Advance peeks of Playboy’s forthcoming March issue (on sale next Friday) have been released, revealing their first centerfold who leaves some of her clothes on: model and actress Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel Hemingway, who posed for the magazine in 1982.
Shot by Angelo Pennetta, the spread has been somewhat complimented by David Segal at the New York Times, who got an advance heads up about the issue, just as the paper did about the magazine’s decision to drop full-on nudity in the first place. To be quite clear, Hemingway is still mostly nude, using what Segal calls “strategic concealment” to hide the parts of her body Playboy would once have laid bare.
Ms. Hemingway and other featured women in the issue are unretouched. Playboy photographs have long been triumphs of technology, giving models a sheen of perfection that is unobtainable without lots of carefully placed lights and aggressive airbrushing. That is over. Some images in the March issue are grainy, and all feel more impromptu than posed. The magazine has adopted the unadorned, point-and-shoot aesthetic made famous by American Apparel ads and fashion photographers like Terry Richardson.
Paradoxical as it may sound, Playboy has undergone major cosmetic surgery and emerged from the operating room looking more natural.
Those perhaps more skeptical will doubt that these images have been “unretouched,” a claim the company has made about their pictures of women before. (It should also be noted that Terry Richardson has shot for Playboy numerous times and his images are anything but natural. Overly lit, perhaps.) If Playboy’s photos look more natural than they did before, they also look considerably more like those used by its competitors Esquire and GQ, with some of the shots bearing a striking resemblance to those favored during Kate Lanphear’s brief tenure at Maxim.