Easter Bunnies

The season of easter has got me thinking of Bunnies.  Not the little furry ones that are tasty when skinned and cooked, but the original Playboy Bunnies.  (Who also might be tasty when cooked, but I don't know if anyone has every tried).

A tasty selection of rabbit?

Bunny Brilliant
The first Playboy club opened in Chicago in 1960.  Part of the brilliance of the Bunny costume is the part played by tights in it.  Hefner could have dressed his women in stockings (more traditional) or even in bare legs.  But what he realised - consciously or subconsciously - was that most men find nyloned legs a turn on.  They may not admit it, but that length of nylon encased leg does its magic work.  It is a fact many girls miss to, regarding tights as nothing more than an "accessory".  The Bunnies featured black fishnets with high heels, but as Hooters showed in a later generation tan tights with trainers can be as effective.

Brit Bunnies
Soon a UK Playboy club opened at 45 Park Lane, London

Carry on Bunny

Exploited Bunnies?
Of course there are always those that will claim Bunnies were exploited.  Nevertheless there was no shortage of potential Bunnies - ranging from debutantes to working girls from Dagenham.   Furthermore, the club offered wages of £35 a week - big money in the mid-1960s, when added to tips - and a chance to meet the stars.  And of course being a Bunny was a counter-cultural statement, a chance to rebel against the remnants Victorian xian "morals" that survived into the 1950s.

Much is made of the fact that the weight of Bunnies was monitored with an industrial weighing machine.  Were the girls just objects?  Of course they were.  They were lumps of well packaged meat which Playboy punters paid the Playboy empire good money to oggle.  But before you get all moral, that is the nature of capitalism.  We are all machines.  We have no souls.   The girl in a call centre is no less exploited than the Bunny.  Her performance (calls her hour etc) is measured and managed, but she doesn't have the fun of a Bunny.

Exploited?

The end of the Bunny?
In the sixties Playboy swung, in the seventies it sunk.  Guys were no longer content with the image of sex, they now wanted the sex itself.  So discos and singles bars thrived instead of the Playboy Clubs.  And if you were so sad that you couldn't get sex with a real girl there was always the porno movies.

Not raunchy enough?

There were attempts to resurrect the Bunny.  In 1999 the Playboy Casino on Rhodes opened and closed almost within the same calendar month.
The Bunny meme lives on
The Bunny club is dead, as by now are some the original Bunnies - reduced to heating for your local swimming pool.  But the Bunny look is still sexy, it has imprinted itself in our brains and even today girls wear it too turn guys on

Of course the Bunny outfit has been subverted, it is not the same outfit as the uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the 60s.  Like all good memes the Bunny look has evolved to survive.

Bunny punk?

And every year a new generation of girls finds the joy of tights in the Bunny look.  Dressing as Bunny is almost a right of passage.