Playboy has reversed its 2015 decision to drop nudes from the magazine, its chief content officer Cooper Hefner, son of Hugh, announced Monday.
“I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake,” Hefner tweeted. “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking back and reclaiming who we are.” It also changed its motto “Entertainment for Men” to the more inclusive “Entertainment for All.”
The nudes return in the March/April issue with Miss March Elizabeth Elam.
Hefner, the 24-year-old son from Hefner’s second marriage to Kimberly Conrad, took over from his father as chief creative officer of the brand last year and was reportedly opposed from the start to the decision to go coy in print, which followed its digital strategy to banish nudes from the non-subscription portion of its website in 2014. In moving towards a more general-interest men’s website, Playboy saw the average age of its readers drop and its web traffic quadruple, and sales of the magazine in its non-nude era reportedly rose.
The decision to cover up was met with mixed reviews, even from New Jersey’s own former Playmates. Helena Antonaccio, June 1969, still in the “tasteful nudes” business in her late 60s, said that “change is always good,” but another, Pat Adamo, November 1965, praised the call, saying the magazine has taken a turn for the worse, calling the photos it had been running “just nasty.”
Leading up to Monday’s announcement, Hefner tweeted out a series of iconic nude photos — Botticelli’s Venus, a Goya odalisque, Phoebe Cates topless in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” — but with the women in Photoshopped T-shirts with hashtag #NakedisNormal.
1 #NakedIsNormal #MarilynMonroe pic.twitter.com/f2friYmlPL
— Playboy (@Playboy) February 12, 2017
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