In a sense, Taylor Swift’s Showgirl era actually began two albums ago—with “You’re on Your Own Kid,” a revealing track on her 10th studio record, Midnights (2022). In the song, Swift charts her coming of age in the spotlight: first escaping her small town by writing music, then searching parties full of “better bodies / just to learn that my dreams aren’t rare,” and ultimately deciding that “there were pages turned with the bridges burned” during her so-called cancellation chapter. It’s where she, Swift, first sang of the friendship bracelets that became currency on her Eras tour—even helping to bring her now fiancé, Travis Kelce, into focus. All of it would coalesce into the biggest creative chapter of Swift’s career.
Two years, $2 billion in ticket sales, and 11 reprisals of “You’re on Your Own Kid” (the most repeated surprise song on her live set list) later, Swift promises a look “behind the curtain” of that blockbuster tour with her new album, The Life of a Showgirl.
Look no further than the cover art—shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, who also worked on her Reputation (2017) imagery—meant to represent Swift’s mood getting into the bath after a night of performing during the Eras tour. “When all this has gone down, you won’t be able to get to bed until 4 in the morning,” she said while announcing the album on Kelce’s New Heights podcast, “but you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show. And you did it. You got two more in a row, but you did it tonight.” Swift added, “This album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage. It’s about what I was going through offstage.”
That’s also true of most great showgirl movies, where Swift has been known to find inspiration. In fact, three of cinema’s most famous showgirls—as played by Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl, and Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl—tend to foreshadow The Life of a Showgirl as first outlined in “You’re on Your Own Kid,” and hint at what may come on the twelfth album.
The small-town “Daisy May” who longed for stardom in “You’re on Your Own Kid” sounds a bit like Nomi Malone, the bright-eyed heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, who hitches a ride to Las Vegas to become a dancer. Once there, she’s deceived and betrayed in both business and love. All of Nomi’s naivete is stripped away in her pursuit of fame. And she abandons her once steadfast ideals to replace Gina Gerhson’s veteran showgirl Cristal Connors, whose line, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you,” sounds like a lyric straight out of “Nothing New,” in which Swift and Phoebe Bridgers sing about the passage of time in the spotlight. “I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream / The kind of radiance you only have at 17,” the two sing of their imaginary successor. “She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me / I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.”
In the end, both Nomi and Cristal realize their dream opportunity may not have been all it was cracked up to be—Malone drives off into the sunset, far, far away from the Vegas Strip. And backlash to the NC-17-rated Showgirls led Berkley to be dropped by her agent, although, like many others, she has since embraced the 1995 film’s campy comforts.
According to Merriam-Webster, the first known definition of “showgirl” dates back to 1836 and gained popularity in Paris to describe the chorus members of cabarets and burlesque shows, including at the famed Moulin Rouge. The term didn’t gain widespread notoriety in the US until the 20th century, with Ziegfeld’s “Follies Girls” on Broadway. But it would be another few decades before Hollywood fully embraced the label. Enter Marilyn Monroe, who played variations of the showgirl trope across several iconic films, including Some Like It Hot (1959), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and finally, The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957.
In the latter, Monroe starred opposite Laurence Olivier—who also directed the ill-fated love story—as Elsie, a free-spirited American showgirl who first captures the affections of an uptight British royal while performing onstage. (Sound slightly familiar?) Like Swift and Kelce, the fictitious couple comes from two different worlds and, thus, face skepticism about their compatibility. Like the baseless political rumors that Swift and Kelce were in a “deep state” plot to influence the 2024 presidential election, the prince and showgirl’s romance also causes international outrage, in part over Elsie’s performance career.
Things weren’t any smoother for Monroe offscreen. What began as a promising revamp of her career—the film marked her first as a full-fledged producer—devolved into a reportedly troubled production rife with delays and creative differences, which served as the backdrop for My Week With Marilyn (2011), earning Michelle Williams an Academy Award nomination. There were also romantic struggles for Monroe and her then husband, Arthur Miller, the playwright behind Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, who didn’t have the onus of navigating as much public attention as his wife. During filming, she found a diary entry of Miller’s in which he claimed to be “disappointed” in her and even sometimes embarrassed by her in front of his friends. Swift laments in songs like “So Long, London” and “Bejeweled” (the music video for which she performs alongside legendary showgirl Dita Von Teese) that her more private partner may not allow her to fully flourish.
Monroe was top of mind when Gia Coppola set out to make The Last Showgirl (2024) about Shelly, a woman in search of her next act after the end of a 30-year run in the same Vegas show. While watching Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson’s 2023 Netflix documentary, Coppola thought, “She is the Marilyn of our time,” the filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly. “I find her to be a very interesting human being. She’s very intelligent and has an art background, and I could see she was a woman that was really craving to express herself as an actress creatively. I saw a lot of parallels with Shelly, but I also saw this was a person that was really hungry to show her talents.’”
In The Last Showgirl, Shelly worries about a world in which she can no longer perform on the same scale as she did during her 30-year stint on stage. There is fear about her relevance as a performer and regret over the personal sacrifices she made to prioritize her art. Still, “I feel so good about myself in this show…. The costumes. The being bathed in that light night after night, feeling seen, feeling beautiful,” Shelly says. “That is powerful, and I can’t imagine my life without it.” Perhaps, it is something Swift also pondered: What do you do after the curtain closes and audiences move on?
Some songs on The Tortured Poets Department—believed to be about her splits from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy over the course of the Eras tour—suggest that Swift once thought she may have ended up like Lola Lamar, the showgirl from Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, 30 years after her tragic love story, “still in the dress she used to wear/faded feathers in her hair.” Or as Swift acknowledges in two of that album’s tracks: She “can do it with a broken heart,” but does, at the moment, “hate it here.”
The Life of a Showgirl, then, may be an opportunity for Swift to revel in the happiness of such a pivotal few years. As Swift first described the album on New Heights, Kelce chimed in to say that the music is “a lot more upbeat, and it’s a lot more like fun, pop, like excitement. I think it’s a complete 180 from a lot of the songs on Tortured Poets for sure.” Swift agreed with a nod to her future husband: “Life is more upbeat.”
Like some of pop culture’s other showgirls, Swift seems to grasp that the sweetness of performing can only be considered now that much of the bitterness has been aired. “It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift told Time Magazine of her Eras tour resurgence. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity. The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”
Following the sale of her music to an industry archenemy, Swift got an idea that would help define her decades, or, shall we say, eras-long career. “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me,” Swift told the outlet. “I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.” Like most showgirls, Swift has never been very good at staying still.
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