That's Me!

I'll never forget when I first discovered Bravo Magazine....

The first time I wrote the German magazine Bravo, I wrote about how I first discovered it while on vacation when I about 11 or 12 years old.  The magazine has actually been around in one form or another since the 1950's.  It began as a celebrity  magazine, with covers featuring stars like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and other big names of the time.  If you search the magazine on E-bay, you'll see covers featuring the who's who in movies and television over the last 8 decades.

It seems to have gone through phases, from movie stars, to more music superstars in the 1970's, through television and teen stars in the 1980's.  It was during the 70's and 80's the magazine was primarily devoured by teens and young adults.  In part, it was the celebrity contact, but in part it was also the adult, and sexual issues covered.  In the early 70's, two issues featuring articles on masturbation were for the first time 'indexed', meaning they could not be sold to customers under the age of 18.

Internationally, the magazine also got into trouble for a section titled Dr. Sommer's That's Me!.  That's Me featured full frontal nudity from both male and female models.  The issue, was that the models were teenagers, aimed at the eye of their audience.  Because it was legal in Germany, some of these models were initially as young as 14 years old.  Now, if the goal was education, and only other eyes on the images were also around 14, you argue the educational value, but of course, that was not the case.

Soon, the age of models was moved up to 16, but again, this didn't made the cut for other countries and their huge international audience.  The magazine initially got 'tricky' to get the images past the censors by having the models 'click' the camera button themselves.  This way, they were not being shot by an adult.  This didn't cut the mustard though, so from the 2010's onwards, the models had to be at least 18 years of age.  The cut off age for models also moved from 20 years old, to 25 years old.

Previous Bravo Features on FH:

2017

2023 Part 1/ Part 2