In a major redesign, lifestyle-entertainment magazine 'Playboy,' has said that it will no longer publish nude photographs.
This move is being viewed as part of a major strategy to bring back an audience that has been declining for years.
However, the magazine will continue to feature a Playmate of the Month in a provocative, but “PG-13” pose.
This move comes three months after the magazine relaunched its website last year and removed all nude content from it, which resulted in immediate results.
“We’ve more than four times grown our traffic. It’s not provocative to see nudity. In fact, it can actually limit our audience,” Scott Flanders, CEO of Playboy Enterprises had said.
The suggestion was reportedly proposed by Cory Jones, an editor at playboy and approved by Hugh Hefner, who is still listed as the magazine's editor-in-chief.
The New York Times reported:
In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women.
The magazine was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and featured a clothed Marilyn Monroe on the first cover and nude photos on the inside.
After reaching circulation figures of more than seven million in the 70s, the magazine started declining with the advent of the internet.
The Guardian adds:
The chief content officer of the magazine, Cory Jones, said the magazine would be more accessible and more intimate, admitting: “Twelve-year-old me is very disappointed in current me. But it’s the right thing to do.”