The Playboy Club is back and better than ever after reopening its doors in New York. Women in cocktail dresses and men in loafers with no socks were seen dancing and shimmering around an oval bar during the opening-night party. The bunnies performed as waitresses in black corsets, rabbit ears and cottontails while offering plates of sushi and flutes of Champagne.
The VIP area, located in the Playboy Club, featured a group of well-groomed men drinking and admiring the beautiful bunnies as they passed by. Of course, they were ignoring the collection of readings on the bookshelves nearby which contained “Lincoln,” by Gore Vidal, “The Sensuous Man,” by M. and “Rabbit, Run,” by John Updike.
According to Bloomberg, Playboy Chief Executive Officer Ben Kohn managed to find a quiet hallway to explain high hopes for Playboy. The company is in the midst of a very good year in which profits are up 25 percent. Playboy see lots of opportunities to expand in its future, particularly in the United States.
Playboy ditched its licensing business in the domestic market five years ago and instead began investing in places where the Playboy brand still conveyed an air of American exceptionalism, according to Bloomberg. Southeast Asia is home to five Playboy clubs, cafes and beer gardens while London is home to one Playboy club.
Last year, the company’s founder Hugh Hefner passed away at the age of 91, making the timing of all of this challenging. Hefner created a legacy and turned Playboy into a lucrative empire. He believed in having a buxom blond on each are which led to a symbol of success. However, recently insatiable bed-hopping is losing all its glamour. The brand instead plans to back its libertarian and personal-freedom roots, according to Kohn. He later adds fun to his list of goals for the brand.
Cooper Hefner, the 27-year-old son of Hugh Hefner and former Playmate Kimberly Conrad, explained further on Twitter saying, “I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but removing it entirely was a mistake,” wrote Hefner, now Playboy’s chief creative officer. “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”
“As you know, journalism is under attack every day by the White House,” he adds, “but there’s also censorship on social media. Those are issues of freedom of speech, which we’ve been fighting on behalf of for 65 years, and we need to address them again going forward. Those personal freedoms, those libertarian points of view are important to bring back.”
