As you may have heard, Playboy is going to be non-nude starting with the March 2016 issue, which actually comes out in the month of February, because that’s how magazines roll. This means the models, celebrities and, yes, Playmates will not be naked for the first time since our founder Hugh Hefner laid out the first issue in 1953.
The question everyone will likely be asking is, “Why?” Playboy has been a friend to nudity, and nudity has been a friend to Playboy, for decades. The short answer is: times change.
When Hef created Playboy, he set out to champion personal freedom and sexual liberty at a time when America was painfully conservative. See: any popular movie, TV show or song from that era. Nudity played a role in the conversation about our sexual liberties, and over 62 years the country made great strides politically and culturally.
We like to think we had something to do with that.
Last year we re-launched Playboy.com as a safe-for-work site and discovered something about our readers and our identity: The Bunny transcends nudity. Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections. We are, and always have been, “entertainment for men” – with award-winning journalism and fiction to boot. Playboy is a cultural arbiter of beauty, taste, opinion, humor and style.
Yes, we’re taking a risk by going non-nude, but this is a company—like all great companies—that has risk in its DNA. It was built around a magazine virtually no one thought would succeed, yet now it’s impossible (for us, anyways) to picture a world without Playboy. Our journalism, art, photos and fiction have challenged norms, defied expectations and set a new tone for decades.
So we say: Why stop now?
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