From its first issue in 1953, Playboy’s publisher Hugh Hefner sought to distinguish it from the sleazy sex magazines stored under the newsstand counter and sold in brown paper bags. He once explained that he chose a rabbit as the magazine’s mascot “because of the humorous sexual connotation,” but dressed him in a tuxedo “to add the idea of sophistication.” The models may have been nude, but the articles were written by acclaimed authors like Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, and Vladimir Nabokov and covered highbrow topics including “Picasso, Nietzsche, [and] jazz,” to quote Hefner’s introductory editorial. Even...