First series (1963–1987) This magazine successful recipe was combining content with depth articles and beautiful naked women, featuring many B-List but also celebrities, often prominent French actresses, such as
Brigitte Bardot,
Mireille Darc,
Jane Birkin or
Marlène Jobert. It featured a monthly pin-up by
Aslan. The first girl to pose on the cover was Valérie Lagrange (the number 1 appeared on 11 January 1963) photographed by
Francis Giacobetti, future director of the soft-core movie
Emmanuelle 2. The magazine hosted also a cartoon by Lauzier:
Les Sextraordinaires Aventures de Zizi et Peter Panpan. Among the first collaborators are Jean-Louis Bory, René Chateau, Philippe Labro, Francis Dumoulin, Francis Giacobetti, Siné, Michel Mardore, Gilles Sandier and many others. The magazine motto was ''Lui, le magazine de l'homme moderne'' (The Magazine of the Modern Man). In the beginning, it had also a mascot, a cat's head, similarly to the magazine
Playboy Bunny, but it disappeared in the early 1970s.
Second series (1987–1994) The second series was published by the
Filipacchi group from 1987 to 1994. It has been published 69 numbers. Its editor was Stéphane de Rosnay in 1989, Brice Couturier 1990 to 1992. Initially, its specificity (compared to the first series) was that it was published in a two separate books, but from number 27, "Lui" returned to be a single book magazine with the new slogan "Le magazine de l'homme civilisé" (The Magazine of civilized man). The circulation that was in early 1980 of 350,000 copies dropped to 70,000 copies in 1993. In early 1993, the magazine abandoned the monthly release and became bimonthly. The Filipacchi group stopped publication in June 1994. ==
Lui published by Michel Birnbaum (1995–2010)==