If you’ve ever wondered what the life of a showgirl is actually like, it starts a little something like this. You slip on a wireframe backpack hidden beneath a flurry of feathers, which is essentially the weight of a two-year-old child clinging to your back, but minus the affection. Next comes the crown: a towering plumed headpiece, as heavy as a large bowling ball, balanced on the head with the improbable grace of a stack of books at a finishing school.
Now try sprinting up a narrow staircase, pivoting sideways through a doorframe, then performing two choreographed shows a night, six nights a week, all while smiling like you mean it. It quickly becomes clear that the showgirl scene isn’t all swaying pasties and soft-focus glamour. It’s really about sheer endurance, dressed up in a bedazzlement of rhinestones.
I gleaned all this the hard way, by spending a morning at the Showgirl Bootcamp Experience in southern Las Vegas, where I’m beginning to feel like one of the elephants that once shared the stage with showgirls of old: galumphing and cloaked in sequins. The two-hour workshop, led by a chorus line of seasoned showgirls, uses authentic costumes and theater makeup to bring its heyday back to life. But even this taster experience is, I’m told, merely a kitten-soft introduction.
“At the Lido in Paris, we wore backpacks where you flicked a switch and the entire costume lit up like a Christmas tree,” marvels Jill Landess, a retired showgirl whose 20-year career saw her shimmy across some of the world’s most opulent stages. “It was beautiful to look at but so heavy to wear that I just hated it,” says Landess, as she helps me into a hot-pink number, nicknamed the “Big Girl.” “These days it’s all LED lights and the girls don’t know the struggles we went through back then,” she sighs, just as Marilyn Monroe gives a breathless rendition of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend over the studio speakers.
With Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl album being teased like a chorus girl performing a tantalizing slow reveal, interest in retro revues is having an encore. Dita Von Teese’s Voltaire burlesque show at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, running until June, 28, 2026, has added to the old-school resurgence, along with the 2025 movie The Last Showgirl, directed by Gia Coppola and starring Pamela Anderson as a veteran Vegas dancer.
It makes sense that a revival is happening in this high-rolling desert oasis. While Sin City didn’t invent the showgirl (that credit belongs to Europe), it certainly put her center stage by crafting a flamboyant image that’s endured far beyond its golden age: the late 1950s through to the late 1970s.
Listening to the showgirls around me discuss this blank-checkbook era is jaw-dropping stuff. A cast could run to 185 performers; horses galloped across the stage on treadmills concealed by dry ice; and at one point, an actual 747 airplane was parked on stage, dancers hot-stepping across its wings.
“The biggest challenge for showgirls today is that we’re dealing with the TikTok mentality,” says costume designer Pieter Grove, as my stage makeup is applied. “You have to have the audience’s attention within seconds or you’ve lost them. These shows were spectaculars with big lavish sets, but they just don’t make them like that anymore: it’s now video screen backdrops,” Grove notes, as I check my reflection.
It’s disconcerting to glance in the mirror and barely recognize the face staring back, but this is all part of the process, I’m assured. Eyes need to pop under a heavy fringe of fake lashes, and lips sparkle like Dorothy’s slippers, all visible from the cheap seats.
Time to walk the walk, with some coaching from dancer Aimee Shank. “The costume needs to be a part of you. Own it!” she urges, as I wobble across the hardwood studio floor like a tipsy tightrope walker. “Everything from the waist up needs to be lifted. You can spot a showgirl in the grocery store just from the way she carries herself, up, up, up!”
All around me, dozens of elaborate showgirl outfits jostle for space on garment racks—some once worn in Jubilee!, the last of the truly splashy Las Vegas revues, which took its final bow in 2016. Boas are made from ostrich feathers, stripped from the quill and meticulously stitched into soft, cloud-like ply. A single pair of 55-inch dyed pheasant feathers could cost $85, and a headpiece might require 120 of them, each one painstakingly placed.
Maintaining these fashion relics is a labor of love for Grove and his small team. But their devotion pays off, giving bootcamp attendees the rare thrill of donning authentic showgirl regalia, rather than the imitation costumes tourists often mistake for the real deal. “People come to Vegas and see the girls on the Strip all dressed up. They have their photo taken with them and go home thinking they’ve met a real showgirl. But that’s like meeting an Elvis impersonator and thinking you’ve met Elvis!” laughs Stacy Blind, co-founder of the Showgirl Bootcamp Experience.
To be a true showgirl, there’s a checklist, Grant Philipo tells me at my next stop: the Las Vegas Showgirl Museum. “You have to be tall, at least five-foot-ten, and topless,” he states, against a backdrop of 270 costumes draped over glassy-eyed mannequins. His entire collection spans over 40,000 artifacts, and the highlights are housed in a private mansion that offers daily tours by appointment.
Philipo, dressed in a red and black frock coat like a circus ringmaster, guides me through a razzle-dazzle archive where individual costumes might cost up to $50,000, some having lit up stages like Hallelujah Hollywood, Les Folies Bergère, and The Liberace Show. Philipo is quick to point out that these lavish shows held cultural prestige. “It was considered art. That’s why all the performers were almost naked—you don’t go into an art museum and see a painting of someone in a bikini. In these shows, it was always presented in an elegant and classic way.”
Yet, while the museum is a sparkling time capsule of yesteryear’s fashions, attitudes towards women’s bodies, particularly unclothed, have shifted since these costumes last got an airing. I’m curious to discover how a contemporary female performer might reimagine the showgirl archetype, so I head onwards to the Blue Room bar at the Cosmopolitan.
Standing under an electric spotlight, Gypsy Wood is impossible to miss. Wearing a custom look by Italian designer Sara Costantini, she towers at a statuesque nine-feet-plus in a powder-puff feathered headpiece, tiara, lilac sequin-encrusted bodysuit, fishnets, and spiked cha-cha heels.
The silhouette nods to the Rat Pack era, but her performance and attitude feel of the moment. “I’m always pushing the boundaries of what I can get away with onstage, because it’s my body, my choice how I represent myself,” Wood says.
A veteran of the Vegas scene for eight years, she currently stars in The Party at Superfrico—a Spiegelworld production reviving the beloved dinner-and-a-show tradition with a surrealist twist. “I’ve taken the showgirl and branched into burlesque, comedy, circus, and cabaret. I’d like to think I’m creating a new genre of my own,” reflects the Australian performer, whose mother was also a showgirl.
Her past acts include a slapstick routine in which she plays a beauty queen who gets her period onstage, and in her current role, she appears as a chaotic plate spinner. “I’m wearing a fabulous red Halston-esque disco dress, with no underpants and a giant merkin. I love being a glamorous woman onstage who also happens to have pubic hair,” Wood says, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow with a wry smile.
Wood’s interest in keeping the spirit of old Vegas alive follows her offstage, too. “What does a showgirl’s life look like? I dance all night. Then I wake up and talk to builders all day, as I’m renovating my house,” she says. Wood’s perfectly preserved 1954 ranch house, with flocked wallpaper and a remnant of original carpet rescued from a historic casino, featured as Shelly Gardner’s home in The Last Showgirl. “I came home from the gym one day and Pamela Anderson was standing in my house, holding my dogs,” she remembers. “It was trippy and fabulous!”
A renewal of interest in showgirls ties in with a broader pushback against the relentless march of fast fashion and fast living, Wood says. “People are craving things like classic Hollywood, prima ballerinas, and artisan craftsmanship in protest of how cheap and manufactured everything is.”
It feels like the right time, the right place, for the showgirl’s second act in this city, she says. “I’m lucky to be living in Vegas right now, because there are still glimpses of that magic era. Go check into the Jackie Gaughan suite at the El Cortez Hotel Casino—the last original vintage penthouse left, with pink carpets and incredible views. Then try your luck downstairs at the roulette tables and meet some real characters,” Wood enthuses. “The true vintage Vegas is still here. You just have to know where to find it.” As I take her advice and wander toward the neon haze of Fremont Street, it hits me: the showgirl never really left Vegas. She simply slipped into something a little more comfortable.