When making magazines you’d print long sheets of paper on both sides, lay them together in the right order, staple down the middle, and then fold the whole thing afterwards to make a booklet.
This means that all of your two-page spreads would be on the front of one page, and the back of the next page. All except the “centrefold”, where the staples were, that was printed on one continuous sheet of paper. It would have been the bottom of the stack, before you folded it into a book.
This meant you could pull that single sheet out and it would essentially become a poster, and so many magazines would print big images in the centerfold with that in mind. It also helps that the center of a binding like that it is easiest to flip to, it’s where the pages naturally want to return, so it helped to put your biggest attraction there.
If you’ve ever seen the trope / gag where someone is looking at a magazine, and then they turn the magazine sideways to oggle it, chances are the joke is that they’re looking at the centerfold, and turning it sideways because this particular image is sideways because the poster is printed to be hung up in portrait orientation.
So anyway, because it was such a main attraction for a magazine, and in particular was a kind of artifact that might live on a wall beyond the normal life of the rest of the magazine, it was considered very high status for a model to be featured even once as the centerfold.
Oh, you probably picked it up, but to be absolutely clear, referring to a person as “a centerfold” is basically short for “a model featured in a picture featured in the centerfold of a magazine”. Which, again, was a high honour in the field.
When making magazines you’d print long sheets of paper on both sides, lay them together in the right order, staple down the middle, and then fold the whole thing afterwards to make a booklet.
This means that all of your two-page spreads would be on the front of one page, and the back of the next page. All except the “centrefold”, where the staples were, that was printed on one continuous sheet of paper. It would have been the bottom of the stack, before you folded it into a book.
This meant you could pull that single sheet out and it would essentially become a poster, and so many magazines would print big images in the centerfold with that in mind. It also helps that the center of a binding like that it is easiest to flip to, it’s where the pages naturally want to return, so it helped to put your biggest attraction there.
If you’ve ever seen the trope / gag where someone is looking at a magazine, and then they turn the magazine sideways to oggle it, chances are the joke is that they’re looking at the centerfold, and turning it sideways because this particular image is sideways because the poster is printed to be hung up in portrait orientation.
So anyway, because it was such a main attraction for a magazine, and in particular was a kind of artifact that might live on a wall beyond the normal life of the rest of the magazine, it was considered very high status for a model to be featured even once as the centerfold.
Stolen from TV Tropes:
That cigarette centerfold is hilarious, what’s that from?!
Oh, you probably picked it up, but to be absolutely clear, referring to a person as “a centerfold” is basically short for “a model featured in a picture featured in the centerfold of a magazine”. Which, again, was a high honour in the field.