Patrick Nagel’s images are iconic. I don’t need to give you an ‘analysis’ of why he’s so great, just look at the pics. He distills feminine (and occasionally masculine) beauty – be it androgynous, sensual, saucy, mysterious, or subtle – down to a few striking lines, a few blocks of pleasingly contrasted colours.

He makes it look effortless – but it can’t have been easy because you can sniff out the many imitators a mile off.

He got his big break contributing illustrations to Playboy in ’75, which he continued to do until ’84, when he died. Two interesting things about this: One, Nagel’s style seemed fully-formed and perfected right out of the gate, and it never really changed until the day he died.

Two, ’75 is much earlier than I expected. His style was everywhere in the 80s. The small but strong colour palette, the bold lines, the economic simplicity, the preoccupation with glamour and androgynous women. In the 70s, however, this was very much against the grain. Art was all earthy textures and bulbous shapes. The ideal woman was all big Bakshi boobs and feminine Frazetta curves. Wild manes of hair and tame expressions. Nagel not only predicted a shift, but had already perfected it.

For a while, I considered making a game inspired by his art (and the erotic thrillers and fashion sketches I also like). I had quite a few ideas for it, but couldn’t resolve a few problems I had with it also.

I began seeking and saving a lot of art to my computer when I began making Decade (which was a bad decision, the game would have probably been done months earlier if my computer wasn’t such a mess). I noticed that a lot of Nagel images weren’t available online.

I ended up accumulating quite a few cuttings from an archive of old Playboy PDFs. This is by no means complete – I only clipped what I liked, though I liked quite a lot. I thought I’d post them here for other Nagel fans to check out.