Dree Hemingway, Great-Granddaughter of Ernest, Is Playboy's First Non-Full-Frontal Playmate

Playboy said in October that it would make a historic shift and stop publishing nude photos of women starting in 2016. With the landmark March issue on sale next month, the magazine is teasing images (opens in new tab) of its models, including Miss March Dree Hemingway—an actress who, yes, is the great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway—as well its cover model. 

The big story, notes Times columnist David Segal (opens in new tab), is less the covered-up models, who are, he points out, still naked, if not full-frontal. Instead, the bigger shock is that none of the photos of the women in the issue were retouched. 

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 (opens in new tab).

Hemingway, who, Playboy notes, won the Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards for her role in the movie Starlet, is depicted in various states of undress in the March issue. In each of the nude shots, she is strategically covered up. 

"My pictorial captures all of me," she told Playboy (opens in new tab), "the sexy Dree, the childlike Dree, the funny Dree, the tomboy, the Lolita."

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