Lindsey Roeper of Los Angeles will deal cards when the new Playboy Club opens on Friday at the Palms in Las Vegas. Photo by The Associated Press. Playboy Club dealer Lindsey Roeper poses at the Palms. Analysts said the new club comes at a perfect time for Playboy Enterprises, which has faced declining revenue from videos and magazine ads. Photo by The Associated Press.

It was late 1985 when Hugh Hefner walked into the grand opening of Playboy's Empire Club in Manhattan, the latest attempt by the magazine company to freshen its suave, sexy image.

A quarter century of success in running such clubs was on the wane and a new gimmick was thought to be needed to attract a new audience of women: male bunnies.

"I thought, 'This is the end of it,'" Hefner recalls, chuckling. "And indeed, within a year or so, it was."

Now, two decades after rising feminism and a fading nightclub scene helped close the last U.S. Playboy Club in Lansing, Mich., in 1988, a new Playboy Club is set to open Friday in Las Vegas, just as fresh and retro-hip as a pair of bell-bottom jeans.

"Things that become old-fashioned in a certain time frame, in a new time frame take on a whole new kind of mystique," said Hefner, the 80-year-old founder and majority shareholder of Playboy Enterprises. "That is exactly what happened to all things Playboy."

The original clubs, staffed by bustiered Bunnies and spurred by the sexual revolution, spanned the globe in their heyday in the 1960s and '70s, from Chicago and New York to Manila, London, Tokyo and the Bahamas.

Top acts such as Bill Cosby, Woody Allen and the Beatles frequented the hotspots as guests and sometimes performers. The clubs also were magnets for professional athletes such as Wilt Chamberlain and Dick Butkus. At their height, 22 clubs were in operation, employing more than 25,000 Bunnies and boasting more than a million "keyholders," or members.

But they ran into feminism on one side and easily accessible explicit adult content on the other.

The Margaret Thatcher government challenged and then revoked the club's casino license in the United Kingdom in 1981. It forced the closure of the London club, once the company's most profitable operation, and led to the inability of Playboy to obtain a gambling license for a hotel-casino in Atlantic City shortly after.

"Once we lost the gaming, we were really not able to financially carry the rest of what we were doing," Hefner said.

The last overseas club closed in Manila in 1991.

Today, Hefner's original idea of providing a roadmap to urban life by urging men to appreciate food, music, high ideas -- and beautiful women -- has taken on a new cachet.

"If you look at the magazine even in the early days, there were features on decorating your apartment, cooking, buying nice clothes, buying wine," said James Beggan, associate professor of sociology at the University of Louisville. "I think that they've always been ahead of their time in advocating what later becomes known as the 'metrosexual identity.'"

"Society has caught up with Playboy's view," he said.

The new club, on the top three floors of the Palms hotel-casino, pays homage to the past while introducing its swinging bachelor lifestyle to a new generation.

"Ninety-five percent of the people who are going to end up spending all the money here have never been to a Playboy Club," said George Maloof Jr., the bachelor casino magnate who runs the Maloof family's $915 million resort. "So it's not even like your dad, maybe it's your grandfather (who) went. We wanted to create something that did remind people of the Playboy Club, but had a fresh new look."

Lounge seating is back, as are the famous Bunny outfits, complete with ears, bow tie and cufflinks, designed by Roberto Cavalli. Hefner's portrait will hang over a fireplace, classic Playboy images decorate a wall embedded with flat-screen TVs, and rabbit logos dot everything from sofa buttons to nail heads. One floor below the club is the Italian restaurant Nove; above is the dance club Moon, complete with retractable roof and light shows.

Most important to the $55 million club's profitability, however, is its casino license, marking the first time in a half century that a Nevada club will be allowed to charge customers a cover to access gambling tables.

Playboy expects to make $4 million a year in mostly guaranteed licensing fees thanks largely to the slot machines and blackjack and roulette tables to be staffed by Bunnies.

Licensing, Playboy's fastest-growing and highest-margin business, took in $16 million in operating profit last year. The club will provide a "meaningful lift" to the bottom line, Chief Executive Officer Christie Hefner said.

Sin City seemed a perfect fit.

"A town that's defining itself through an ad slogan that says, 'What Happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,' you could argue is a pretty good environment for a Playboy-branded product."

The company is looking to open Playboy Clubs in other destinations in which casino games take center stage, Hefner said, first in London and Macau, and then other locations in Europe, the Caribbean and Australia.

"Our view was not that we wanted to go back into having a chain of nightclubs," she said. "But in markets where the dominant business proposition is casino gaming, you can complement that with a great club and lounge and entertainment and food and beverage and merchandising and make a great deal of money."

Analysts said the opening comes at a perfect time for the company. Playboy Enterprises' revenue from video products took a stutter step in the year's first half as cable companies switched to video-on-demand technology. Also, magazine advertising revenue continued to decline.

Magazine circulation is around 3 million, down from its peak of 7.2 million in 1972, and the print version is losing money because of high paper and postage costs despite being America's top-selling men's magazine and having 21 foreign editions. In the second quarter, Playboy Enterprises lost $2 million, eking out a $393,000 profit in the first half.

"As far as the club itself, the fact that they're returning to that, we think that's a good thing," UBS Securities analyst Lucas Binder said. "It's an aspirational brand, where people aspire to be involved, and Las Vegas is a place that you know you can be part of something without having to go to the (Playboy) Mansion."

While some feminists, such as Gloria Steinem, who wrote a famous exposé of the New York club as a Bunny in 1963, may be wringing their hands, Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" said the nation has changed in the 20 years since the feminist movement was active in shutting the clubs down.

"Women dressed as stuffed animals is not something that's going to meet a lot of public resistance because that matches the way women are portrayed in reality television and music videos. I think there's been a real return of acceptance to the bimbo image."

Women have increasingly accepted Playboy's brand. The reality show featuring Hugh Hefner's life at the Mansion with his three girlfriends, "Girls Next Door," is the E! network's most popular show, and Playboy says 55 percent of the viewers are female.

Retail sales of Playboy-branded products have more than doubled over the past three years to $650 million -- and most of the merchandise is in women's fashion or accessories.

Former Bunny and author of "The Bunny Years," Kathryn Leigh Scott, argues Bunnies used the clubs as stepping stones for careers as scientists, actresses and entrepreneurs and they served as exciting places to meet celebrities, especially "for a kid from Minnesota."

"There are always going to be young, self-assured women, confident and ambitious who are going to want to work as Playboy Bunnies, just as there were when I got the job," she said.

Lindsey Roeper, a 22-year-old communications major from Cal State Fullerton has been training more than a month to become a Bunny dealer. She said she's just excited to work in a town she normally visits to play.

"I think the outfit's cute, so we'll be fine," she said.