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Under the headline "Naked is Normal," the magazine will bring
nude pictorials back in its March/April edition, the company
said on Monday.
“I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine
portrayed nudity was dated, but nudity was never the problem
because nudity isn’t a problem,” Playboy’s chief creative
officer Cooper Hefner said in a statement on the magazine's
website.
"Today we're taking our identity back and reclaiming who we
are," added Hefner, the son of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
Former "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson was the last person to
bare it all for the magazine in its January/February 2016
edition.
Founded in 1953, Playboy had decided to stop publishing nude
photos of women, saying they had become outmoded due to the
plethora of free pornography on the internet.
Playboy's circulation has dropped from about 5.6 million in 1975
to around 800,000 in recent years, and the magazine had also
come under pressure from women to end a practice many found
offensive and degrading.
It launched a revamped version in March 2016 in which it
replaced full frontal nudity with flirty, more natural shots of
women in scanty attire.
Cooper Hefner said on Monday that the magazine was also bringing
back some of its other features, including "Party Jokes" and
"The Playboy Philosophy" column that last appeared in the 1960s.
He said the upcoming issue was a "reflection of how the brand
can best connect with my generation and generations to come."
The famed Playboy Mansion near Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner's home
and the venue for his lavish, hedonistic parties in the 1960s
and 70s, was sold for $100 million in August in a deal that
allowed Hefner, 90, to continue living there for the remainder
of his life.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Andrew Hay)
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