Bunny brand joining the modern world

Cooper Hefner has his father’s translucent skin and mischievous smile, which stretches across his face like a flat line. He’s lankier but has the same eyes, impenetrable bits of brown seaglass below that high forehead.

‘‘He looks just like his father,’’ marvels a woman catching a glimpse in a dark nightclub. True, if you can imagine Hugh Hefner without the satin pajamas and harem of spray-tanned blondes.

The comparison is inescapable because Cooper, 26, is the only Hef left in the family business. Which, of course, is Playboy.

In the nine months since Hugh’s death at 91, Cooper Hefner has stepped fully into his father’s role as the creative mind of a sprawling 65-year-old empire - cable channels, cocktail lounges, clothing and accessory lines and, of course, the flagship nudie mag.

The task at hand is daunting: to save one of the world’s most recognised brands from its own greying boomerness; from its slide into bunny mudflaps and other cheesy merchandise; from the ugly shadow of reality TV’s The Girls

‘‘We were producing twerking videos," says Playboy’s chief executive Ben Kohn, as evidence of how far the brand had gone off the rails. But the identity crisis for the newera Playboy peaked in 2015, when the company concluded that it should no longer publish nudes.

‘‘That’s the exact opposite of what makes Playboy Playboy,’’ Cooper says now, exasperated. ‘‘We should not apologise for sex.’’

It’s a sentiment Hugh Hefner might have uttered in his heyday, when millions subscribed to his magazine and stayed up late to peer into his televised ‘‘penthouse’’. For Cooper, the path forward in the era of online porn and cable TV nudity is to look back to the days when his father, writing in the first issue of his magazine, conjured the kind of guy who sought the company of women for ‘‘a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex’’.

The son is sipping a Coke in the lounge of a swank hotel in Washington, DC, where hobnobbing with power and the intelligentsia is another key part of Playboy’s strategy.

Later, he and other company executives will huddle around a table at the White House correspondents’ dinner, the first one to be graced by Playboy. The group will dip out early to throw one of the buzzier parties of the weekend, featuring R&B crooner Miguel and a bunny-to-guest ratio hovering near 1:1.

In June, the crew returned to attend the Hugh M Hefner First Amendment Awards in the nation’s capital for the first time in its four decades, mingling with journalists and think-tankers at a Newseum reception.

Of course, the Playboy name has been bandied about Washington lately for more than just throwing a solid party. Both President Donald Trump and GOP money man Elliott Broidy have been prominently linked to former Playboy models whose silence was allegedly purchased at a high price. Reminded of this, Cooper winces.

‘‘There’s a note that many companies and people live by, and that is ‘Any press is good press’,’’ the self-described liberal says dryly. ‘‘That’s (expletive).’’

Those who know Cooper say he was deeply affected by his father’s death. ‘‘It’s motivated him even more,’’ says Kohn, ‘‘to bring this brand back to where it was 20 years ago’’ – better days for anyone in the skin business.

The question now is whether anyone cares.

‘‘They went the direction of competing against pornography etc, forgetting that the nudity wasn’t the catalyst for

says Susan Gunelius, a marketing expert and author of a book,

The company, she argues, forgot that ogling women was only ever supposed to be secondary to the cool-guy lifestyle magazine espoused.

In trying to wipe away decades of spray-tan tarnish, Cooper has not hesitated to question some of his father’s choices.

Hugh Hefner approved the move to end nudity. Cooper’s first audacious act was to bring back the flesh, enlisting his fiancee,

actress Scarlett Byrne, to pose bottomless and pen a feminist-lite treatise on ‘‘freeing the nipple’’.

One of the most obvious departures from his father’s aesthetic has been to promote more diverse beauty. Cooper calls the Playboy of five years ago ‘‘this factory for one particular look – bleachblonde, orange-hued and scalpelperfected.

Nowhere was that look more codified than on

an instant hit that peeped into the notorious Playboy mansion and the lives of Hef’s blonde, top-heavy sister wives. The reality show, which aired from 2005 to 2010, was a coup for Playboy because it managed to garner a largely female viewership – until the ‘‘girls’’ started appearing in the gossip rags with tales of drug use, Hef-mandated curfews and compulsory orgies.

Cooper is eager to relegate the show to ancient history.

Last year, magazine named French model Ines Rau the first transgender Playmate. It excised the phrase ‘‘Entertainment for men’’ from its spot on the cover for the first time since the magazine’s founding. In its place: ‘‘Entertainment for all.’’ The magazine also hired an executive editor, James Rickman, with edgy credentials Cooper Hefner, pictured left, at Playboy’s party following the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC. from the high-design, cultishly followed magazine.

Cooper’s colleagues, however, say the heir is the one who’s pushed the magazine to make an aesthetic leap away from Vaseline-screen retouching, and move towards more, uh, naturalism. Just look at 2018’s Playmate of the Year, Nina Daniele, a bushy-browed, unaugmented hipster with a Penelope Cruz vibe. The Bronx native looks more like she’d grace the cover of an Urban Outfitters catalogue than Playboy.

But will any of it titillate millennials, who, despite the sexual revolution and porn and Tinder, don’t actually seem to have much sex?

‘‘Which is fascinating,’’ Cooper interjects. ‘‘We’re not a generation that was introduced to sex or a masculine lifestyle by taking our dad’s

Our experience (was) going online and seeing some incredibly graphic videos . . . What does that do for an entire generation that was introduced to sex in that way?’’

Cooper’s mother, cover girl Kimberley Conrad, married Hugh Hefner in 1989, when Hefner was in his 60s and the Canada native was a tanned and leggy 28.

When they parted less than a decade later, Conrad and their two young sons (Cooper and his older brother, Marston, who doesn’t work for the company) moved next door – far enough from their father’s evergrowing cadre of girlfriends but close enough to maintain some semblance of family. It’s an arrangement Cooper now sees as a remarkable feat of co-parenting.

‘‘I had a fantastic childhood,’’ he says. Though, yes, he acknowledges, ‘‘growing up at the mansion makes for a different experience than most people’’.

There were flamingos in the backyard, he offers tersely. And yes, of course there were Playmates.

What Cooper has most in common with her father, says his oldest child, Christie Hefner, is a creative vision.

Forty years older than Cooper, she served as the company’s chief executive for all of his childhood; a skilled Hef whisperer, she’d long helped to hold the financials together. But she stepped down in 2009, in the midst of the recession, a profound moment of crisis for all publishers.

The two speak weekly. And Christie says she can relate to the position Cooper now finds himself in.

‘‘From the day you join the company, everybody thinks that some day you’re going to run it. That’s difficult.’’

A few years ago, Cooper clashed with management over its ideas to remake Playboy as a safe-for-work website and left the company. (He owns only a limited, but undisclosed, share of the company.) ‘‘They didn’t know what they were doing,’’ he says pointedly. Playboy was an ‘‘adult brand. We’re not a BuzzFeed’’.

He tried his hand at launching his own business, called Hop, which published nerdy blogs and promoted parties. Kohn urged him to return and help redirect Playboy – ‘‘not because he was a Hefner,’’ he says, ‘‘but because he understood what the brand was and what it should be’’.