Recent projects include the Playboy Live series on Instagram, with episodes featuring everything from comedy and book clubs to workouts and quarantine pool parties with models, as well as a modern reimagining of the famed Playboy Advisor series, presenting grown-up sex ed gone digital that offers sexual wellness lessons such as “ Dildos and Dildon’ts” and the best “ Toys & Tools” to achieve the female orgasm. These digital pursuits of pleasure include a combination of Playboy old and new, refashioned and repackaged into a sprawling multi-platform presence fit for the 2020 consumer. By focusing on the brand’s online presence, which includes, Instagram, Twitter, IGTV and YouTube channels as well as a Medium blog, Playboy “will continue to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure in a digital way.” “We’re turning our attention to achieving our mission in the most effective and impactful way we can for a 2020 audience,” Playboy’s executive editor Liz Suman tells InsideHook. While Playboy is retiring its long-running print product - which just last year saw a major artistic and editorial overhaul that transformed Hugh Hefner’s iconic nude mag into an ad-free quarterly the Times called “a newer, woke-er, more inclusive Playboy,” - the brand is moving forward with a multi-platform, fully digital presence.
But now free of its print anchor, the brand, like many of us in this particular moment, is suddenly more of the internet than ever before. Like the vast majority of media brands, Playboy itself has been “of the internet” for quite some time.
Burana, who had posed for the magazine’s 1996 “Women of the Internet” pictorial, penned her tribute to the late print magazine after finding herself feeling “weirdly nostalgic” in the wake of Playboy’s announcement, perhaps for a time before all of us were “of the internet.” Citing various reasons, including the long-running plight of print media and the far-reaching tendrils of the COVID-19 pandemic, the magazine came to a seemingly sudden and unceremonious close, ultimately ending its 66-year print run with an exit that proved relatively quiet for a brand that “liked to make noise,” as one-time Playboy model Lily Burana put it in an essay for the New York Times. On March 18, amid a slew of endings, closures and deaths both literal and figurative, Playboy announced it would be ceasing publication of its print magazine with the Spring 2020 issue. When the Bunny calls, it takes a certain kind of woman to heed that call-here are the 50 hottest celebrities who did.As American life ground to a halt last month, as we seem to have become fond of phrasing it, so too did one of its longtime cultural signifiers. Say what you will about showing the goods, it's still considered an honor to be asked to be in Playboy, and the famous women who've done it have made their fans happy and converted new ones. And in the absence of celebrities, the mag would run celebrity relatives, former celebrities, girls who looked like celebrities, girls who'd slept with celebrities and, of course, Playboy models who had themselves achieved some level of celebrity.
By the late '90s, Playboy was full-on addicted to celebrities.
Pictorials by Bo Derek, Barbara Carrera, and Kim Basinger were some of the earliest examples of celebrities who decided to "do Playboy," a phrase that is now a ubiquitous suggestion for every starlet with a movie or two under her belt. Playboy got hip to the value of naked famous ladies. The girls in Playboy usually had names like Phyllis and Melba, and though they were supreme beauties, they weren't famous outside of the brand.Īround the turn of the '80s, that changed. Playboy launched in December 1953 with a celebrity on the cover and in the pages-Marilyn Monroe (who didn't actually pose for the mag)-but the magazine really didn't trade in famous nudity for its first couple of decades.
Movie icons, TV stars, athletes, supermodels-fans know them with their clothes on, and a lot of those fans want to see them with their clothes off. And as much as warm-blooded folks all like getting a peek at the Playmate-dreamed up by Hugh Hefner to be the girl next door, stripped bare for your convenience-nothing has the gawk factor of celebrity skin. Over the years a lot of hot, nude women have graced the pages of Playboy.