Do Playboy Models Wear Body Makeup
From its starting time event in 1953, Playboy'due south publisher Hugh Hefner sought to distinguish it from the sleazy sex magazines stored under the newsstand counter and sold in chocolate-brown newspaper bags. He in one case explained that he chose a rabbit every bit the magazine's mascot "because of the humorous sexual connotation," but dressed him in a tuxedo "to add together the idea of sophistication." The models may have been nude, but the manufactures were written past acclaimed authors like Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, and Vladimir Nabokov and covered highbrow topics including "Picasso, Nietzsche, [and] jazz," to quote Hefner'due south introductory editorial. Even JFK read it.
Similarly, when he opened his outset Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960, Hefner emphasized respectability above raunchiness—a preference widely noted past writers reflecting on his legacy following his death at age 91 last week. The Playboy Lodge was a supper club, not a sex club; jackets and ties were required. Though only men could be members—or "keyholders," in Playboy parlance—they could bring female guests. The buffet offered crab legs and filet mignon, and entertainment was provided by the likes of Nat Rex Cole, Steve Martin, Aretha Franklin, Baton Crystal, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
One of the most iconic symbols of the Playboy Club was its waitstaff: a throng of women known, and dressed, as Bunnies. Much like the clubs themselves, the magazine whose name they shared, and the human who created all of information technology, the outfits worn by the Playboy Bunnies were a blend of provocative and old-fashioned. Since its debut, the Bunny suit—a strapless bodysuit paired with rabbit ears and a fluffy tail—has become a cartoonish cliché of female sexuality, serving every bit a visual punchline in Bridget Jones'due south Diary, Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, The Business firm Bunny, and a host of other rom-coms. Only the Bunny'south erotic allure was equally much of a tease every bit the stuffing that so often filled out the D-cups of her costume. Her skimpy accommodate promised further revelations that never came; her cuddly demeanor concealed the Bunnies' intensive training, strict disciplinary policies, and astronomical paychecks. And if feminists are notwithstanding arguing over whether the Bunny suit was constricting or liberating, information technology's because information technology was designed to be both.
* * *
According to Kevin Jones, the curator of the Fashion Establish of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) Museum, Hefner originally wanted the club's waitresses to wear short, frilly nighties inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies girls—the sex activity symbols of his youth. Just, as recounted in Kathryn Leigh Scott's memoir The Bunny Years, Playmate Ilse Taurins—who was dating the company'south promotions director, Victor Lownes—pointed out that all those flimsy layers would be impractical for serving drinks and lighting cigarettes. It was her idea to dress the waitresses as distaff versions of the mag's masculine logo. The rabbit became a Bunny, and an icon was born (and apace patented—a commencement for a service uniform).
The kickoff paradigm—a satin one-piece worn over a prefab Merry Widow corset and paired with rabbit ears and a fluffy tail—looked besides much like a bathing adapt. A few snips of the scissors raised the leg opening, elongating the legs, accentuating the crotch, and removing whatsoever resemblance to swimwear. Hefner himself insisted on adding the criss-cross lacing at the top of the leg, said Jones, who has a Bunny suit in his museum'south collection. Though the laces were purely decorative—they couldn't exist untied or loosened—they revealed that much more than skin, and suggested the tantalizing possibility of a wardrobe malfunction. A rosette proper noun tag at the right hipbone and dyed-to-lucifer satin pumps completed the outfit. But it was the addition of a human's tuxedo neckband, bow tie, and cuffs in 1961 that pushed the Bunny suit into pop-culture legend.
"Everybody has this idea that [the society] was very sexually liberated," Jones told me. In reality, it was pretty tame—a place for flirting at most. So were the Bunnies. The wife of one keyholder declared the average Bunny to exist "so darn prissy and respectable, you lot'd fifty-fifty let your brother marry her." Nevertheless, the blend of overpriced cocktails and underdressed waitresses proved to exist a winning formula. Clubs multiplied like rabbits; somewhen, there would be more than thirty Playboy-branded clubs worldwide, in improver to casinos and resorts.
In his 1963 book The Presidential Papers, Norman Mailer described the Bunny adapt thusly:
a Gay-Nineties rig which exaggerated their hips, bound their waist ... and lifted them into a phallic brassiere—each chest looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac. Long black stockings, long long stockings, upward nearly to the waist on each side, and to the back, on the curve of the can, equally if ejected tenderly from the body, was the puff of chastity, a little white ball of a bunny's tail which bobbed as they walked.
It was a flattering if constricting design; Lownes observed that "the costumes took girls with fifty-fifty boilerplate figures and made them look like they had amazing figures." His annotate is telling; not all Bunnies were bombshells. The suit made the Bunny, not the other style around.
From day one, "the suit was a throwback," Jones told me—to the 1950s if not the Gay Nineties. The fashionable silhouette of the 1960s was boyish, non curvy. Shapeless shifts and ballet flats may have been all the rage on the rail, simply within the club, it was perpetually 1953: hourglass figures, bullet bras, and three-inch heels. The only concessions to mode were the Bunnies' bouffant hairstyles, topped with artfully angled ears.
Early visitors to the Playboy Club picked upward on its heady dynamic of naughty and nice. Newsweek called information technology "a Disneyland for adults." Appropriately, the dress code for female employees was just as strict and detailed every bit the amusement park's famously rigid sartorial standards. Everything was spelled out in meticulous item in a Bunny Manual and enforced by a Bunny Mother, who inspected each Bunny from head to toe earlier her shift. Makeup and weight were closely monitored. Blast smooth, jewelry, and eyeglasses were strictly forbidden, though hairpieces were encouraged. Cuffs and collars had to be starched and spotless; the rabbit logo cufflinks had to "kiss," or confront each other. Bunnies were responsible for buying their ain (taxation-deductible) satin pumps and having them dyed to match their suits and ears, which came in 12 unlike colors. "Our pair is actually telling because it'southward completely spattered with spilled drinks," Jones said of the costume in the FIDM Museum. "They must accept been replaced a lot." Muddy shoes, laddered stockings, and other infractions incurred demerits, which could lead to a Bunny being fined or even fired.
Far from beingness exploited, the Bunnies "were really well protected young women," Jones told me. They may have been eye processed, but they were meant to exist (literally) untouchable. Bouncers kept tipsy keyholders from groping or grabbing tails. (The original yarn tails were replaced past fire-retardant imitation fur by 1969 considering "customers were always trying to light them," Bunny Alice Nichols recalled in The Bunny Years.) Touching a Bunny was grounds for expulsion. And Bunnies were strictly prohibited from dating customers, entertainers, or whatsoever C-suite level Playboy employees. They didn't demand sugar daddies, anyway—they made more in tips in 1 nighttime than a salesgirl at Bloomingdale's could make in 2 weeks, according to Scott.
Indeed, the Bunnies' bare, buxom epitome was always an illusion. The suit merely came in 2 cup sizes: 34D and 36D. But those cups were equipped with pockets to facilitate stuffing. (In "A Bunny's Tale," her 1963 exposé for Testify magazine, undercover Bunny Gloria Steinem recalled the club's in-house wardrobe mistress telling her that "just almost everybody stuffs" while shoving an unabridged plastic dry cleaning handbag downwards the front of her adjust.) Bunnies were non allowed to curve forwards, lest their assets (or stuffing) spill out in a tawdry display; in any example, the arrange'due south tight, boned bodice would accept made it uncomfortable. Instead, they were trained to perform a series of elegant, unnatural moves such every bit the "Bunny Dip" and the "Bunny Crouch" that immune them to take orders and serve drinks without e'er angle at the waist. Though their cleavage was served up on a satin platter, Bunnies were cinched in and covered upwards from the chest downward, wearing sheer black Danskin pantyhose over mankind-toned Danskin tights, according to Jones.
History has conflated the Playboy Bunnies with the Playmates featured in the mag's centerfolds. Though Bunnies were non prohibited from posing for the magazine, few did; they were a different kind of animal. Bunnies were rarely seen in the wild, emerging from the clubs only for promotional events—at which they wore skirts and sweaters—and parties at the Playboy Mansion. ("Wherever Hugh was, it was a gild," Jones said.) The Bunny adapt was meant to be appreciated in the exclusive environs of the members-only club.
The fact that a few suits have made their mode into museum collections is surprising; they were considered belongings of the guild and handed in later every shift for cleaning. Taking a arrange home was punishable by a $500 fine. According to The Bunny Years, "only a few larcenous Bunnies out of the more than fifteen,000 women who wore the costume managed to leave Playboy with 1 as a emblem. ... One Bunny wore her costume for her induction into the U.Southward. Air Force. Some other walked down the aisle at her wedding ceremony in a white satin Bunny costume." The FIDM Museum's arrange was donated by a former Bunny in the Dallas society, who managed to smuggle information technology out when she quit. "Technically, it's stolen property," Jones said with a express joy. The Met and the Museum at FIT obtained their suits straight from Playboy Enterprises.
Just when did the Bunny go a dinosaur? The lodge scene began to fade in the early '80s, with the last of the original clubs closing in 1988. After that, Bunnies occasionally appeared at Playboy events, simply "they were Playmates with Bunny ears on," Jones said. The original Bunnies moved on to bigger and better things; the sometime wearer of the FIDM Museum's arrange parlayed her service industry experience into a career as a flight attendant. Former Bunnies Lauren Hutton, Debbie Harry, and Steinem institute new jobs, too.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/history-of-the-playboy-bunny-suit/541929/
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