Fashioning Sex Work

It’s a tale as old as time.

In the Oscar-winning 2024 film Anora, Ani (played by Mikey Madison), a stripper living in Brooklyn, New York, meets Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch. They both get swept up in the thrill of a week full of partying and sex. So much so that they get married in Las Vegas and, suddenly, Ani, who hustles back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn on the subway, is granted access to a world of sable fur coats, private jets, and four-carat diamond rings. Three decades before, Vivian (Julia Roberts), the “hooker with a heart of gold,” goes to give directions to a businessman named Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) driving a 1989 Lotus Esprit SE only to find herself spending a week in the penthouse of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel and getting the best that money can buy at the shops on Rodeo Drive. The women leave their work outfits behind—and with them, ostensibly, the stigma of sex work—for worldly glitz, the modern-day Cinderella.

So much of how Americans view sex work today is wrapped up in these stories. Whether Pretty Woman’s rags-to-riches arc, Hustlers’ strip-club-based scams, or Anora’s hot pursuit of the American dream, how sex work feels, operates, and looks has largely been defined by such films and their costumes. Ask the average person to picture a sex worker, and we’d bet our lucite pleasers that Vivian’s blue-and-white cut-out dress and thigh-high patent leather boots come to mind; the image has been so imprinted on the collective pop culture imagination. The oldest profession glistens under a different light at the movies, styled in hoop earrings, bandage dresses, and sky-high heels that turn a job that is, well, a job into a glamorous and fantastical endeavor.

“Like other countercultural kinds of figures, such as drag queens, there is a way in which the visualization and the fashion of sex workers does tend to be exaggerated,” says Rachel Schreiber, director of the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute at The New School. “The color red, the heels, the lipstick, the black leather, and fetish wear—these are easy ways to begin to signify to the viewer that you're encountering a character who is a sex worker.”

The fashion choices seep into the mainstream and vice-versa. Not a Halloween goes by without someone dressing up as Pretty Woman’s Vivian, while the suits worn by Richard Gere in American Gigolo are constantly referenced by fashion designers. And for costume designers like Pretty Woman’s Marilyn Vance, Hustlers’ Mitchell Travers, and Anora’s Jocelyn Pierce, it’s all about treading the line between authenticity and fantasy. “In no way do I feel like an authority on sex work or like I can even speak for anyone in those positions,” says Pierce. “All I can really hope for is that people feel represented.”

The Uniform

The accurate representation of sex work, according to Schreiber, starts by recognizing it as that: labor. It’s a perspective shift that activists have been fighting for for decades, with a goal of implementing regulations and protections for sex workers. “There are all kinds of professions that we accept in our society that involve the body, right?” Schreiber says. “Construction work is physically dangerous. It's arduous, it has its risks, but we don't outlaw it—we regulate it.”

As with many other professions, what people wear to perform sex work—it’s just a work uniform. That’s precisely why the research process for many of the costume designers in charge of depicting prostitutes, exotic dancers, and escorts on screen starts at their workplace.

Travers describes the research process for the Golden Globe–nominated film Hustlers as his “most expensive.” “I would be like, ‘I will go someplace with you and chat,’ and all the girls would be like, ‘You can, but you have to pay me,’” he recalls. “And so I was like, ‘100 percent—work is work.’” Travers quickly found himself inside champagne rooms chatting with strippers, who would go into detail about their work uniforms, the places they bought them, and how much their labor influenced what they wore: “What makes money, what doesn't, what looks good in a photo versus what looks good in the club lights,” he explains. Pretty Woman’s Vance also started her research at the source. Nearly four decades ago, she looked to Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard, where Pretty Woman is based, for inspiration, adding that it was the “revealing” clothing that she gravitated toward most.

Pierce chose to start more abstractly for Anora. While she did work directly with dancers, including co-stars Luna Sofía Miranda, Lindsey Normington, and Sophia Carnabuci, at the club where the film was shot (“We were so lucky to be able to be immersed in the actual worlds that our characters exist in”), Pierce first began her process with mood boards that included images by the San Francisco-based photographer Rachel Lena Esterline's series Heaven is a Strip Club: “She has been photographing dancers for years, and her work is incredibly intimate, honest, and empowering,” Pierce says.

While “uniform” implies similarity, the broad range of services that exist in the profession means there is not one way to define how a sex worker dresses. In Pretty Woman, Vivian is introduced to audiences while getting ready to step out onto the Walk of Fame in search of clients wearing the aforementioned mini-dress and thigh-highs. It’s a formula that calls to mind 1971’s Klute, in which Bree Daniels (played by Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for the role), a call girl, is also dressed in a mini skirt and over-the-knee black boots. The characters in 2015's iPhone-shot Tangerine, who are primarily Black trans women on the streets of Los Angeles, follow a similar formula, dressed in heels and more casual staples like jeans and tank tops.

For Hustlers' Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a stripper working in one of Manhattan’s most expensive clubs, the uniform was thought out differently. “Everything that she wore was custom,” Travers explains. “The girls who operate at that level do have custom work done for their bodies, for how they move as any other dancer or athlete would. The higher you get in the rank, the more custom your attire can be.” Ramona is, therefore, introduced in a haze of sparkles and lights, taking center stage in a glimmering fringed silver bodysuit, a matching sequined jacket, and a crystal-encrusted cap. It’s the epitome of glamour. There's a high-low dichotomy at play in the 1995 film Showgirls, in which leading lady Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) decamps to Vegas to make it as a dancer, only to get hired at the Cheetah Club, a strip joint where she performs in mostly basic lingerie. But it’s at the more elite topless production, Goddess, that Malone finds the kind of glamour embedded in the stripper fantasy.

Anora’s Ani is somewhere in between. Unlike Ramona, who spends her time mostly on the pole, or Vivian, whose money is made on the street, Ani works face-to-face with clients inside a club, offering both pole and lap dances. That makes her work uniform less starlet and more 20-something. But she’s still selling a fantasy. Pierce was able to lean on recommendations from real dancers at the functioning club where they shot. “Not only were they just smart, confident, stylish people, they were just so funny and so generous with stories,” Pierce says. “We got to go through all of their clothes.” The result was a look that closely resembles that of any party girl inside a New York club: a black bandage dress styled with high heels and hoop earrings.

Building a work uniform is not only about labor, says Pierce. It needs depth, too, especially while depicting a profession that is both glamorized and demonized: “I don’t really feel qualified to talk about sex work, but as a costume designer, it is my hope with any character is that our characters are visually represented with the truth of their given circumstances and with honesty and humanity,” she says.

A Cinderella Story

Many pop culture portrayals of sex workers follow an arc that will sound straight out of a Disney film: A struggling woman meets a man who saves her from that situation. It’s Edward Lewis telling Vivian she could be “so much more” or Ivan offering $15,000 to Ani to be his girlfriend for a week. Soon after these conversations, the women undergo a makeover of sorts, one that takes them out of their work uniform.

Vivian, for example, has just one explicit work outfit in Pretty Woman, which is rapidly tossed to the side and replaced with ladylike clothes for accompanying Edward to his business dinners and polo matches. Although Anora shows a more varied exhibition of Ani’s workwear—the bandage dresses at the club, the bikinis for pole dancing inside private rooms, the school-girl-like plaid mini skirt and crop top for a dance at Ivan’s mansion—the moment she says “I do,” her wardrobe changes right along with her marital status. She abandons her usual puffer coats for a Russian sable and switches from off-duty sweats and on-duty short hemlines to plain skinny jeans.

Yet, there were subtleties between the two makeovers that signal how society’s views on sex work have progressed in the three decades between films. While Vivian’s uniform is seen as a costume she must shed to enter society, Ani’s is not altogether unlike her everyday clothes, allowing her to transition in and out of her uniform with more ease. Schreiber says that this depiction may be more realistic of what sex work is beyond its on-screen glamorization. “As an activist and researcher, I have interviewed and met with high school teachers and nurses and people who are not paid enough to support their families and choose [sex work] as a way to augment their income.”

Even before Anora snagged six nominations and won Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars, there were signs that the cliché makeover storyline was shifting. In Hustlers, for example, none of the women go through a complete transformation—even after they start making beaucoup bucks from their card scam. Sure, their lives change, but their clothes and the way they express their identities through them don’t. It’s evidence that sex work is starting to be seen as something that doesn’t need to be tucked away. It’s an approach worlds apart from the 1967 film Belle Du Jour, in which the protagonist’s venture as a call girl is an escape from her life as a dutiful wife. As the “Belle Du Jour,” she wears white lingerie, but in her life at home she sleeps in ladylike nightgowns. Travers didn’t see a divide between the Hustlers characters’ lives in and out of the club.

Travers made sure his work reflected that, building the women’s wardrobes to be influenced by both their workplace character and personal lives. “I wanted some girls to feel like they're finding out how this business works and be at the early stage of their career,” he explains. “And I wanted other girls in the club to look like they were professionals.” And when a makeover moment does present itself, there is no knight in shining armor. Destiny (played by Constance Wu), a newbie at the club, goes from being comforted inside Ramona’s giant fur coat at the beginning of the movie to later buying one for herself.

Clap Your Pleasers

Much has changed since films like Klute, American Gigolo, and Pretty Woman hit the big screen. For starters, if the sets and research process of Hustlers and Anora are any evidence, sex workers have more of an influence on the way they’re depicted.

That looks like Anora's Pierce pulling clothes and accessories directly from dancers’ lockers or shopping at their usual uniform stores, including Empire Exotics in Midtown Manhattan. “Hair, makeup, and wardrobe were set up in the dressing room of the strip club, and it was such a creative and energized space,” she recalls. “So many fabulous and supportive women, all willing to let us go through their lockers and bags and play dress up, all unique and with such great personal styles. I am so grateful for their collaboration.” It’s perhaps why, when star Mikey Madison screened Anora for a group of sex workers in Los Angeles, they clapped their Pleaser heels together as the credits rolled. “That was really moving,” Pierce says.

Travers notes that, although people may assume the subject matter changes a costume designer’s methods, to him, it’s all the same. “I think a lot of my prep is just listening and absorbing as much knowledge as I can. I would do that for any group of people,” he says. “If I was doing nurses or if I was doing athletes, I would study how they get dressed, and I would want to know why they get dressed the way that they do. And so this is no different to me at all.”

More than outfitting a worker’s uniform, Pierce says it’s about reaching past society’s views of the oldest profession to present it in its rawest form. “It's not just putting an outfit on somebody," she says, "there is a truth that you can't buy.”

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