Playboy Is Bringing Back Nudity

Playboy is bringing nudity back. A year after the iconic magazine stopped printing pictures of naked women on its pages, the company's chief creative officer said those (short-lived) days are over.

"I'll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake," said Cooper Hefner, Hugh Hefner's son, in a post on Twitter.

"Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn't a problem. Today we're taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are."

The announcement is a stark change from a year and a half ago, when Playboy announced it would be dropping nudity altogether as a way to possibly add more subscriptions, which had dropped to just 800,000 subscribers from 5.6 million in 1975.

The magazine said the mass availability of internet porn was cutting into its market.

“That battle has been fought and won,” Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive, told the New York Times in October 2015. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

In recent days, the Playboy Twitter account had been hinting at changes. It has been tweeting references to notable nudity such as Jack and Rose on the Titanic, Adam and Eve and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" with the hashtag #NakedIsNormal.

On Monday, it tweeted the cover of its March 2017 issue, which features the "Naked Is Normal" slogan with a topless woman on it. We won't put it in here, but you can click here to see if if you so choose.

Just be warned that it does contain, for the first time in a year, nudity.