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The photograph that launched the magazine was taken four years before the magazine existed, by a photographer who owned it, of a woman who did not.
In 1949 Marilyn Monroe posed nude for Tom Kelley and was paid fifty dollars. Kelley sold the images to a calendar printer. In 1953 a 27-year-old Chicago copywriter bought reproduction rights from that printer for around five hundred dollars, put Monroe on the cover of a magazine she had no involvement in, and did not pay her anything further. She was by then a rising film star, and the pictures had been taken when she was neither.
That transaction is the whole magazine in miniature, and it is worth sitting with before the rest of the history, because everything Playboy later became — the aspiration, the taste, the interviews, the litigation, the logo on a keyring in an airport shop — was built on top of it.
A magazine that did not expect a second issue
The first issue carried no date on its cover. Hefner was not confident there would be another one, and an undated cover can sit on a newsstand indefinitely. It ran to forty-four pages. It was meant to be called Stag Party until a magazine already called Stag objected; a colleague suggested the replacement.
The funding story that gets repeated — a thousand dollars borrowed from his mother — is true as far as it goes and misleading as a whole. It was one contribution among several from small investors. The lone-visionary version is a better anecdote than it is an account.
It sold. And the thing it proved was commercial rather than cultural: that a magazine could carry explicit photographs and still be sold openly at a newsstand, provided it was wrapped in enough furniture recommendations, jazz criticism and cocktail advice to look like a lifestyle rather than a stroke book. The nudity was legible as sophistication. That packaging was the innovation.
The literary reputation was real, and smaller than it is remembered
Playboy paid well and printed serious writers, and a genuine roster of them appeared in it over the decades. The Playboy Interview became a format that mattered — long, adversarial, and given to people who would not sit for that treatment elsewhere.
One story attached to this deserves correcting, because it circulates constantly and reverses what happened. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was serialised across the March, April and May 1954 issues. It is often said Playboy ran it because no one else would. Ballantine had already published the novel in October 1953, months before the first instalment appeared. The serialisation was a coup for a magazine four issues old buying a new book by an established author. It was not a rescue.
The pattern generalises. The magazine's literary standing was a real asset that was also, always, doing a job — it was the thing that made the pictures respectable, and it was funded by them.
What the empire looked like from inside it
In 1963 Gloria Steinem, then a freelance writer, was hired at the New York Playboy Club under an assumed name and worked eleven days as a Bunny for Show magazine. The resulting two-part piece ran that May and June.
What it documented was mundane and damning: wages lower than the glamour implied, tips shared out by the house, mandatory deductions for costume upkeep, long unpaid waits, and a requirement that new hires submit to medical examinations including internal ones. Hefner ordered that last requirement dropped after publication.
It is the single most useful document about the brand at its height, because it is not an argument about whether the magazine objectified women — a debate that ran for fifty years and moved nobody. It is a description of an employment arrangement, checkable against a payslip.
The milestones the magazine did set
Two are worth naming precisely.
In October 1971 Darine Stern appeared alone on the cover, the first Black woman to do so. It took the magazine eighteen years to get there, and the cover is now better remembered than almost any other from the decade.
In January 1972 Marilyn Cole was the first full-frontal centrefold, a line the magazine had held until competition from Penthouse made holding it commercially unaffordable. The escalation between the two titles through the early seventies acquired a nickname at the time and is usually told as a joke. What it actually shows is that the magazine's editorial limits were set by its rivals rather than by any principle it held, which is worth knowing when reading its later account of itself.
The two exits
Playboy has now stopped twice, in different senses.
In March 2016 it published its first non-nude issue in sixty-three years. The reasoning given by its chief executive at the time was straightforward: the internet had made explicit imagery free and ubiquitous, so nudity was no longer what a magazine could sell. The reversal came fast. On 13 February 2017 the company announced that nudity was returning with the March/April issue, with Hefner's son — by then the company's chief creative officer — saying publicly that removing it entirely had been a mistake. Hugh Hefner died later that year.
The second exit was quieter and more final. In March 2020 the print magazine stopped after sixty-six years, with pandemic disruption to newsstand distribution given as the cause. What survived was the trademark.
What the company is now
PLBY Group's largest revenue line is licensing — the rabbit head on clothing, accessories and goods, plus territorial licences for foreign-language editions. That is the business. Publishing is a marketing expense attached to it.
In August 2024 the company announced print was returning as an annual edition, arriving February 2025 with a named editor-in-chief and a revived worldwide Playmate of the Year search. An annual is not a magazine in the sense the first seventy years meant; it is a keepsake that reminds licensees the mark is still in use. Whether it has continued past its first outing is not something that could be established here, and it is not claimed either way.
The digital properties — Playboy Plus, Playboy TV and the surviving brand accounts — are licensed operations trading on the same asset.
What the history is actually about
The usual telling is about a man and his tastes. The more accurate one is about ownership.
Playboy's founding asset was a photograph its subject could not control and did not benefit from. Its most durable asset turned out to be not the writing, the interviews or the photography but a silhouette of a rabbit, which is why the company outlived the magazine by a comfortable margin. And the reason so much of the industry has moved toward performers holding their own rights and their own audiences is a direct reaction to the arrangement that started here.
That is not a small legacy. It is just a different one from the one the brand tells about itself.
What this article leaves out
The original version of this piece spent its final third on contemporary performers who had appeared on the author's own production site, with biographical assertions about each. None of that is carried forward: it was unsourced, it concerned identifiable living people, and it had nothing to do with the history in the title. The original's dismissal of feminist criticism of the magazine is also not restated — Steinem's reporting is included instead, because it is a document rather than an opinion, and it can be checked.