A Playboy Club, replete with “alluring Playboy Bunny hostesses” and a “sexy and sophisticated aesthetic” is set to open in New York City this week, in defiance of both the #MeToo era and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who more than 30 years ago declared Playboy Bunnies “a symbol of the past”.

The venue, where a top-tier membership will reportedly cost $250,000, will throw open its doors to the public on 15 September, 32 years after New York City’s original Playboy Club closed.

That closure came after a waning in interest and decline in membership, but the company behind the new iteration insists there is an appetite for scantily clad women wearing rabbit ears and tails.

A Playboy Club source told the New York Post in June that it had already sold “$2.2m worth of memberships”, although with top-tier initiation fees sky high, that figure may be less impressive than it sounds. But at least one person is definitely excited – the writer of a breathless press release accompanying the launch.

“The space will feature a lounge area, a game room and a full-service dining room, but by far the most attractive feature of Playboy Club New York will undoubtedly be the return of the Playboy Bunnies to Manhattan,” the release said.

“The alluring Playboy Bunny hostesses, waitresses and cocktail servers have a worldwide, well-deserved reputation for their style and graciousness.”

The Playboy Club will be located on the west side of Manhattan, about a mile-and-a-half south-west of the original club, and just a few blocks from where hundreds of thousands of people took part in a Women’s March in January.

That jarring symbolism is not lost on critics of the Playboy Club. Clark Wolf, a restaurant and food business consultant based in New York and California, described the decision to reopen the club as “completely tone deaf” given the push for greater gender equality.

Bunnies resting at Playboy Club in New York City in 1963. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

“It’s kind of ridiculous actually,” Wolf said. “People are demanding better conditions and a bunny suit and ears doesn’t seem to be on par with what people are wanting.”

Wolf believes that the Playboy Club may be a “conscious or unconscious” tap into the pushback against women who are demanding equal rights.

“There is a bitter fight going on right now for middle-aged douchey white men to regain power and control and that is going on at all levels of society,” Wolf said.

The first Playboy Club opened in Chicago in 1960, and a slew of others followed in cities around the US. Miami, Dallas, Denver and San Diego all boasted their own clubs, and New York City got its version in 1962. The Playboy Club in London’s Mayfair marked its 50th birthday in 2016.

Initially the clubs, where access was granted only with the presentation of a black and gold Playboy key, were a success, even if questions persisted about the working conditions Playboy Bunnies faced.

The feminist icon Gloria Steinem went undercover as a bunny, at the New York City Playboy Club for a magazine article in 1963, and said she was forced to undergo a gynecological exam and blood test to check for STDs.

The bunny outfits, Steinem wrote, were “two inches smaller than any of my measurements everywhere except the bust,” and “so tight that the zipper caught my skin”. Bunnies were expected to pad the bust of their costumes, while Steinem wrote that the pay was low, the hours long and the men lascivious.

It remains to be seen how popular the club will be with New York City dwellers – especially given the failure of the initial clubs. Playboy claimed that it once had 750,000 members across its 30 clubs, but business and interest dried up in the mid-1970s, and by 1986 every club had shut down.

The New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago clubs were the last of the company-owned clubs – some were franchised – to close, in 1986. It was thought – even by Hefner – that the era of the Playboy club had passed.

The Playboy Bunny had become “a symbol of the past”, Hefner told the New York Times in 1986.

“I’m not having any sleepless nights,” he said of the Playboy Clubs’ collective failure. “If anything, it’s a little overdue.”

