Showgirls: Before Taylor Swift, there was Mistinguett • FRANCE 24 English

Showgirls: Before Taylor Swift, there was Mistinguett • FRANCE 24 English

Time now for a little bit of culture news for you with Solange Ma who joins me on set. Hi Solange. Hi Genie. So today we’re going to talk about the life of a showgirl. That’s Taylor Swift’s new album. It’s already a huge success. 2.7 million copies sold in the first 24 hours. And today you’re going to take a deep dive into what exactly a showgirl is, whether Taylor Swift really is one, and how there’s actually a strong French element to all of this too. Yeah. Despite the fact that perhaps now with the release of the album, the word showgirl girl will become synonymous with Taylor Swift. That’s perhaps uh or that when we think about showg girls uh today, it’s often a scantily clad Las Vegas dancers with all their feathers and their revealing over-the-top outfits. There is a strong historical argument to be had that the original iconic show girls that they were French. uh and discussing that history will actually help us understand and get to the bottom of this question of whether Taylor Swift is really a showgirl or if she isn’t. Uh uh so first for some of the history of show girls and why Paris and Malt are so important here. Well, when France entered the bell puck period or the decades after the FrancoRussian uh war in the 1870s, uh cafes and concert halls became popular places to drink, talk, watch entertainers of all sorts, men and women alike, and places like Ranoir, which opened in Mal in 1881, but also the Fibbeer, the Mun Rouge. These places began to dabble with increasingly risque and lavish performances to attract audiences and daring female dancers and singers. Lifting their skirts became a big draw for spectators who wanted something more modern than say theater or opera. Uh a cabaret and the burlesque became hugely popular. This coincided with advancing wealth uh changing values and industrialization. And if actually if you think about it the French can can dance is actually kind of like a machine or a lot of human legs moving in unison and the history of the can the French can can dance is in itself quite fascinating but when it comes to show girls the popularity of these mmouth cabarets led to a stardom a mystique and a sexualization of these dancers/ singers um this then traveled to the US with the zigfield follies Hollywood and then Las Vegas and we continue to see the fascination today in movies, TV shows, and the continued popularity of the Mural Rouge, one of Paris’s last remaining cabarets. Right. So, tell us a bit more about these original show girls. Who were they? Well, the list is a very long one. Uh, but I’ve chosen a few that stick out here in France, such as the Parisian dancer Lagul, uh, who was famous for her high kicks at the Mul Rouge. Uh, she was referred to as the queen of Malta for a time, but she ended up an alcoholic and destitute. uh and the fall from fame and grace is also an aspect of this showgirl persona even today and that fame is fickle and harder than it looks which is a theme on Swift’s uh new album. Then there is Mistangette uh whose stage name continues to be used in common French language to this day. Franophones can affectionately call a young girl a Mistangette. As for the real person uh her name was Jean Bourgeoa. Uh but she chose to be called Mistangette without an E at the end of Mistet. Uh because she said one less letter meant that her stage name it allowed it to be bigger on billboards. And she was uh once the highest paid entertainer in the world uh like Taylor Swift, her stardom was uh unsurpassed as was talk of her love life or her relationship with fellow star Maurice Shavalier. and she was particularly known for her very long legs uh which is she is said to have insured uh for what uh at the time what is now the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars today. It is also believed that Mistangette was a spy during World War I uh helping France win the war in uh 1918. Much like the equally beloved uh showgirl uh who is perhaps more wellknown today. Uh we see her there, Josephine Baker, the French go American singer and dancer uh also helped the French resistance as a spy, but she was above all worship for her singing, dancing, and overall mystique. Uh and those are just a few in the long list of original show girls. All right, let’s come back to Taylor Swift. What about her? Is she really a showgirl? Well, in naming her album The Life of a Showgirl, Swift is indeed calling herself or her work a showgirl’s work. And you could argue that that is what matters. Uh and the fame and the money and the glitter and the dance routines and all of the adoration, all of these things work uh well with this showgirl image. But in a in the massive amount of reviews and opinion pieces that have come out since the album was announced and then released, there’s been a lot of discussion about this. And some reviewers do not think that Taylor Swift is a showgirl. The Economist argues in spend a day in the life of a showgirl that the cabaret industry has lost its shine. That unlike Swift, real show girls well their earnings vary and they are seasonal. Uh but it also says that real show girls that they play with the dual worlds of performance one moment and then ordinary boring lives the other, which is actually something that Swift plays with too. She says she’s just a normal girl in some sometimes uh just like her feminist rhetoric the sexualized versus the sexualized co costumes. Meanwhile, Time argues that the modern-day showgirl is a woman dressed in a vintage costume posing for photographers on the Las Vegas stripped strip or a prop in essence. Uh whereas Swift is not a member of the chorus they argue, but rather her core identity is not that of a showgirl but of a superstar. in the conversation. Uh they say that uh Swift brings to light the hard work uh and that that aspect of a showgirl’s life or quote tapping into a century of glamour while signaling that she too has worked hard and made sacrifices end quote. But how far does that really go? Uh I ask when you are a billionaire that all that hard work. Well, in an opinion piece in the New York Times, Lisa Rogers argues that Swift is no show showgirl for she created the show, she writes, or but simply she is the boss. And that is where perhaps Swift is trying to change our collective minds uh in the idea of what a show girl is to move away from the male sexualized gays or women being the victim of it and move towards uh an idea of an independent woman who dances and sings when and what she wants. It’s interesting. Thank you so much for that salon, for that deep dive into Taylor Swift and her new album, The Life of a Showgirl. You’re watching Friends 24.

In this edition of Entre Nous, we take a look at Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl” and how, long before her stardom, it was French showgirls who stole the show. We also find out if, indeed, Swift is a showgirl or not.
#Showgirls #TaylorSwift #Mistinguett

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