Years after the London Playboy Club was closed down could it now be set to reopen?

• Hugh Hefner's first Playboy club opened in 1960

Bottom-skimming outfits and stocking-clad legs could soon be an established part of London night-life once more. All topped off with a white cotton tail. It's like the swinging Sixties again.

Opening a new London club has been a longstanding dream for Hugh Hefner, the priapic octogenarian who founded Playboy Magazine in 1953 and Playboy Enterprises in 1960, and is never seen without his trademark smoking jacket and phalanx of pneumatically enhanced blonde "Playmates". And dreaming is what Playboy is all about.

From the beginning the brand was blatantly aspirational, selling a fusion of worldly success and sex appeal. The image portrayed inside the pages of the magazine invited motor mechanics and randy teenage boys to imagine they were James Bond.

And if the magazine was the catalogue, the club was the showroom where fantasy became flesh. An idealised gentlemen's club in which curvaceous girls dressed in satin bodices, bunny ears and fluffy tails served martinis, the Playboy Clubs were an immediate hit.

When the first club opened in Chicago in 1960, the image of the Playboy bunny was adopted by some women as a symbol of the pending sexual revolution.

The bunnies claimed they were feminists, sexually liberated and in control of their bodies. But not everybody loved the 'Cottontail Queens'. Gloria Steinem infiltrated a club and wrote an expose about it. Others viewed the bunnies as victims, the cheap playthings of men with disposable income.

To celebrate the reappearance of this disputed icon of femininity, a book with a foreword by Hefner is to be published next month. 50 Years Of The Playboy Bunny is brim-full of pictures; it's an impressive roll-call, challenging the view that bunnies were all bobble tails and no brains, with alumni including banking executives, lawyers, scientists and celebrities such as Deborah Harry and Lauren Hutton.

Hefner initially imagined a bevvy of beautiful "girl next door types" serving drinks, dressed in skimpy nighties. Ilsa Taurins, the girlfriend of Hefner's friend and business partner Victor Lownes, suggested they have some fun with the Playboy Magazine logo and dress the girls as rabbits.

Hefner rejected the idea until Taurins walked through the doors of the Chicago Club a few days later dressed in a satin bodice, rabbit ears and a fluffy bobtail. The Playboy bunny was born. Hef loved it so much he patented the costume.

Clubs opened in cities all over America, from Los Angeles and Las Vegas to New York. Thanks to a relaxation of the British gaming laws, Hefner opened his dream Playboy Club in the heart of London, at 45 Park Lane, in 1963.

Others opened in Jamaica, Canada and Japan. The ideal customer was, according to Hefner: "Somebody with money and taste." Members were required to wear a jacket and tie.

Protestors said there was no way British girls would demean themselves as their American counterparts had. They were wrong. When the London club advertised for bunny girls, it was inundated. Many came despite fierce opposition from their parents. The successful applicants were rewarded with wages of 35 a week plus tips – a significant sum at the time. On top of that, there was a chance to meet the stars.

The man in charge of the London club was Victor Lownes, dubbed 'UK One'. He was famous for his lavish parties that attracted visiting American movie stars, The Beatles, George Best, Sean Connery and Roman Polanski.

While the atmosphere of the clubs was relaxed, the inside was more hierarchical than Watership Down. A Bunny Mother ruled the roost. Girls competed for positions as Door Bunny, Cigarette Bunny, Pool Bunny or Jet Bunny, permitted to serve on the Playboy private jet. Members, or 'keyholders' as they were known, were not permitted to date, or touch a bunny.

The costumes had generous, ultra-stiff D-cups, made from the same foam rubber as car seats. "All of us had to stuff our bras," says Kathryn Leigh Scott, author of The Bunny Years, who worked in the New York Club for three years.

"There were very few of us who could simply zip themselves into that costume without any sort of padding." The girls would use anything that came to hand – rolled-up socks, bunny tails and toilet paper – and were to stuff so that their bosoms constantly threatened to spill out. To prevent this from happening, the girls were taught the famous "bunny dip", bobbing down while carrying a tray filled with drinks in such a way as to retain their dignity while ensuring not a drop of liquor was spilled.

Every few weeks club managers would have bunny culls, at which the girls paraded through the venue to be judged. Those who didn't make it were shown the door. The Park Lane outfit was by far the most profitable of all the clubs, and was soon propping up many of its American counterparts.

By the 1980s, however, they were falling out of fashion and many closed their doors for good. In 1981, amid rumours of financial misconduct, the London club was forced to close after its gaming license was revoked.

Now, following months of speculation, a building in nearby Old Park Lane has been identified as a potential venue for the group's first British outlet in nearly 30 years. A spokesman for Playboy says: "London is an important market for Playboy and we continue to evaluate potential partners and properties in the capital." Other new openings are lined up for Mexico, Macau and Miami.

Will the revived bunny clubs be an ironic haven where a new generation of men weaned on Mad Men can sink martinis and make deals? The place where retro-sexist irony meets good, old-fashioned sexism? Or is the global Playboy brand proving the only figure that turns it on is the bottom line?

This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, June 13, 2010