Sex Fifth Avenue

Christmas! Shopping! Playmates! It's the holidays!

Published December 20, 2005 4:26PM (EST)

The reason Broadsheet is so late with this item even though more than half of us live in New York City is that we have just not been doing our holiday shopping at the right place -- namely, Saks Fifth Avenue.

But Broadsheet reader Liza Kirchoffer recently got wind of some ludicrous story about how the upscale Manhattan department store had kicked off the season by hiring Playboy playmates to lure rich guys to come in and drop cash. It sounded like crazy talk! "I was hoping that I was having auditory hallucinations," she wrote in an e-mail.

As it turns out, she wasn't.

According to a piece in the New York Sun, Saks wanted to reel in big-spending males, and decided to use the oldest fish bait in the world: scotch and grown women dressed as rabbits. The event was held Dec. 7 and was called "Shop with a Bunny."

According to Sun reporter David Lombino, it worked; a bunch of sharp-looking guys in pinstripes showed up to be led around the store by playmates. "We've got bankers and we've got construction workers here tonight," playmate Jennifer Wolcott from St. Louis told the Sun. And playmate/veterinarian Colleen Marie described a recent five-month bus tour of the nation as a whirlwind of "shopping and pajama pillow fights."

No kidding! Pillow fights! I wonder if they also gave each other massages and brushed each other's hair and licked a lot of lollipops and then made out?


By Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister writes for Salon. She is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" (Free Press). Follow @rtraister on Twitter.

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