It’s no secret that things have changed at Playboy in recent years. As part of last year’s major rebranding that transformed the old-school nude mag into what the New York Times called “a newer, woke-er, more inclusive Playboy,” the company has revised and/or parted ways with many of the brand’s former hallmarks and traditions in lieu of more modern branding designed to appeal to an evolving audience.
Now a Hefnerless, ad-free quarterly whose pages are filled with progressive content and nude pictorials of a more artistic nature than male-gazey centerfolds of yore, Playboy is rethinking another of the brand’s long-standing traditions: the Playmate of the Year award.
On Tuesday, the brand announced Playboy would be “taking a new direction” with the iconic award, anointing not one, but 12 Playmates of the Year.
If you do some quick math, you’ll notice that that’s every Playmate that appeared in the magazine last year. In what Playboy calls the latest in “a string of progressive decisions” for the brand, the magazine has decided to celebrate all the Playmates of the Year, instead of a single honoree.
“This year, in lieu of its traditional Playmate of the Year award, PLAYBOY made history once again by choosing to celebrate all twelve diverse Playmates of the month from 2019, for each of their unique contributions to the brand,” the company announced in a press release.
The 12 new Playmates of the Year will be featured in a 14-page spread shot by photographers Ali Mitton and Chloe Chippendale in the magazine’s most recent issue, On Speech, available March 17.
The newest Playmates of the Year are:
Vendela (January 2019 Playmate)
Megan Moore (February 2019 Playmate)
Miki Hamano (March 2019 Playmate)
Fo Porter (April 2019 Playmate)
Abigail O’Neill (May 2019 Playmate)
Yoli Lara (June 2019 Playmate)
Teela Laroux (July 2019 Playmate)
Geena Rocero (August 2019 Playmate)
Sophie O’Neil (September 2019 Playmate)
Hilda Dias Pimentel (October 2019 Playmate)
Gillian Chan (November 2019 Playmate)
Jordy Murray (December 2019 Playmate)
Subscribe here for our free daily newsletter.Â
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
