I Went to Showgirl Bootcamp in Las Vegas—and Learned a Few Life Lessons Along the Way

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.

Photo: Cruz Valentin

Photo: Cruz Valentin

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.

Photo: Cruz Valentin

“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.