LONDON: Giuliana Farfalla has become the first transgender model to appear on a cover of Playboy.
According to the Independent, Farfalla, a 21-year-old model, who starred on Heidi Klum’s Germany’s Next Top Model, shared the cover with her followers on Instagram yesterday.
Accompanying the image of her posing topless, she wrote, “My dears I’m on the latest Playboy cover and very proud of the result. I hope you like the cover as much as I do.”
Farfalla was born a boy, and grew up in the south-western city of Breisgau as Pascal Radermacher.
However, she has explained that she felt she was in the wrong body from a young age, and underwent gender reassignment surgery when she was 16.
While talking to a leading German magazine she said that she felt like a girl since the age of three. She got her modelling break last year, when she was chosen to compete on Germany’s Next Top Model.
Farfalla is the first transgender cover star for the Playboy brand, but not the first trans-model to appear in the magazine.
Last year US Playboy gave French model Ines Rau, 26, the honour of being centre fold in the first magazine published after Hugh Hefner's death.