The rise of feminism led to some criticism that women were being objectified.

Its a break with a 62-year format that has had a significant impact on American culture.

Every month since 1953, fold-out spreads of fully nude women have filled Playboy.

The glossy adult mens magazine boasts a plethora of celebrity conquests in its portfolio.

Madonna, Sharon Stone and Naomi Campbell were photographed at the peak of their fame.

The magazine may have offended some who see it as sexist and demeaning to women, but the idea of Playboy dispensing with nudity would once have been unthinkable.

Youre now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free.

And so its just passe at this juncture, Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders is quoted by the New York Times as saying.

The redesigned Playboy will still feature sexy, seductive pictorials of the worlds most beautiful women, but full nudity will be banished.

Marilyn Monroe famously appeared on the magazines first cover and centrefold.

If youre a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you, he wrote in the first issue.

We want to make it clear from the very start, we arent a family magazine.

If youre somebodys sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.

The 50,000 copies - which were sold for 50 cents each - flew off the shelf.

Dian Hanson, author of a six-volume history of mens magazines and an editor for Taschen, says Hefner tapped into a new consumer attitude that emerged at the end of World War Two.

America came out the war relatively unscathed, it did not suffer like Europe.

Many young men didnt see battle but had experienced more adventurous things, more nudity, and wanted something different when they came back.

It wasnt the first nude magazine, but rather than showing a macho Hemingwayesque way of life that many men didnt relate to, it showed scrawny intelligent guys they didnt have to be rough, tough guys to be a playboy.

The magazine published stories by Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood among others, and interviewed culturally and politically significant figures such as Frank Sinatra, Malcolm X and Jimmy Carter.

But nudity was always a big selling point of the magazine, which attracted or coaxed well-known female public figures into gracing its pages.

Some of the pictures were pretty amazing and became pop culture references.

Hefner basically reconfigured a magazine made by older men to fit a younger mans need, and then took it a step further, she says.

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