It’s an old showgirl trick to fasten your G-string to your fishnets with seven small hooks. Too many hooks, and you can see the metal on your tights. And when you’ve spent so much time bedazzling your body—with glitter! with feathers! with sequins! with rhinestones of crystal, glass, acrylic, and resin!—do you really want people to stare at your butt (and, yes, everyone will be staring at your butt) and see…metal? Too few hooks, however, and you risk shifting or overexposure. And here’s the thing about showgirls: They’re sensual. They’re evocative. But most of all, they’re mysterious. And to be mysterious, you gotta leave something to the imagination.
It’s also an old showgirl trick to put nail polish on the back of cheap jewelry so it doesn’t turn your skin green, and to use wig tape to secure your pasties because it’s the gentlest adhesive. And when it comes to pasties, you should try to make your own. Everyone’s cup size, nipple area, and cup-to-nipple ratio are so different that achieving the optimal, fun-and-flirty tassel spin becomes a very personal and particular science. “There’s a physics to it. If you ever can’t get your pastries to spin, you need to make them heavier or longer,” says Hazel Honeysuckle.
Hazel Honeysuckle is a Las Vegas burlesque, showgirl-like performer at Absinthe, a modern circus show run by the entertainment group Spiegelworld. I don’t know her real name because she won’t tell me. She just shrugs and smiles and flutters her fake eyelashes every time I ask, until I finally get the hint to shut up and let Susan Meiselas—the legendary Magnum photographer known for her journalistic pictures of strippers in the 1970s and workers at an S&M sex club in the 1990s—get her shot.
At the same time, I stare at Hazel’s face. It’s a face I’ve technically seen before, because it’s everywhere in Vegas. It’s on a billboard just off of Route 15 and advertised on the roofs of cabs driving down the Strip. That face belongs to the Green Fairy—a female character with coiffed hair, a jet-black beauty mark, and a sparkly green push-up bra that makes her ta-tas look like Aphrodite’s. Yet as I sit in her trailer outside Caesars Palace while she prepares to go onstage, I see a different face entirely. This one is soft and human, framed by balayaged hair that skims her shoulders. She wears a black robe, green sweatpants, and black Crocs with a strawberry charm.
Over the next 30 minutes, she quietly stares into a compact mirror, applying contour powder, winged liner, and Maybelline magenta lipstick. She then moves on to a golden eye shadow. “What’s it called?” I ask, pen ready.
“Nefertitty,” she says.
“Nefertiti?”
She flashes me the palette. Nefertitty.
With every stroke, her real face falls away and a new, retro-sex-bomb one is chiseled. Soon, off come the sweatpants and on come the fishnets and glittering G-string. Finally, she takes a deep breath and smiles.
Inside a circus tent, a crowd of people sit on mismatched metal chairs. They order flashy cocktails with names like the Fairy Drip and something called a No Pants burger, getting drunker and drunker as the music gets louder and louder. After the opening act, during which a man stacks a bunch of chairs (much cooler than it sounds), an emcee in suspenders who refers to himself as the Gazillionaire asks the crowd to applaud for the Green Fairy.
Then she appears, descending from the ceiling, sparkly green heels first. She lands on a table and begins to shimmy on it.
“Now that the gloves are off, what do you say about the rest?” Hazel asks. The crowd hoots and hollers as she rips off her clothes.
Las Vegas tourism may be down 11% this year, but the spotlight on its female performers is especially bright right now. On October 3, Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, the cover of which shows Swift in a rhinestone costume originally designed by Bob Mackie for the long-running Jubilee! revue at Bally’s Las Vegas.
The iconography of a showgirl is familiar to most Americans: We’ve seen them portrayed in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the critically panned cult classic Showgirls; we’ve seen celebrities like Cher and Kylie Jenner wear interpretations of their iconic headpieces on red carpets. And they existed in real life, waltzing across casino stages with their long legs, bright smiles, and great boobs.
Their origins can be traced back to the dance halls of Paris. In the late 1800s, chorus girls would can-can at the Folies Bergère or Moulin Rouge, and by the 1900s, some did so topless. Those shows caught on, and in 1907, the Ziegfeld Follies—a cabaret production inspired by the Folies Bergère—opened to great fanfare in New York City.
Two decades later, in 1931, a Depression-addled Nevada took a gamble and legalized casinos. The same year, construction on the Hoover Dam began. Suddenly, thousands of workers—lonely male workers—had flooded the dry Mojave, and by the end of the 1930s, Nevada’s sandy southern tip swirled with vice.
In 1946, the mobster Bugsy Siegel turned seed into style when he opened the Flamingo, a splashy hotel and casino that he claimed would turn Las Vegas into a desert oasis. (He would die before seeing that happen, shot dead in 1947.) Other ritzy, bacchanalian resorts with mob connections soon followed, such as the $15 million Tropicana, which opened in 1957 and called itself the Tiffany of the Strip due to its half-moon pool and 60-foot tulip fountain. The idea was that these hotels would make their money back with their casinos. And how were they going to lure people to their casinos? With live—and racy—entertainment they imported from France. The first showgirl show in Las Vegas, Lido de Paris, opened at the Stardust Resort and Casino in 1958. A year later, the famous Folies Bergère followed at the Tropicana.
By the 1960s, showgirls had entered their golden age and become a breed unto themselves. While burlesque performances involved erotic, drawn-out stripteases, showgirls embraced elaborate costumes, theatricality, and a willingness to free the nipple on sets with sky-high production values. There were rules about height (performers had to be five-eight or above), about breast size (they should fit into a Champagne coupe), about shoes (high heels only!), and about general temperament and, in the modern parlance, aura (beautiful, mysterious, yet not aloof). You could spot them and their endlessly long legs at the Flamingo, at the Tropicana, at the Stardust, at Minsky’s Follies at the Dunes Hotel, and in Hallelujah Hollywood! at the MGM Grand. Many of the productions were produced by legendary choreographer Donn Arden, who is credited for developing the signature aesthetic of the showgirl: sequins, feathers, headpiece, and, eventually, no top. (When Jubilee! opened at Bally’s in 1981, a rumor started that the costumes used so many Swarovski crystals, it caused a worldwide shortage.) Their glamorous, provocative image soon permeated pop culture, popping up in Diamonds Are Forever and in the background of The Godfather Part II.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, Vegas had started to change. When the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act sent mob bosses to jail, corporations swooped into the area, bringing with them luxury stores and celebrity chefs and regulation. Just like Siegel before them, they imported the foreign entertainment du jour—Quebec’s Cirque du Soleil—in the 1990s. And before long, the showgirls and their risqué routines began to seem outdated, compared to the gravity-defining, high-tech, and appropriate-for-all-ages stunts of a neo-circus.
“They’ve Cirqued us to death,” Lisa Malouf Medford, a former showgirl in the Folies Bergère, told The Washington Post in 2018. “I loved the mob. They protected you.” Hallelujah Hollywood! closed in 1981, Lido de Paris in 1991, and the Folies Bergère in 2009. Jubilee! was the last to bow in 2016.
In modern-day Vegas, the showgirl of yore is effectively dead, though buskers in rented costumes still wander the Strip, posing with tourists for cash. (“Say titties!” one shouts during a selfie.) “The real Las Vegas showgirl basically went extinct with the closing of Jubilee!” Dita Von Teese told Vogue this week, even if she, like Hazel, references them in her act at the Venetian.
Then there’s Gypsy Wood, a performer in The Party at Superfrico, a three-course dinner and a show by Spiegelworld that pitches itself as “Las Vegas’s Las Vegiest Place.” She’s a beautiful bastion of a bygone era: Her grandmother was a showgirl and her mother was, too, performing as a go-go dancer at Kings Cross Sydney and a club in New Zealand called the Coconut Jungle, where she danced in cages and bouncers squirted men with water when they got too close. Then she ran away with an actor and gave birth to a daughter whom she named Gypsy Rose, after the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee.
From as early as she can remember, Gypsy’s mother would tell her, “Get out there and perform!” And as the traditional Vegas showgirl began to die away, Gypsy built herself into a new one. She studied dance at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne and developed a stand-up striptease show that made it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017. There, she was spotted by a Spiegelworld scout, who invited her to perform in Vegas.
And so, here she is, eating spaghetti and applying makeup in the bowels of a dressing room at the Cosmopolitan. Her eye-shadow palette is covered in so much fake eyelash glue that it’s burned off the NARS label. Next to her is a trained acrobat, Pawel Walczewski, reading a book called The Millionaire Fastlane. A few seats down is Alec Batton, who does drag as a sexy cow named MooNaysha. (“A dairy queen,” he jokes, as he slicks down his eyebrows with an Elmer’s glue stick.) Penny Wren, another burlesque performer-slash-showgirl, applies liquid eyeliner with military-like precision. Meanwhile, the night’s emcee, Laurie Hagen—who previously worked at the legendary Crazy Horse in Paris—studies the seating chart.
I see Gypsy onstage a few hours later, in front of 50 people who’ve paid $150 a pop. It’s something you need to see to understand, but I’ll try to explain the scene: A lingerie-clad Gypsy, wearing a fur coat and a skimpy red dress, tries (and purposefully fails) to keep a number of spinning plates up in the air. At some point they all fall, and Gypsy performs a dance routine…that ends with her revealing a comically hairy merkin.
Afterward, we sit in an empty dressing room. She’s icing her nose because she hit it with a plate and it drew blood. Her red hair cascades over her hunched shoulders as she tells me she hopes it’s not broken.
I’m not the only one who is fascinated with Gypsy. Her house has been photographed for The New York Times, and Gia Coppola gave her a small role in the recent film The Last Showgirl. Vogue even published portraits of her in a different story published this week. What she and I talk about runs the gamut from Taylor Swift and ex-boyfriends to pubic hair (“Don’t laser it! You’ll want it when you’re older!”) and how we know it’s self-absorbed but we care deeply about our faces. And we talk about her mom, who once upon a time had better costumes. Then again, she also had to deal with more misogyny. Gypsy offers a defeated shrug.
Because here’s the thing: Gypsy is in her 40s now and still performing for a crowd that claps and whoops at her every seductive move. “Showgirls? We aren’t girls,” she says. “You can be a showgirl until you’re 100 because it’s not just for the male gaze anymore. It’s about being an entertainer.”
There’s something to that. The world outside is random and cruel, but here, life is beautiful and unserious, filled with sensual women and muscular men and weirdly hot drag cows. So why not sit down, relax, enjoy yourself, enjoy each other—and maybe even spend a little?
I walk back to my room at Caesars Palace. My phone is buzzing with emails from angry bosses and text messages from unexpected exes and headlines about censorship and assassinations and free speech and whether or not we still have it. And, standing in this fake temple to the world’s first democracy, I throw it straight into my tote bag and head to a blackjack table. Maybe I’ll have a winning hand in a game I barely know how to play.
