Taylor Swift has Branded Herself a Showgirl: These Hardworking Women have a Long and Bejewelled History

Taylor Swift as the showgirl on her new album. Photograph: TAS Rights Management. 

By Emily Brayshaw

The iconic feathered showgirl was born amid the chaos of the first world war, when the wealthy, global French superstar Gaby Deslys entertained Parisians and Allied soldiers in a 1917 show called Laissez-les tombe! (Let Them Fall), a dazzling spectacle of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and beauty.

Although showgirls first appeared in late-19th century music halls, the red, white and blue feathered costumes in Deslys’ revue offered Paris something new and triumphal. The massed plumes, wild dancing and bodily displays celebrated French aesthetics and extravagance and communicated that France and her allies would not bow to Germany.

Gaby Deslys, resplendent in ostrich plumes and jewels, photographed in 1919 by Henri Manuel. Wikimedia 

Prior to 1914 Deslys’s expensive jewellery, haute couture and expansive feathered hats – along with her affairs with powerful men such as department store magnate Harry Selfridge and King Manuel II of Portugal – created countless headlines.

But she was also outspoken about a woman’s right to support herself financially and worked tirelessly during the war raising funds for the Allies. Deslys was so passionate about aiding the devastated Parisian nightlife that she paid for all the costumes in Laissez-les tombe! herself.

Deslys’s cultural impact has inextricably linked feathers, high fashion, celebrity and showgirls ever since.

From France to Broadway

Feathered showgirl revues were so popular that they quickly went global. In 1920s New York, impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld staged luxurious Broadway productions that glorified the American showgirl.

But he made exceptions to American women. One of Ziegfeld’s most famous showgirls, Dolores, was born into poverty in London’s East End as Kathleen Mary Rose. She rose to become a supermodel who walked for the couturier Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile.

Ziegfeld considered Dolores one of the world’s most beautiful women. Tall, slender and graceful, she drove audiences wild when she glided across Ziegfeld’s stage and posed in opulent costumes.

The famous haute couture model and showgirl known as ‘Dolores’ posing as the White Peacock in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolics (1919). Wikimedia Commons

On becoming a showgirl, Dolores used her modelling ability to make her fortune, earning today’s equivalent of US$10,000 a week by 1923.

Other performers harnessed the feathered showgirl aesthetic, including the celebrated twins Jenny and Rosie Dolly, who came from humble origins and used their beauty, talent and hard work to dominate American and European stages in the 1910s and 1920s.

Ziegfeld paid the Dollys the equivalent of US$64,000 weekly in 1915. Like Deslys, they became notorious for their consumption of fashion and affairs with famous men.

The Dolly Sisters, famous performers in the Ziegfeld Follies of the 1910s and 1920s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

However, stage revues became unpopular around 1930 due to their vast expense and the rise of cinema – so the showgirl travelled to Hollywood.

There, she was celebrated in biopics such as The Great Ziegfeld (1936) with its glittering, feathered costumes by the designer Adrian.

In the second world war, showgirls boosted troop morale, like Deslys did in 1917.

Hollywood made feel-good films including the biopic The Dolly Sisters (1945), which reimagined the brunette twins as all-American blondes by casting 1940s pinup stars Betty Grable and June Haver.

From Hollywood to Vegas

From there, the American showgirl arrived in Las Vegas, performing in every hotel and casino on the strip during the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the showgirls of yore, these performers’ allure was their grace, beauty, and extravagant, expensive costumes, produced by the world’s leading designers.

Showgirls remained a fixture of Las Vegas entertainment throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Choreographers including Donn Arden and Madame Bluebell (who also worked in the Parisian revues) created hallmark, visual spectacles featuring costumes by Bob Mackie.

Jubilee!, which opened at the old MGM Grand casino in 1981, was one such revue. In addition to the vast volume of plumes, it was claimed the show had caused a global shortage of Swarovski crystals because the costumes had used them all.

In 1986 the old MGM Grand became Bally’s Casino, but Jubilee! stayed. The costumes, some of which cost more than US$7,000 each (roughly US$25,000 today), were used six nights a year for 35 years and maintained by 18 wardrobe staffers.

Jubilee! closed in 2016, but its costumes live on as valuable cultural artefacts that celebrities borrow to reinterpret the American showgirl for 21st-century audiences.

This includes demonstrating that showgirls are independent, hardworking and talented women.

From Vegas to Taylor Swift

Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese draws on the American showgirls’ legacy by wearing costumes from Jubilee! in her Las Vegas cabaret, and called the 1945 Dolly Sisters film one of her inspirations.

Pamela Anderson wore Jubilee! costumes in The Last Showgirl (2024), a film that highlights the sacrifices female performers often have to make to pursue their dreams.

Taylor Swift is the latest superstar to harness showgirl iconography. Photographs from her new album show Swift wearing the Jubilee! “Diamond” and “Disco” costumes by Mackie.

Another photograph shows Swift in a cloud of ostrich plumes and rhinestones wearing a dark, bobbed wig: a direct reference to 1920s American showgirls and performers such as the Dolly Sisters.

Swift’s stage costumes are by the world’s leading fashion designers, while her songs often reference historical celebrities to critique how the entertainment and media industry treat female performers.

Choosing Mackie’s Jubilee! costumes allows Swift to become the American showgirl (Taylor’s Version), by tapping into a century of glamour and signalling that she too has worked hard and made sacrifices to reach the top.

Emily Brayshaw, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

Paris Fashion Week: The Poetry of Continuity - Yohji Yamamoto’s Meditation on Presence and Legacy

Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto brought finesse and poetry to the runway in Paris. Photograph (above) and cover picture by Jay Zoo for DAM. 

At a moment when Paris Fashion Week seems obsessed with reinvention, Yohji Yamamoto offered something more profound, continuity. His Spring/Summer 2026 collection, unfolded as a reflection on time, memory, and artistic endurance. Through a restrained palette of black, white, and red, the designer reaffirmed his lifelong dialogue between strength and fragility. Yet beneath the serenity of the silhouettes lay an emotional undercurrent: a quiet, personal tribute to the late Giorgio Armani, transforming the runway into a space of remembrance and respect between two masters of subtlety. Story by Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photographs by Jay Zoo

The soaring, gilded ceilings of Paris' storied city hall

was the backdrop to Yamamoto's evocative collection.

ON a dark Parisian evening, inside the city's historic Hôtel de Ville, Yohji Yamamoto delivered a masterclass in restraint. While many designers raced ahead with spectacle and showmanship during Paris Fashion Week, the 81-year-old Japanese couturier slowed everything down. 

“Be present,” his show notes urged. “See with your eyes, not through your screens.” It was an invitation, and a warning, that what followed would be an experience to feel, not to consume.

What unfolded was a poetic meditation on form and memory, rendered through 47 looks that distilled Yamamoto’s vocabulary to its essence. Models moved through dim pools of light in near silence against an evocative soundscape, their unhurried pace amplifying the emotional weight of the collection. From the first steps, it was clear this was not a show about the frantic hunt for the new, but a reflection on the past, present and future.

"Be present and experience the presentation with your eyes rather than your screen. Let the moment, the movement and the clothing speak to you - they are meant to be felt with your senses, not merely digitally recorded"

As a tribute to Giorgio Armani,

the Japanese designer printed a

 copy of the Italian's invitation

 to his 50th anniversary show. 

The opening looks, austere black dresses brushed with

streaks of white, resembled moving ink drawings, each one as though lifted from an unfinished sketchbook. The garments were stripped back, yet far from simple.

 Yamamoto’s mastery of cut and composition turned loose threads and irregular folds into deliberate architecture. Pleating and knotting became sculptural gestures, each one transforming fabric into motion. At moments, the clothes appeared to breathe, as though the air itself was part of their design 

Midway through, tartan disrupted the monochrome, shredded, reassembled, and draped across the body in a kind of textile rebellion. Wisps of fringe followed, giving way to ghostly white ensembles that seemed to dissolve as they moved. 

Then came the inevitable transformation: a final sequence of deep reds, from cloaks that fell like curtains to a sweeping reinterpretation of Yamamoto’s iconic Eighties black coats, this time opening onto a bustle, a cascade of crimson fabric. It was theatrical, but never loud, a flourish of emotion emerging from near-monastic control.

Yet beneath the beauty was something more personal. Just weeks after the loss of Giorgio Armani, Yamamoto quietly wove a tribute into the show. Two black tunics stood apart from the rest, one adorned with hand-painted calligraphy, the other bearing a print of Shalom Harlow from a 1998 Armani campaign, alongside the invitation to Armani’s 50th anniversary show, handwritten and signed by Armani himself and an image of Kristen McMenamy wearing a 1997 tuxedo. 

Yet beneath the beauty was something more personal, Yamamoto quietly wove a tribute into the show to Giorgio Armani, a rare gesture between designers who shared a deep respect for craft and discipline

Yohji Yamamoto takes his bow

at the finale of an emotional show. 

It was a rare and intimate gesture between two designers who, despite different aesthetics, shared a profound respect for craft, discipline, and the human form. The connection ran deeper than homage. 

Armani built elegance through precision; Yamamoto dismantled it to find truth in imperfection. Both resisted fashion’s noise in favor of quiet conviction. Here, in a vast, dimly lit Paris salon, one designer saluted another, not only with words, but with cloth.

As the final model paused in a halo of red light, the audience remained hushed. Yamamoto appeared briefly at the end, bowing low, to the crowd, to his craft, and, unmistakably, to Armani, before waving with two hands and disappearing backstage. In a week defined by debut collections by new artistic directors at big fashion houses, his show felt like something rarer: a reminder of longevity, of consistency, and of the kind of artistry that needs no amplification

Scroll to see more highlights from Yohji Yamamoto's Spring/Summer 2026 collection in Paris