Early last year, Ben Kohn, a financier who had helped take Playboy private in 2011 and is now chief executive, told The Wall Street Journal that he was considering getting rid of the magazine, in order to focus on licensing and joint ventures. But instead, Playboy was quietly relaunched this year — this time as a thick-stock, matte-paper, ad-free quarterly. It is edited by a millennial triumvirate: the openly gay Mr. Singh, 31; Erica Loewy, 26, the creative director; and Anna Wilson, 29, who oversees photography and multimedia. There had been women in the latter two positions before, but never both at the same time.

The result is a magazine that is virtually unrecognizable from the one Mr. Hefner created — and, for the first time in Playboy’s history, with no Hefners involved. Not Hugh, of course, nor his daughter, Christie, who was chairwoman and chief executive from 1988 through 2008, nor his son Cooper, who stepped down as chief creative officer in April. (He said he would start his own adult content portal, HefPost.) A Playboy spokeswoman said the Hefner family no longer had a financial stake in the company.

The summer issue, out now, features an interview with Tarana Burke, the activist who founded the MeToo movement, conducted by Dream Hampton, whose documentary about R. Kelly led to multiple charges against the singer. There is a queer cartoon and a feature on gender-neutral sex toys. The fall issue will feature a photo essay by the artist Marilyn Minter celebrating female pubic hair.

“We have red hair, blond hair, black hair — it’s basically every color of the rainbow,” Liz Suman, 35, the magazine’s arts editor, told me. She added that elsewhere in the publication, “I’ve been sneaking in some penises, too.”

“Stuff like that wouldn’t have happened a year ago, for sure,” she said. “Or maybe it would have — but it wouldn’t have been celebrated in the same way.”

The ‘Big Bunny’ gets grounded

During its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, Playboy represented, to a certain breed of male consumer, a lifestyle: lavish, aspirational, sexually adventurous. Reaching nearly seven million subscribers at its peak, the magazine published the work of Andy Warhol, Margaret Atwood and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as interviews with the likes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fidel Castro. Soon there were clubs and resorts and casinos, as well as a “Big Bunny” jet with a discothèque inside.