‘It was utterly wild’: the story of a 1970s erotic magazine for women

A cover of Viva magazine. ‘I feel like it failed because white men did not like the idea of losing power.’ Photograph: PD

Back in the mid-aughts, right before the internet made Play-Doh spaghetti of the magazine industry, Jennifer Romolini was an editor at Lucky, a Conde Nast property dedicated to all things shopping. It was while researching her column on eBay and Etsy finds that she stumbled across something even better than a secondhand Laura Ashley frock: a back issue of a chic and not a little absurd erotic magazine geared for the thinking woman of the 1970s.

Viva had soft-focus photography by artists like Helmut Newton, and portfolios of male pubic topiaries styled by none other than future shampoo mogul Paul Mitchell. The articles bore the bylines of Patricia Bosworth, Betty Friedan, Nikki Giovanni and Anaïs Nin, and the fashion and beauty spreads were orchestrated by Anna Wintour. The British fashion editor had been fired from Harper’s Bazaar, and came to the crotch-centric magazine to resuscitate her career.