Morto per cause naturali a novantuno anni Hugh Hefner, il fondatore della rivista Playboy, conosciuta in tutta il mondo.Il suo marchio sfidava sfacciatamente il puritanesimo, incarnando una delle molte facce della rivoluzione sessuale.
He died in his home in Los Angeles, the Playboy Mansion near Beverly Hills, surrounded by his family. The news was announced by the publishing house of Playboy, which heads a real empire of flirtatious entertainment, populated by playmates, the omnipresent, smiling and attractive bunnies born from the imagination of Hefner to reach that of millions of men around the world across several generations.
It was 1953 when, at just twenty-seven years old, Hefner founded the magazine. A young husband and father, he had recently left his previous job at a magazine dedicated to children's activities and embraced the challenge of the sexual revolution, making it a personal revolution.
Pretty, smiling, scantily clad women as a formidable antidote to American puritanism. Criticized and opposed by some, celebrated and praised by others, the undeniable trait of Playboy magazine is its notoriety, not impervious to the changes of time and emblem of one of the most successful marketing operations.
Playboy wanted to offer the dream of which Hefner was the testimonial as much as his desired playmates. A very fortunate intuition that of Hefner, capable like few others of reading the signs of the times: thus in the first edition of Playboy there appeared photos of a young Marilyn Monroe without clothes.
In one year the magazine's circulation reached almost two hundred thousand copies, becoming one million in five years; in the 70s the readers were seven million. With the Internet the competition, even for Playboy, has become very tough and the copies have dropped to less than three million.
In 2015, Playboy stopped publishing photos of naked women in response to the spread of such images online. But Hefner kept his promise to the end.
Article published on 28 September 2017 - 08:35
