As it goes online only, a (briefs) history of Playboy magazine...

1953: A marketing copywriter for Esquire magazine called Hugh Hefner raises $8,000 — including donations from his brother and mother — to launch a magazine called Stag Party. But there’s another men’s title called Stag and, after it threatened to sue him, he changed the name to Playboy. The first edition, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, sells out its entire 54,000 print run.

1954: The U.S. Post Office refuses to distribute the magazine on the grounds that it’s obscene. Hefner sues and wins — generating huge publicity.

1960: First Playboy Club opens in Chicago.

1962: The magazine introduces the first ‘Playboy Interview’ with jazz legend Miles Davis. Over the years, Martin Luther King, the radical black separatist Malcolm X, and a young Steve Jobs are interviewed. Heavyweight writers from Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac and Roald Dahl to Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal and Ian Fleming also contributed. In 2005, journalist Mark Boal who was embedded with bomb-disposal experts in Iraq, wrote a piece called ‘The man in the bomb suit’ which inspired the awardwinning film, The Hurt Locker. Such content made the defence of ‘I only read it for the articles’ vaguely plausible.

1965: Jennifer Jackson becomes the first African-American Playmate of the Month in the March issue. In October 1971, Darine

Stern became the first African-American model featured alone on a cover.

1971: Hefner buys a West Los Angeles estate and creates Playboy Mansion West which becomes his home.

1972: The British model Marilyn Cole is the first full-frontal nude Playmate. She later marries Victor Lownes, Hefner’s righthand man, who launched the Playboy Clubs in London and in Europe

1988: Hefner’s daughter, Christie, becomes chairman of Playboy Enterprises Inc. Hefner remains editor-in-chief.

1999: Pamela Anderson appears on the cover of the February issue, one of 14 shoots she did for the magazine. British stars who graced its pages include Naomi Campbell, Daisy Lowe and Katie Price.

2009: By now, a company valued at $1 billion in 2000 is worth just $84 million, as tastes change and criticism grows of the objectification of women.

2015: Playboy announces it will no longer run pictures of completely naked women.

2017: Playboy announces that it is reverting to running pictures of completely naked women. Hefner dies at the age of 91.

2020: Playmate of the Year becomes Playmates of the Year, and from the spring edition onwards, the magazine will cease to be available in print and will be online only.