To the surprise of zero human beings on this planet, Playboy has announced that they will be reinstating photos of nude women. Actually, they never went away. They got tamer…but every issue I've received has had a couple pix of women with no clothing on. Basically, they reverted to the kind of nudity they had in 1965.
I don't know anyone at that magazine anymore so this is not inside info…but it looks to me like what happened was that someone decided that if Playboy was going to survive, they had to get a big influx of advertising. That meant lowering the ad rates which were way high for its circulation. It also meant toning down the nudity which scared off some advertisers. And it also meant slashing the budget of the magazine.
It didn't get a lot of attention because the big story was that Playboy was getting rid of nudity but what they really did was get rid of most of the budget. Say what you will but he used to do a very lush magazine with top writers and great photographers and the best-looking models and some of the best cartoonists in the business. They got rid of all that and wound up with a pretty crummy magazine which no one wanted to buy.
So now they're bringing back full nudity but I'm guessing they're not about to bring back the great writers and cartoonists and other expensive elements…so they'll still have a magazine that no one wants to buy. This is not going to end well.