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Vice Blog

THE FANCIEST T&A MONEY CAN BUY

Paradis

is our second-favorite magazine in the world. It harkens back to the golden age of glossies when it was par for the course to combine smarty smart-smart stuff for smart people with beautiful, artsy smart-peoples' porn. They prefer to call it "erotica," but that doesn't mean there's not still

tons

of classy muff (Daisy Lowe and Lilf

Charlotte Rampling

shot in the Louvre) in addition to the in-depth interviews with science folks like Albert Hofman and the guy who developed the pill, and the 10,000-word profiles on the likes of Sir Norman Foster and Damien Hirst. The Parisian mag launched in 2006 and comes out roughly twice a year in English and French editions. The quality is ridiculously high: The latest issue has a freaking hardback cover. It's put together by ritzy art director

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Thomas Lenthal

and Jonathan Wingfield, who's the editor of big-deal French fashion mag

Numero

. We were so dazzled by issue five (the one with the hardback) that we inadvertently called Jonathan up to say "We like you!" That led to this:

Vice: Paradis seems a bit like those early Playboy editions that big-shot male editors always seem to hold in such high esteem. Do you see this as part of a general move back to mixing porn and intellectualism? Jonathan:

Well, it's erotica.

Playboy

was great and sold millions, but French mag

Lui

was just as important. There's a cycle. Before women found their voice in the 80s, people were politicizing tits and ass by basing shoots on storm troopers and Hitler. In a way, things are moving back to that.

How hard was it to set up the nude shoot in the Louvre?

At first there was resistance from the Louvre regarding Jurgen Teller's shoot, but look around the Louvre, it's full of beautiful pictures of naked women. We're not doing anything new. Look at the history of art. We've had people come to us and ask to pose nude, and tabloids ask to run our pictures, although tabloid publicity isn't the ambition.

You guys do some extreme long-form stuff. Do you think that there's a paucity of this now that the web has taken over most people's lives?

Well, we have a journalistic ideology; we can do a 45-page piece on David Hockney. When

Playboy

did Lennon and Muhammed Ali, they would do four separate interviews with them to get the one piece. If a piece takes a year to write, that's fine by us. We like depth and covering things in an extreme way; it's an attempt to do the best thing ever, not just fill space.

DARYOUSH HAJ-NAJAFI