Grant Philipo shares his six-bedroom Las Vegas house with 270 mannequins and three ghosts. The mannequins start at the front door, continue into the living room and the dining room, and line the staircase to the second floor, where they fill the ballroom, the conference room, and the primary bedroom. Some have lifelike glass eyes; others (those less fortunate) don’t even have faces, or heads. But all are dressed exquisitely, in wigs or heavy feathered headdresses, rhinestone body chains revealing bare breasts, floor-length mesh gowns and bedazzled caged face masks. These showgirl costumes have appeared in performances from Las Vegas to Paris and have been worn by stars from Cher to Ann-Margret. Placards indicate gowns conceived by fashion legends like Liberace’s custom designer Michael Travis and Rockettes costume designer Pete Menefee. But most were created by Philipo himself.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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A 67-year-old former showboy (a male performer in a showgirl performance), he owns and operates Grant Philipo’s Las Vegas Showgirl Museum along with Marydelia Mantle here on a residential block off the Strip. It’s where the duo display their 40,000-piece showgirl archive—costumes, backdrops, and set pieces—which Philipo claims is the largest in the world. The nonprofit museum opened in 2007; the ghosts were inherited when Mantle bought the house in 2001. Unless you’re a redhead, Philipo says, they mind their business.
According to Philipo, a showgirl is a professionally trained live performer whose act requires an adults-only audience. Few these days can discern a showgirl from any other dancer, but Philipo has dedicated his life to teaching this nuance. In the past few decades, he has watched Vegas abandon the showgirl, trading glitz and glamour in for what he calls the “family era,” brought on by the popularity of Cirque du Soleil. Today, according to Philipo, Las Vegas does not have a single true showgirl performance on or off the Strip. The museum is his effort to preserve showgirl culture—where he found community nearly four decades ago, on his first visit to Vegas from Iowa as a teenager. He believes in the importance of the showgirl. And for Philipo, her revival in pop culture—Gia Coppola’s 2024 film, The Last Showgirl; Taylor Swift’s October 2025 album, The Life of a Showgirl—comes none too soon.
Through meticulous caretaking of the archive—and a willingness to cohabitate with mannequins—Philipo telegraphs his dream for the museum’s future: an uncensored, immersive, bejeweled bacchanal where others can find resonance and, hopefully, unconditional acceptance. “When people come in here, I live through them,” he says.
ON TOUR
The first time I try to visit the museum, I’m met with a blunt reply via email: “I don’t do tours on Friday the 13th.” When I enter Philipo’s foyer on Saturday the 14th, he emerges wearing all black, dark hair slicked into a ponytail. Over six feet tall, he looks like an older, wiser vampire from a Twilight movie.
Philipo is one of two docents. For years, he offered two tours a day, at noon and 4 p.m., but it was difficult to keep up. Now the museum is open by appointment only; tickets are $33. The week I visit, he has three tours; the week prior, he had six. Most visitors are fashion and showbiz lovers looking for an alternative to the typical Vegas itinerary. But Philipo’s favorite museumgoers are a surprising demographic: straight men. “They love it,” he says. “I get them with the craftsmanship, talking about how it was welded and soldered. The people that say ‘We’ve got to go back to that place again’ are the husbands.”
Every guided tour starts with the same question: “What makes a showgirl a showgirl?” Visitors rarely know the answer—or at least Philipo’s answer—and my friend and I, the only people in our group, are no exception. Philipo’s quick to explain: “All showgirls are topless. No exception. If they don’t get topless, they aren’t a real showgirl.” And so begins the three-hour tour.
Throughout the year, Philipo rotates the displays of costumes and accessories. Recent additions are pieces from Paris Line, a mid-1970s stage show featuring singer and actress Line Renaud. Mantle purchased more than 100 costumes from the show, including dozens of the same dress, worn by ensemble dancers, and Renaud’s red gown with a feather collar that is removed by male dancers to reveal her breasts at the beginning of the show. But Philipo and Mantle’s collecting habit is only one expense. There’s also the rent for the museum’s massive storage unit, full of thousands more costumes and 30-foot-tall sets from the show Jubilee!—the last full Vegas showgirl production, which closed in 2016. Then there are the maintenance fees to keep the house climate-controlled and dusted and of course the expense of restoring the costumes.
Philipo’s current work as a producer and costume designer, his savings, auctions and other fundraisers, and tours help bankroll the museum’s robust collection. In 2013, the reality show Extreme Collectors highlighted the museum, and 100 of its pieces were assessed at $15 million. That was before the museum acquired the most valuable items, including the 29-pound hand-beaded couture gown worn by Lynette Chappell in her role as an evil queen in a Siegfried and Roy show. Philipo says that one is valued at $1 million.
On the tour, Philipo moves slowly, rattling off stories (“This house was once owned by Kenny Kerr, the most famous female impersonator on the Las Vegas Strip”), pausing for us to read each plaque identifying the costume’s designer and year in colorful Microsoft WordArt. Creations that were featured in films—including a cape and G-string made for the 2000 movie The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas—are accompanied by stills from the scenes in which they were worn. We’re encouraged to take photos and videos, but no touching. In one room, I’m spooked by ominous music from a motion-activated speaker from a Halloween store.
Upstairs, Philipo offers a peek into his workshop, where clothing storage racks line the edges of the room and every inch of counter space is covered with spools of thread, feathers, and beads. A foam wig head labeled “Pamela” has a piece of tape across her eyes. Philipo’s workshop is a refuge for mistreated pieces. A hat from a 1920s show at the Folies-Bergère in Paris is currently displayed in the living room. “Some asshole somewhere along the line sewed modern elastic in it. You’re not supposed to do that,” he says, sighing. “You don’t deface it.”
LIFE’S A STAGE
Across Southern California and Las Vegas, Philipo has worked as a dancer, a singer, a high-fashion model, a makeup artist, a costume and set designer, and occasionally a stripper. Born in Iowa, he dove into the arts at an early age to escape an abusive household. In 1976, after high school graduation, his former dance teacher suggested he leave Des Moines for a more gay-friendly city. She invited him to go with her to see every show in Vegas in 30 days. To bypass the 21-plus requirements at clubs, he grew a mustache (“It was a bad one, but no one cared in the mafia days”), and he saw an estimated 90 shows (“I felt like Dorothy entering Munchkinland”). After the monthlong trip, he moved to San Diego, never to return to the Midwest.
By 21, Philipo was producing small shows in San Diego, and he returned to Vegas in 1980 to perform, model, and teach, resorting to side gigs when money was tight. In those early years, after the disappointment of his not being cast for the new epic revue Jubilee!, a friend, Ludo Vika, star of the show The Las Vegas Strip at the Tropicana Hotel, asked for help designing and making a costume. Philipo had no experience but used his art background to create a white feathered dress and headpiece. The final look brought Vika to tears. Puerto Rican singer and dancer Iris Chacón saw the outfit when she visited Las Vegas and hired Philipo to design and fabricate her costumes, starting with a chicken dress—inspired by the cockfights on the streets in her hometown—for a performance at San Juan’s Caribe Hilton. Philipo also began re-creating famous gowns from classic films like Gone with the Wind for figures on display at the Hollywood Wax Museum and Guinness World Records Museums, among other tourist attractions.
Philipo soon started integrating his own costume design into a new facet of his work: writing and directing showgirl stage productions. 90 Degrees and Rising—featuring a cast of 35—debuted in 1992 at the Dunes hotel. A framed letter on display at the museum from Jubilee! choreographer Donn Arden to Philipo describes the show as “well paced, well costumed, well choreographed and well cast…a genuine traditional audience pleaser.”
In 2021, Philipo worked on the PBS documentary The Showgirl: A Las Vegas Icon, directed by Heather Caputo, casting former showgirls and showboys and styling them in garments from the museum’s collection. Three years later, he selected costumes to lend to Spectacle of the Showgirl, a pop-up exhibition at Las Vegas City Hall. While he wasn’t paid for his contribution, he considered the free exhibition a marketing opportunity for the museum.
Even if some archival pieces are 100 years old, the quickest way to make Philipo mad is to speak about showgirls in the past tense. He is a firm believer that showgirls will return to the Vegas stage soon. “I don’t want to have a dead museum,” he says.
Philipo wants a new, stand-alone museum, open to the public all day, with options for casual self-guided visits and docent tours conducted by him and a small team. He wants to display costumes for an entire cast next to multimedia installations with archival footage. He’s had little success raising money for the project via GoFundMe, but has recently made inroads with two hoteliers who are interested in financing a larger, public museum space as well as a new, live showgirl performance series.
These projects are part of Philipo’s master plan to reinvigorate showgirl culture—an art form that he compares to “going and seeing the most romantic, beautiful film you ever saw, only it’s live people.” It’s a mission to which he is so dedicated that if nothing else, he will continue to open his home, climb up and down the stairs, and personally guide curious audiences through a century of sequins.•
Lina Abascal is a writer and filmmaker from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, WIRED, McSweeney’s, and more. She is the author of Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor (2021). Her first film, the award-winning short documentary Stud Country (2024), traces the little-known history of queer country-western dancing in Los Angeles.
