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Playboy Is Bringing Back Nude Models A Year After Banning Them
In a flip-flop worthy of a primary season American politician, Playboy announced that it will be bringing nude models back to the pages of the magazine. The shift comes a little over a year after the legendary men's magazine made a much-publicized decision to ban birthday suits.“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 tweeted Monday.
Hefner, the 25-year-old son of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, took the helm of the 63-year-old magazine four months ago. He had previously been an outspoken critic of the magazine's decision to step away from models in the buff.
"Today, we’re taking our identity back and rediscovering who we are," Hefner's Twitter statement continued. Nakedness will make its return in the magazine's March/April issue, with model Elizabeth Elam doing the honors in a photospread shot by Gavin Bond. The issue will hit newsstands emblazoned with the headline "Naked is normal."
Playboy banned nude models in October 2015, in a shift that had "little to do with feminist wins and everything to do with finally understanding our digital world and the cost of an outdated business model," according to Fortune. The move was supposed to drive more ad revenue for the struggling mag. Fortune posited that the company had finally realized that the glut of free nudity available online, coupled with the fact that social networks, which forbid nudity, were Playboy's number one traffic driver, made it so that sex alone no longer sells like it used to.
Seems like sex does sell after all.
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