NEW YORK — Victoria Oliver placed the upright satin rabbit ears atop her blond tresses. A fluffy white cottontail had already been fastened with a snap to her backside.
Her bow tie was straightened, her cuff links aligned. A sparkly black Roberto Cavalli cummerbund was wrapped around her midriff.
Oliver, 25, looked in the mirror, cocked her head and paused. Reaching up, she tweaked one of her rabbit ears so it flopped downward. A smile spread across her face. “I kind of like them a little askew,” she said. “It’s quirky.”
Behold the birth — or rebirth — of a Playboy Bunny.
Oliver was being fitted this summer morning as one of 54 young women chosen from hundreds to serve drinks in a new Playboy Club at 512 W. 42nd St. in midtown Manhattan (formerly site of the gay-themed Out NYC hotel, which incited local ire after hosting an event for Ted Cruz). Designer Jeremy Scott, a champion of plastic femme culture, was to host a party at the 14,000-square-foot space after his show at New York Fashion Week.
Another Bunny-to-be, Lauren McFall, was being sewn into her bodice for the first time. Like so many in New York City who garnish cocktails by night, she and Oliver are actresses by day. McFall, who declined to give her age, has worked in clubs downtown; Oliver as maître d’ at a restaurant in SoHo.
The women shimmied a bit, adjusting to their new work uniform. The seamstress knew all the right spots to give a little so as not to make the corset excruciating. Pouches are cut into the satiny bust, in case further padding is wished. Each woman will receive three costumes, which are never to be taken home after a shift. Machine wash on cold. Never dry clean; the satin bunches.
Fully laced, McFall stood before a reporter and said she felt a bit like Wonder Woman.
“I have brunette envy right now,” said Oliver, gazing admiringly at her new colleague.
This is not the first time Playboy, which is working with Merchants, a hospitality company, has tried to bring back the Bunny. The original Playboy club, which opened in Chicago in 1960, was such a success that it spawned chapters in more than 30 cities around the world. The last of those clubs, in Lansing, Michigan, closed in 1988.
Attempted reboots over the years have included another New York club in which women were joined by male servers — “Rabbits” — who donned unitards and yachting caps (but not ears or tails); and the more likely match of a Playboy club inside the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, which opened in 2006 and closed after six years.
But how will the bunny ears fare in a zone better known for the blooming of thousands of pointy-eared “pussy” hats? In this (yes, again) Year of the Woman, during which a record number of female candidates are running for office (and winning), is a cotton-tailed cocktail server simply a specter of sexism past?
Or will an America so weary of political correctness that it put a blingy Howard Stern regular into the Oval Office perhaps bring itself to again celebrate the Bunny? Could she be a welcome bit of retro glamour — relieving, perhaps the beleaguered Victoria’s Secret Angel — dusted off for some playful fun in an increasingly puritanical age in which corporate worker bees are forbidden from looking at one another for more than five seconds?
Depends on whom you ask.
‘A Cartoon Situation’
Some would say Gloria Steinem settled this issue long ago. In 1963 she wrote a two-part tell-all for Show magazine after working as a Bunny in the original New York club, then on 59th Street, off Fifth Avenue. She described long hours, gross men, absurd job requirements (like a mandatory doctor inspection) and low pay. The conclusion she reached — “all women are Bunnies” — resonated.
Another pair of young actresses became Bunnies on the same day in New York when Steinem was undercover. One was Mary Hutton, gaptoothed and from Florida. Another was Kathryn Leigh Scott, who came to New York after growing up on a farm in Minnesota whose crops included turnips.
Hutton was asked to change her name because there were already three other Marys. She tried her middle name, Laurence, after her father, who had died young. It was too long to fit on a name tag, so she lopped two letters off the end.
Then Keith Hefner, brother of Hugh, stationed her to work one of the food counters. It wasn’t long after that Lauren Hutton, the “king crab Bunny,” would trade in her collar and cuff links for the cover of Vogue.
Scott, who was designated “cigarette bunny,” would later act in movies and television and publish books, including “The Bunny Years,” in which she interviewed over 200 former Bunnies.
“So many of them that I worked with are still my friends, and I’ve kept in touch with them,” said Scott over a tuna fish sandwich in her living room in midtown. “They’ve become entrepreneurs, scientists, architects, all kinds of things.”
When a friend died recently, Scott worried that a pet dog left behind would wind up in a pound. She tapped into her Bunny network and found the pooch a new home “within minutes.”
“We’re now at an age where a lot of us are widows, living singly, and I can’t tell you the caring and selfless reaching out that exists among this sisterhood of Bunnies,” she said.
Scott is not surprised to see Playboy give it another go. “Everything old is new again,” she said with a shrug. “Who’d have guessed they would have brought back ‘Hawaii Five-0’?”
Hutton, reached by phone on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, where she pulled her truck off the road for some eggs, said she was neither surprised nor appalled at the idea.
“I think it’s a great job for a girl if she’s got no training in anything, like me,” said Hutton, who was turned down from several fast-food joints before being hired at the Playboy Club. “And you know, I was making $600 on a lunch shift in 1963.”
Recalling such sums of money, Scott said, “a lot of us were earning more than our boyfriends or brothers, even our fathers, and we were 18 years old, going to school and launching careers. And it was fun.”
Hutton said she learned to be sophisticated and that she felt protected as a Bunny. “No one could come on to you in any way, although occasionally you would have a couple of goombahs come in from downtown and try.”
Scott agreed with that sentiment. “I had schoolmates who were working as Kelly girls and shop girls, temp secretaries, or waitresses at other places and they were nowhere near as safe in their jobs as we were. Playboy knew they were dressing girls in provocative costumes, and they were careful. It was a safe environment and we were in charge.”
But Steinem maintains her thesis that the Bunny life was and is, by nature, exploitative. “In this age of Me Too and Time’s Up we know that restaurant workers are among the most sexually harassed because they’re exempt from minimum-wage laws and dependent on tips,” she wrote in an email. “Also seminude corsets and high heels are painful to work in.
“Like Hefner, Playboy Clubs were a parody of patriarchy, and so were the guys who needed them. Hard to imagine any New Yorker going except Donald Trump.”
Hutton takes a different view. “I’d like to point out it’s a one-piece bathing suit,” she said with a chuckle. “Nowadays in fact it’s probably a pretty sober one-piece I guess for what’s out there. And you’re wearing ears, which is pretty funny. It’s a cartoon situation.”
Going for the Gold Leaf
Both Oliver and McFall said they read Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” before putting on their ears. They said it reminded them of how much women faced in the 1960s, but, McFall said, “if the Bunny outfit is outdated, that means the Wonder Woman costume is outdated and that means that every costume that Beyoncé puts on is outdated — and it’s not.”
Hutton and Scott said they would be game to swing by the new club. “I don’t drink much,” Hutton said, “but I might go if it was lunchtime, just to see how the young girls fared, and to tell them some of my experiences. And to save the money. Save the money!”
Speaking of which, a recent walk-through of the still-under-construction club in which these Bunnies will serve, balancing trays of martinis in 3-inch black matte leather pumps, revealed that no expense has been spared.
The floor will be made of tile mosaics, herringbone-patterned walnut and blends of white Carrara and Nero marquina marble; the walls fashioned from black beveled Bendheim glass; the furniture, midcentury and assembled in Portugal. Covers and photographs from the Playboy archives hang in the wash closets and corridors.
The place will be dripping in Trumpian gold leaf. It will drip from the brass handles that finish a leather-wrapped railing along a glass staircase that glows from the light-emitting diodes embedded into each stair. It will drip from the black wall coverings inset with gold paisley. And from the rabbit head that will live in a 350-pound fish tank, surrounded by coral structures and, among other species, 2-foot-long zebra-striped eel and crosshatch triggerfish flown in from Japan.
“From a designer’s perspective, it’s almost like putting a race car driver in a Ferrari and taking the brakes off,” said Cenk Fikri, the architect of this club and others including downtown’s GoldBar.
Fikri said Playboy “allowed for me unhindered creative expression,” and that the only guidelines he received from Cooper Hefner, 27, the company’s chief creative officer, was “to create something that captured the lifestyle” that Playboy represents.
“It almost sort of reminds me of this Sean Connery, 007 lifestyle,” Fikri said. Now that there’s no longer a Hefner residing in the Playboy Mansion, this luxurious bunker between 10th and 11th avenues will serve as chief party palace.
There will be allusions to the mansion’s erstwhile bacchanalia, lounges with names like the Grotto Lounge — a nod to the notorious Jacuzzi cave that teemed with licentiousness (and eventually bacterial strains including Legionnaires’).
A 35-seat club within the club, called the Rabbit Hole, can be found two floors below street level and beyond a tufted leather door that can be unlocked only by a class of key-carrying members who will pay at least $25,000 per year.
And whom might one meet in this club? Playboy insists this will not be the sort of place where investment bankers hurl bottles of liquor at each other. There will be a full menu of food and live events including “discussions.”
Organizers imagine, say, Leonardo DiCaprio enjoying a drink in one of the VIP sections. They hope to attract not just Wall Street but Williamsburg, a challenge even if the L train were not heading for a shutdown.
The Fate of a Brand
“Playboy wouldn’t exist if women and men were equal in our society,” Steinem said. “It’s the gendered version of a minstrel show.”
At the moment men, and print magazines, are having a bit of an identity crisis. Nowhere is that more evident than in Playboy magazine, withering away behind safe-for-work, opaque plastic on the back of the rack and behind a pay wall on the internet.
When its founder, Hugh Hefner, died last year at 91, a number of editorials examining his legacy revealed a certain disdain that had calcified over the years for a man once hailed as a free-speech crusader who championed diversity and LGBT rights in his pages long before everybody else, along with publishing journalism giving the oft-mocked line “I read it for the articles” a fundamental credence.
And yet as adrift as it may be in this gender-neutral zeitgeist, Playboy may be better poised for brand longevity than competitors like Esquire or Maxim. That is because it doesn’t have to be in the content game, dependent on clicks and newsstand sales.
Playboy 2-in-1 shampoo and Playboy cologne, watches, hats and backpacks are sold around the world, purchased primarily by women, according to the company, and bring in over $1 billion each year.
Owing to those lucrative licensing deals, the magazine does not need to generate profit. But more than any nightclub or TV show or fashion designer collaboration, it defines a brand. Without the magazine, the empire is arguably just a mishmash of sexed-up Hard Rock Cafes and Spencer’s Gifts stores.
That is why it came as a shock to some in the company when Playboy’s chief executive, Ben Kohn, told The Wall Street Journal in January that he would likely stop publishing the magazine, saying, “we want to focus on what we call the ‘World of Playboy,’ which is so much larger than a small, legacy print publication.” (Indeed the “World of Playboy” is wide: the company operates a casino in London and spaces across Southeast Asia, though because of local customs, not all employees wear Bunny uniforms.)
But in an interview with The New York Times last month, Kohn insisted the core product was safe, for now. “The magazine is not going to stop printing,” he said by phone from Playboy’s offices in Los Angeles. Though Kohn did say he plans to make the magazine a quarterly, reducing the current print run of six to four beginning next year.
Cooper Hefner, who is described by current and former employees as having a progressive, pansexual vision for Playboy that could assure it a future with his generation and beyond, cracked down on a 2015 hipster revamp that removed nudity from the magazine’s pages.
Under his direction (he declined to be interviewed for this article), the magazine featured a transgender Playmate on one of its covers for the first time in its 64-year history. “It’s the right thing to do,” he told the Times then. “We’re at a moment where gender roles are evolving.”
But not on 42nd Street, where this fall at least they will be preserved in amber, and satin.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.