature film about a girl who leaves her nursing home job and joins this farming commune in the early 2000s. But I also love working on fashion films. It's a nice way to break up larger projects and it gives me a different perspective to see my work through.
