Coming Soon:  Modernist furniture coverage in Playboy
Finally, you can read it "just for the articles" - no nudity here

Playboy is of the most successful brands in history. Hugh Hefner, who had written promotional copy for Esquire, formed HMH Publishing Corporation and raised just over $8,000, including a $1,000 loan from his mother. The first issue, produced in his kitchen and published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe. Priced at 50¢, it sold out within weeks.  Playboy quickly became more than a pin-up magazine. It serialized Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in 1954, rescuing the novel from obscurity. Art Paul designed the tuxedoed rabbit logo (above). Playboy published authors such as Nabokov, Updike, Cheever, Vonnegut, Le Carré, Joyce Carol Oates and Doris Lessing. The Playboy Interview delivered landmark conversations:  Alex Haley with Martin Luther King Jr., George Rockwell, and Malcolm X; Jimmy Carter's 1976 "adultery in my heart" admission; and David Sheff's John Lennon interview.  Playboy championed gay rights, women's rights and First Amendment causes, and circulation peaked at seven million in 1971 when a quarter of American college men bought it monthly. Feminists were unsparing then and now about the sexualization of women for men.

Competition from Penthouse, then video, then the internet eroded the franchise. Circulation fell to 400,000 in 2017.  Hefner's daughter Christie Hefner ran the company from 1988 to 2009. Hefner took it private in 2011. Nudity was dropped in 2016, restored in 2017 as an acknowledged mistake. The Spring 2020 issue ended regular print publication. Relaunched as an annual in February 2025 under Mike Guy, then quarterly with a Winter 2025 Jane Birkin cover. Phillip Picardi, formerly of Out and Teen Vogue, became editor-in-chief in March 2026, as headquarters prepared to move from Los Angeles to Miami Beach.  Story adapted from Wikipedia.

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Photograph by Marvin Koner (1921–1983) and Daniel Rubin, accompanying John Anderson's article "Designs for Living," July 1961.  Left to right, George Nelson with his serving cart; Edward J. Wormley with the Dunbar 5480 armchairl; Eero Saarinen with the Womb chair; Harry Bertoia with the Diamond chair; Charles Eames with the DCM chair; Jens Risom with the U-140 armchair.

Article Index:  1969-1973 1974-1978 1979-1983 1984-1988 1989-1993 1994 1995 1996