Ester Cordet Bio
Ester Cordet is a Panamanian glamour model and flight attendant. She was born Esther Sgobba on December 31, 1946, in Panama City, Panama. Playboy named her its October 1974 Playmate at 27. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Cordet has natural breasts, brown eyes and black hair. Her measurements are 36-24-36.
Captured by Richard Fegley, Cordet’s centerfold carried the polished, urbane look that defined much of the magazine’s 1970s photography: poised, a little mysterious and quietly self-possessed. The session’s lighting and composition left room for implication rather than spectacle, and those choices are part of why the images have kept their hold in the archive.
Away from the studio she kept a decidedly ordinary schedule for a magazine face: at the time of the shoot she was working as a flight attendant for Pacific Southwest Airlines and living in San Diego. That detail—an everyday profession alongside high-gloss portraiture—gave her public image an accessible counterpoint that readers found intriguing.
Her likeness reached beyond magazine pages the following year when a sultry photograph of Cordet was used for the Ohio Players’ 1975 album Honey, a cover that helped fix the image in popular memory and placed her work at the intersection of pop culture and commercial design. That crossover brought the same quiet glamour of the centerfold into a different, broader audience.
Her private life was less tidy than the single-frame images suggested. She met writer Robert Ringer at a party at the Playboy Mansion and he would later become her husband, but during the pictorial she was already married and caring for a four-year-old son; one magazine frame even includes her then-husband in the background, identified only as a “friend.” That mix of domestic detail and public image—staged portraiture sitting beside everyday obligations—gives Cordet’s place in the archive a particular texture: glamorous photographs tethered to an ordinary life, and vice versa.
