‘Bad taste or trashy-cool?’: Behind the stripped-down costumes of cult classic ‘Showgirls’

Scarlett Harris

(CNN) — Throughout her four-decade career, costume designer Ellen Mirojnick has been lauded for transporting viewers across time and place, from the metaphor-heavy suiting of Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” to the elaborate period pomp of Emmy-winning “Bridgerton.”

Her work on the 1995 cult classic “Showgirls,” however, often elicits a very different response: Did it even have costumes? The lead character, after all, spends much of the movie in various stages of undress.

“I’ve always found it funny that people think, ‘Oh you did ‘Showgirls,’ that wasn’t very much (work),’” said Mirojnick. “Actually it was quite a lot. That film is chock full of costumes!”

Often listed among the worst movies ever made, director Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls,” which turned 30 this month, has achieved cult status thanks to its over-the-top acting, unforgettable one-liners and extravagantly camp styling. It stars former “Saved by the Bell” teen actor Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone, a down-on-her-luck sex worker from “different places” who arrives in Las Vegas with dreams to make it big — specifically, to succeed famous showgirl Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) in the Strip’s most popular topless show, “Goddess.”

Mirojnick’s costumes bring the show — and the movie’s other Las Vegas revues — to life, while reflecting characters’ evolving story arcs. Among them is the Versace dress Nomi buys with her first big paycheck (“It’s a Versayce,” goes her now-iconic mispronunciation). In fact, the designer said, most of the “Goddess” costumes were inspired by Versace’s Fall-Winter 1994 show, held a year earlier, which featured metallic dresses and a gold chainmail minidress worn by supermodel Helena Christensen.

The result subverts the traditional image of the showgirl exemplified by historical cabarets and the marabou feather-clad follies of Ziegfeld (Broadway), Bergere (Paris) and “Jubilee!” (Las Vegas). Instead, Mirojnick used 1970s-style gold lame and mirrored sheaths to portray Nomi as the rising star coming for Cristal’s crown.

“(Vegas) was still living in the past,” Mirojnick said of the movie’s contemporaneous mid-’90s Las Vegas setting. “The showgirl shows that were still there were of the ’50s and ’60s. The ’70s were not at the forefront of anyone’s imagination to reinvent at that time.”

Or perhaps Nomi was coming for Cristal’s cowboy hat, as it were. “It’s Nomi’s interpretation of the crown,” Mirojnick explained.

Through its luminescence, “Showgirls” reflects the “seedy underbelly,” as Mirojnick described, of Vegas before it was sanitized as a destination for family vacations and millennial girls’ night out. “We always tried to do it with a point of view,” she said. “Is this bad taste or is it trashy-cool? What we created was not pedestrian.”

Mirojnick said the production team wanted to make the movie aspirational for young, ambitious showgirls, elevating Nomi above the tackiness of ‘90s Vegas to become the figurative queen of the Strip. “We had to make it have some glamour — in a pretend, painted-on way — because if it was gross, then why would Nomi want it?” she said.

“Too much shine, (too many rhine)stones, too much pattern, too short, too loud,” Mirojnick said of Nomi’s costumes, evoking a lost little girl playing dress-up with her mom’s costume jewelry, trying on a version of glamour, stardom and wealth that elude her.

This chasm between reality and desire has continued to underpin showgirl stereotypes, including those explored in last year’s “The Last Showgirl” and “Anora,” both of which arguably owe an —albeit distant — debt of gratitude to Verhoeven and Mirojnick. In the former, Pamela Anderson’s Shelly is stuck in the version of Vegas-gone-by once inhabited by Nomi; in the Oscar-winning latter, Mikey Maddison’s Ani (although emerging from an altogether grittier world of Brooklyn strip clubs) embodies Nomi’s wide-eyed optimism and naivety, as her version of a fairytale briefly comes true upon marrying a rich Russian playboy in a 24-hour drive-through wedding chapel.

As in “Showgirls,” these characters’ stories are reflected in their costumes. Shelly is in a perpetual state of sparkle, the body glitter she wears on stage wedging its way into every part of her life, as glitter is wont to do. Ani’s hair tinsel may even directly nod to Nomi’s, while her luxury fur coat, like the “Versayce” dress, foreshadows the false promise of seemingly improved fortunes.

Pop culture’s fascination with the notion of showgirls also stretches far beyond movies. This week, Taylor Swift releases her hotly anticipated 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” building on an aesthetic the star has cultivated through her 2022 “Bejeweled” music video, where she danced in a martini glass with Dita von Teese, and 2017’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” where she bathed in a tub of diamonds and swung around in a bird cage, another classic showgirl prop.

Knowing Swift’s penchant for creating entire eras around her album concepts, Mirojnick wonders if she will create “a new archetype” for showgirls — one that the costume designer can take some credit for shaping. “That would be thrilling.”

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