Say hello to a new era #PlayboyReveal pic.twitter.com/DoIDYRRgQD
— Playboy (@Playboy) February 4, 2016
Selfies and Snapchat; welcome to the new era of Playboy, everybody. After announcing late last year that the magazine was planning to eschew nudity going forward, thanks to the accessibility of any kind of porn imaginable being right at your fingertips, the famous skin rag just unveiled its new cover. And the magazine’s making it loud and clear just what demographic it’s going after: Playboy is now all about the millennials.
The reasoning behind the change is simple enough. When Playboy.com relaunched as a “safe for work” website last year, traffic jumped by 400 percent and the average age of visitors went from 47 to 30. Despite the fact that the magazine is now (sort of) nudity-free, however, it will continue the hallowed tradition of centerfolds — albeit tastefully covered up in just the right places.
Dree Hemingway, great-granddaughter to Ernest Hemingway, appears as centerfold in the first revamped issue, according to The New York Times, which got a sneak peek:
Ms. Hemingway and other featured women in the issue are unretouched. Playboy photographs have long been triumphs of technology, giving models a sheen of perfection that is unobtainable without lots of carefully placed lights and aggressive airbrushing. That is over. Some images in the March issue are grainy, and all feel more impromptu than posed. The magazine has adopted the unadorned, point-and-shoot aesthetic made famous by American Apparel ads and fashion photographers like Terry Richardson.
But that’s not the only thing that’s changed with Playboy 2.0:
Gone are the bawdy cartoons as well as the racy ads at the back of the magazine, for stuff like “bedroom adventure gear.” The phrase “Entertainment for Men,” which has graced the cover since that 1953 debut, has vanished. So too has the dense and cluttered layout that has defined the magazine’s appearance since the 1970s, when circulation stood at 5.6 million. (It is now about 700,000.) In its place is an airier and more contemporary feel, with a lot more white space.
Most people still have a rather skeptical reaction to the idea of a revamped Playboy, but this new version — which is being described as “a saucier version of other magazines like Esquire and GQ — seems like a necessary evolution given the state of print media today, like it or not.
(Via New York Times)