Lui

Lui

Cover of the August 1983 issue of Lui, featuring Valérie Kaprisky
Categories	Men's magazines
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	Filipacchi
Founded	1963
First issue	November 1963
Final issue	March 2020
Country	France
Based in	Paris, France
Language	French, others
Website	www.luimagazine.fr

Lui (French: [lɥi]; lit. 'Him') is a French adult-entertainment magazine created in November 1963 by Daniel Filipacchi, a fashion photographer turned publisher, Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and jazz critic.

The objective was to bring some charm "à la française" to the market of men's magazines, following the success of Playboy in the United States, launched just a decade before.

France, indeed, in the first half of 20th century had an outstanding reputation for erotic publications, feeding also foreign market and inspiring also ersatz French-flavoured magazines abroad, when, for example, US publishers used French-sounding titles like Chère and Dreamé or placed tricolour flags on the covers, attempting to attract the casual buyer.^[1] It was anyway a semi-clandestine circulating material, not allowed to be freely displayed or openly bought. In this sense Playboy changed the way 'soft pornography' (become more respectfully 'adult entertainment'), can be publicly circulated.

This magazine was particularly successful from its origins to the early 1980s, but afterwards it began a long decline. It was published regularly until November 1987 (the final issue of this first series was the number 285). After 1987 there was a further attempt to relaunch the title but the publication ceased again in 1994. Passed into the hands of the media group of Michel Birnbaum, after a transient stimulus, it became a pornographic magazine with episodic dissemination. It was published every three months.

After the purchase of the title by Jean-Yves Le Fur, Lui was relaunched on 5 September 2013 as a high-end magazine with Frédéric Beigbeder at its helm.^[2]