Playboy Magazine Returns to Print Next Year

Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine at age 26 with help from 45 investors, including his own mother, and turned it into a global brand. The risqué magazine shook publishing (and American society) and ran for almost seven decades before shutting down during Covid.

Early next year, the storied publication returns to print, owner PLBY Group, Inc. announced recently. Hefner famously landed Marilyn Monroe as his first cover model in 1953 and recruited some of the world’s most famous writers to contribute to his magazine. Hefner pictured the magazine as a thinking man’s journal peppered with naked ladies between the jazz reviews and Op Eds.

The magazine opened Playboy clubs with bunny-costumed cocktail waitresses around the country during the 1960s. One of the first was located on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in 1964. Hefner relocated to Los Angeles full-time in 1975 and purchased a historic Gothic-Tudor mansion in Holmby Hills that he dubbed the Playboy Mansion. The sprawling home, with its pipe organ, zoo , and famous grotto, was the site of countless debauched parties that continued until Hefner’s death in 2017.

Hefner’s original creation has morphed into a sizable sexy empire. A new generation of Playboy clubs has come and gone in cities around the world, but a new clothing line is coming and the company has even taken on a “global condoms and lubricants partner.”

That company, PLBY Group, plans a new, annual print edition of Playboy featuring celebrity interviews, their 20 questions column, and the Playboy Advisor. The original magazine dropped nude photography in 2016 but brought it back a year later. This new edition, set to drop in February 2025, will also feature those famous centerfolds.

The company is currently hosting a Playmate and Bunny Search and open casting call that kicks off onboard a private plane in Los Angeles next week. Aspiring bunnies can submit an application along with natural-looking, “unfiltered” and “unretouched” photos. The magazine requests that models please keep their clothes on for the pictures.