It’s the Summer of Showgirlmanship

Life is to be a movie—a satirical erotic melodrama.

Last week I interviewed a burgeoning megastar and she offhandedly used the word “showgirlmanship” about her work ethic. Since then, the phrase has been bumping around my cranium, displacing other more important things like basic arithmetic. Why? Because we’re living in a time of great showgirlmanship.

But Nicolaia, wasn’t 2025 the year of the showgirl? Aren’t you a day late and a buck short? Didn’t it kick off in 2024 with Pamela Anderson’s comeback The Last Showgirl, and reach an inflection point in 2025 with Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl (a title track that featured fellow showgirl obsessive Sabrina Carpenter)? Two things can be true, but also, these two things are different.

The enduring appeal of the showgirl archetype is based on intertwined forces: A moth-like draw to glamour, beauty, sex, coupled with the winking acknowledgement that it’s a varnish. Showgirlmanship opens the kimono completely. Showgirlmanship is not being a showgirl, as sportsmanship is not being an athlete. It is an attitudinal severity towards work, less about the product, more about the process, and also, the direct result of our dependence on the cultural equivalent of flavor enhancers: AI, behind the scenes songwriters, script doctors, creative consultants, publicists, coaches, etc. So many hands, so many forms of technology, so much potential for capitalist intrusions goes into any finished work—that it’s become en vogue to signal artistic purity through process posting. Anyone can look glamorous on Instagram, but the question that emerges in this brave new world is how to transmute care and craft through a screen?

In NOVEMBER (!!!) for this very Substack I wrote about the quickstep towards anti-algorithmic posting, and the uptick in public “finstas” (which, since then, every magazine and their parent company covered). Showgirlmanship is an extension of that ethos—a public declaration of the time, sweat, and glitter that it takes to be That Girl. It’s Sharleen Schiadic in the NYT, Adéla and Lexee in the studio, Addison recreating Emma Stone’s Easy A costume, Gabriella giving herself the Substack exclusive on styling Rama Duwaji, Rachel in the writer’s room. It’s also any season of RuPaul’s Drag Race (perhaps the birthplace of showgirlmanship). It’s the displacement of “chic” for the word “erotic” (someone on Substack pointed this out in a post that I cannot, for the life of me, find), a marked disinterest in polish. It’s commitment to the bit, a little messy, a little urgent, undeniably spunky. It’s renaming yourself Cristal— but after the champagne. Honey, it’s feathers and lashes, but it’s also knowing the taste of doggy chow!

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• I hosted office hours two weekends ago at Bar Oliver and it was the sweetest group ever!

  

• On Saturday all my favorite writers (Whitney Mallet, Danya Issawi, Mikaela Dery, Maya Kotomori, Tanya Bush) and I are throwing a gargantuan closet sale and literary reading at Surrender Dorothy. Come for the clothes, stay for our Eulogies.

• The full Ottessa Moshfegh x Alexa interview is live online.

• Lastly, GO KNICKS! BING BONG!