“We are focusing on what we’ve always done best – providing playful, fun, arousing and entertaining experiences with real rigor and research behind them,” says Suman. Recent projects include the Playboy Live series on Instagram, with episodes featuring everything from comedy and book clubs to workouts and quarantine pool parties with models, as well as a modern reimagining of the famed Playboy Advisor series, presenting grown-up sex ed gone digital that offers sexual wellness lessons such as “ Dildos and Dildon’ts” and the best “ Toys & Tools” to achieve the female orgasm. These digital pursuits of pleasure include a combination of Playboy old and new, refashioned and repackaged into a sprawling multi-platform presence fit for the 2020 consumer. By focusing on the brand’s online presence, which includes, Instagram, Twitter, IGTV and YouTube channels as well as a Medium blog, Playboy “will continue to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure in a digital way.”

“We’re turning our attention to achieving our mission in the most effective and impactful way we can for a 2020 audience,” Playboy’s executive editor Liz Suman tells InsideHook. While Playboy is retiring its long-running print product - which just last year saw a major artistic and editorial overhaul that transformed Hugh Hefner’s iconic nude mag into an ad-free quarterly the Times called “a newer, woke-er, more inclusive Playboy,” - the brand is moving forward with a multi-platform, fully digital presence. But now free of its print anchor, the brand, like many of us in this particular moment, is suddenly more of the internet than ever before. Like the vast majority of media brands, Playboy itself has been “of the internet” for quite some time. Burana, who had posed for the magazine’s 1996 “Women of the Internet” pictorial, penned her tribute to the late print magazine after finding herself feeling “weirdly nostalgic” in the wake of Playboy’s announcement, perhaps for a time before all of us were “of the internet.” Citing various reasons, including the long-running plight of print media and the far-reaching tendrils of the COVID-19 pandemic, the magazine came to a seemingly sudden and unceremonious close, ultimately ending its 66-year print run with an exit that proved relatively quiet for a brand that “liked to make noise,” as one-time Playboy model Lily Burana put it in an essay for the New York Times. On March 18, amid a slew of endings, closures and deaths both literal and figurative, Playboy announced it would be ceasing publication of its print magazine with the Spring 2020 issue. As American life ground to a halt last month, as we seem to have become fond of phrasing it, so too did one of its longtime cultural signifiers.

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