Playboy scion sees retro renaissance
Hugh Hefner’s 25-year-old son isn’t afraid of nudity — in fact, he thinks it’s just what the country needs to escape “reactionary cultural conservatism,” according to a report.
“Right now, as history is repeating itself in real time,” Cooper Hefner told the Hollywood Reporter this week, likening the Trumper a to the Eisenhower administration. “I want Playboy to be central to that conversation.”
The skin-mag scion proved his mettle in June, when he published a fresh crop of nude photos of his own mother, Kimberley Conrad, who had debuted as a Playboy centerfold in 1989 before marrying Hugh Hefner and starting a family with him.
Still, the younger Hefner’s retro strategy won’t be easy in an era where free and easy access to nudity has slashed Playboy’s circulation from 5.6 million in the 1970s to less than half a million.
Having sat in on its board meetings since college, Cooper senses where Playboy went astray. It shouldn’t have done “The Girls Next Door,” E! reality-TV-series, for example.
“[The show] collected a young audience but didn’t do a good job of conveying how Playboy is both playful and sophisticated,” Cooper told THR.
Even worse was briefly giving up nudity in 2015. The flesh book’s bid for respectability so upset Cooper that he quit for 18 months.
“There was a lack of understanding of who we are,” he said. “Nudity hadn’t been the problem — it was how it’d been presented.”