It’s not the end of the world or anything. Playboy is just changing its ways of using nude women to lure and keep more readers under its wing. This change is going to be a total shocker for many because the magazine has been featuring naked women for 62 years now.
The big move of Playboy magazine was said to be all thanks to editor Cory Jones' effort to talk founder Hugh Hefner into agreeing that they should stop featuring and publishing naked women images on its ubiquitous magazine.
According to The New York Times, the 89-year-old editor-in-chief agreed to Jones' words, so now the world can expect to see a fully redesigned Playboy magazine when March 2016 arrives.
Though the magazine will still feature women, they will not be showing off their nude bodies to the readers. Instead, they will be fully clothed despite possibly posing provocatively.
"That battle has been fought and won," chief executive Scott Flanders was quoted as saying. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture."
The planned redesign comes at a time when the magazine's circulation is declining. Its online presence is also not as successful as its peers, with Flanders stating that Playboy has a strong competition in the Internet now that pornography is very accessible, Mashable reported.
In December, Flanders already expressed how nudity has affected the magazine's performance. "You could argue that nudity is a distraction for us and actually shrinks our audience rather than expands it," he said at the time.
Playboy, in its early years, caught a lot of attention from the public for showcasing the woman form's natural state at a time when it was still a taboo. But now that nudity is considered normal, it may be the right time for the controversial mag to shift its focus.
In 1975, the circulation of Playboy reached up to 6.5 million, now the figure's down to just 800,000, Business Insider has learned.
