Or: When and why did Japanese culture divorce the bunnysuit from the Playboy company and turn it into more of a General Thing? As an eminent bunnygirl myself, this is of course important scholarship for me.
I had always been under the impression this was an 80s thing--indeed, a friend of mine recently mentioned she thought it took off with the Daicon 4 opening animation (1983) (figure 1). But then I saw someone post a screencap (figure 2) from an episode I'd apparently seen once but completely forgotten about of JAKQ Dengekitai (1977), and I got to wondering.
Because A. Those are bunnygirls presented like you should already understand that's an archetype in its own right, implying this has been a thing for a while, and B. they're magician's assistants. The original Playboy bunnies were cocktail waitresses, right? It's not hard to see how you make the leap--the classic "fabulous assistant" often wears a shiny leotard, the bunnysuit incorporates elements of formal menswear much like the "magician proper" might wear (though it's important to note that even in ye olden days of more gendered magic shows, the "assistants" were doing just as much of the magic; the roles were performance), and it easily falls in the sphere of bunny activities: They assist, they cater, they provide decoration. But it still would take time to make that leap, which further implies that this outfit must have been floating around, outwith any one company's control, for quite some time already by '77.
So I did some "extensive research", by which I mean I switched to Japanese Wikipedia and pasted what it said into a translator. And it turns out the timeline goes back quite a ways further indeed!
1960: The first iteration of the bunnysuit is designed by Ilse Taurins and her mother.
1962: It reaches essentially its final form with a redesign by Renee Blot, and becomes more of a public icon.
1966: There is no Playboy branch in Japan, so a nightclub called ゴールデン月世界 ("Golden Moon World", seems to be the translation?) decides if their region isn't being paid attention to, they can just do it themselves, and right from its opening includes 15 staff bunnygirls (apparently paid 4 times the salary of an office worker of the time1). They were shortly joined by restaurants such as "Zen" and "Esquire Club" employing bunny waitresses (figure 3; that card was being resold at auction, and the listing didn't date it2, so I don't know if it's actually from back then).
It also doesn't take long for bunnies to start appearing as assistants on late-night variety shows, presenting prizes and such; the first to do this is apparently "11PM", which started airing in 1965, but I couldn't find anything indication when the costume started appearing on it, if it jumped on the trend during the 60s or not until later.
1976: A Playboy club opens in Japan, but by this point it's too late to re-monopolise the image; there's been a full decade of continued proliferation of similar establishments. Playboy Japan would close, but Zen, Esquire (エスカイヤクラブ) and their fellows (LOFT101 continues to be successful as a "bunny bar" today, figure 4) would soldier on.
1980s: As well as the jump into anime and manga spheres--thanks, let's be honest, only in part to Gainax and Daicon, and just as much surely to artists like Takahashi Rumiko--this also seems to be when bunnies first started appearing as staff in casinos (in reality during this era, though nowadays I think more in the artistic imagination). At least, again, according to Japanese Wikipedia.
1990s-2000s: The great cosplay-cafe leap (and simultaneous reduction in mainstream acceptability, and to be fair it is not weird to think that maybe you should not have to dress particularly revealingly to staff a mainstream establishment) and final shift into the costume as it is today, in how it's regarded in the pantheon of sexy outfits, and nowadays tends to show up in sorta recursive homages relying on you already accepting it as an institution of the imagination.
And for what it's worth, I think the democratisation of the bunnysuit is an unambiguous good. I hope someday trademark law can be less restrictive, such that this can be the case worldwide, without having to worry about one company, or one guy's estate. Bunnies are for everyone.
