Hefner bunnies out to play in casinoland's newest club

FLAUNTING bunnies, booze and blackjack, the first Playboy Club in nearly two decades opened in Las Vegas this weekend with high hopes that its time-tested combination of sex and celebrity will attract a new generation of high rollers.

With a distinctly vintage feel, Playboy bunnies, wearing the familiar ears and cottontail, delivered drinks and dealt cards to a mostly male crowd at the Palms Casino Resort.

The Playboy founder Hugh Hefner surrounded himself with a group of blondes - and one brunette - in a red corner booth while pulsating music filled the smoky room.

"There's a new generation ready to come out and play," Playboy Enterprises founder Hugh Hefner said before the party, saying the Playboy brand was just as relevant today as it was when he started the men's magazine in 1953.

"Playboy has always stood for something - a social, sexual and political agenda that has real meaning," the 80-year-old Hefner said.

Almost a half century has passed since Hefner opened his first club in Chicago in 1960 and helped usher in the sexual revolution while the Playboy bunny and the Playboy centrefold skyrocketed to American icon status.

Now, the flagship magazine faces depressed advertising and lower sales revenues amid competition from magazines such as Maxim and internet porn.

At the same time, however, Playboy has attracted new fans through The Girls Next Door, the reality television series shown on American TV about Hefner's three live-in girlfriends, and a successful licensing business.

While once controversial, the brand appears almost quaint amid today's X-rated offerings, said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, who says that Playboy represents a pivotal moment in American culture.

"[Hefner] was starting a revolution to break down fusty, infantile, puritanical mores that probably needed to be broken down," Prof Thompson said. "At the same time he was creating a cultural climate that made many women who were just starting to make progress in the young feminist movement very uncomfortable."

In their heyday, the dozens of clubs reached as far as Japan and Jamaica and featured the hottest entertainers of the time.

But the symbols of flesh and free-wheeling began shuttering their doors in the late 1980s amid escalating costs, and a sense among many that the bunny brand had peaked.

Now, Playboy is banking that its retro appeal will lure younger fans into the club.

The bunnies have been told how to deliver drinks and how to "perch" themselves delicately on the backs of seats.

"Bunnies don't sit," said bunny Ashley Rovenheiser, who said she loved being one.

According to Palms owner George Maloof, the Playboy Club will be a welcome respite from the X-rated offerings available elsewhere in Vegas. Mr Maloof said he expects young women to frequent the club, along with stag groups and high rollers.

"There's plenty in Vegas to do if you want to go to a strip club," Mr Maloof said. "This is a sophisticated place."