• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 13, 2017

The publication which earned iconic status by making nudity a social cause is doing it again.

Playboyannounced the magazine’s print edition and digital channels are bringing back nudity after a year-long experiment with clothing. The decision appears to be an admission that the non-nude editorial policy, the centerpiece of a strategy to make the pub more advertiser-friendly, has failed to deliver the hoped-for financial turnaround.

The return of nudity was revealed with a flurry of other new features and revamps by Cooper Hefner, the son of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. He was named chief operating officer of Playboy Enterprises in October of last year.

Playboy is celebrating the reintroduction of beautiful women in the buff with a new campaign, with the theme “Naked is Normal,” dedicated to encouraging Americans to adopt a less panicky and more welcoming attitude towards human biology.

In addition to bringing back bodacious babes, Playboy is resurrecting another defunct feature, albeit with a more contemporary take and millennial appeal, with the return of “Party Jokes.” It’s also dropping the tagline “Entertainment for Men” from the cover. A new section, “heritage,” will revisit the magazine’s prescient past views and their meaning in the context of the current cultural climate.

In a tweet announcing the move, Hefner junior argued  the decision to drop nudity, while well-intentioned, was a misstep: “I’ll be the first to admit the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake. Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today, we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”

Hefner, son of Hefner and 1989 Playboy Playmate of the Year Kimberly Conrad, has been consistent in his opposition to the no-nude policy.

In February 2016, he stated he disagreed with the company’s new management on this point, but had been sidelined, telling Business Insider: “When you have a company and the founder is responsible for kick-starting the sexual revolution and then you pluck out that aspect of the company’s DNA by removing the nudity, it makes a lot of people, including me, sit and say: ‘What the hell is the company doing?’”

He elaborated: “I didn’t agree with the decision, because I felt as though millennials and Gen-Y didn’t view nudity as the issue. The issue was the way in which nudity and the girls were portrayed.”