Monday, January 06, 2025
What The Last Showgirl Owes to Las Vegas' Folies Bergere
www.hollywoodreporter.com: Va-va-voom ostrich-plumed showgirls were once synonymous with Las Vegas entertainment. While Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl explores the end of an era for the glitzy, glamorous dancers, the first showgirls were introduced to the U.S. in The Ziegfield Follies, a series of revues on Broadway from 1907 to 1927, inspired by the famed dancers at the Folies Bergère in Paris.
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I saw the trail for the movie The Last Showgirl and immediately I was intrigued so reading this article was so fun and enlightening for me. It seems so theatre adjacent and like such a cool experience from all the costume pieces and even the set, all of it just seems very avant garde and for lack of a better word, showy. Something that stood out to me was the last couple of sentences in this article because it talked about how a lot of the showgirls had day jobs and lives outside of being a showgirl and how their job as a showgirl was more of a hobby or something they did in their free time because they wanted to perform as well. I never really thought about it that way because I have only ever been exposed to the way of thinking where doing theatre for a living means going all in and focusing on the show and the performance and doing things outside of theatre is more a secondary support job whereas it seems that for these showgirls it was maybe the complete opposite.
As someone who wants to get into costume design, I have always adored the glitz and glamour of Vegas showgirls. They are probably my second biggest inspiration, the first being Christian Dior’s New Look from 1947. I love the jewels and larger than life accessories on each carefully crafted outfit. The drastic decrease in popularity of showgirl revues is something I lament, though I can understand why it has had such a sharp decline. With the internet and the ever-changing film industry, entertainment is easier to access than ever before, so it's logical that live theater would be on the decline. However, the entertainment value of seeing a person performing live on stage will never be replaced. I hope that even if more performance art like the Vegas showgirls disappears in the future, theater will continue to adapt and find new ways to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world.
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