This is not the first time Playboy, which is working with Merchants, a hospitality company, has tried to bring back the Bunny. The original Playboy club, which opened in Chicago in 1960, was such a success that it spawned chapters in more than 30 cities around the world. The last of those clubs, in Lansing, Mich., closed in 1988.

Attempted reboots over the years have included another New York club in which women were joined by male servers — “Rabbits” — who donned unitards and yachting caps (but not ears or tails); and the more likely match of a Playboy club inside the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, which opened in 2006 and closed after six years.

But how will the bunny ears fare in a zone better known for the blooming of thousands of pointy-eared “pussy” hats? In this (yes, again) Year of the Woman, during which a record number of female candidates are running for office (and winning), is a cotton-tailed cocktail server simply a specter of sexism past?

Or will an America so weary of political correctness that it put a blingy Howard Stern regular into the Oval Office perhaps bring itself to again celebrate the Bunny? Could she be a welcome bit of retro glamour — relieving, perhaps the beleaguered Victoria’s Secret Angel — dusted off for some playful fun in an increasingly puritanical age in which corporate worker bees are forbidden from looking at one another for more than five seconds?

Depends on whom you ask.

‘A Cartoon Situation’

Some would say Gloria Steinem settled this issue long ago. In 1963 she wrote a two-part tell-all for Show magazine after working as a Bunny in the original New York club, then on 59th Street, off Fifth Avenue. She described long hours, gross men, absurd job requirements (like a mandatory doctor inspection) and low pay. The conclusion she reached — “all women are Bunnies” — resonated.

Another pair of young actresses became Bunnies on the same day in New York when Ms. Steinem was undercover. One was Mary Hutton, gaptoothed and from Florida. Another was Kathryn Leigh Scott, who came to New York after growing up on a farm in Minnesota whose crops included turnips.