Taylor Swift has gone through many evolutions over her 20-year career: the guitar-strummer of her 2006 debut, the wide-eyed New Yorker on 1989, the introspective storyteller of Folklore and Midnights. Her two-year Eras tour established her as the defining entertainer of her generation, and after her recent engagement to American footballer Travis Kelce, one of its biggest celebrities. Now, after an unexpectedly brief hiatus, Swift returns with her 12th album in yet another guise: a showgirl.

Swift made The Life of a Showgirl with Swedish super-producers Max Martin and Shellback while touring Europe last year. She described the project as a tribute to her “joyful, wild, dramatic” life as an entertainer, and a look “behind the scenes” of the Eras spectacle. Album imagery by fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shows Swift bejewelled with diamantes, fishnet tights, fur and feathered headdresses.

“Swift has crafted a different persona for pretty much every album, so it’s not such a surprise that we’re seeing a new side of her,” says Drew Nobile, an associate professor of music theory at the University of Oregon. But why a showgirl – and why now?

It is not as much of a clash with Swift’s trademark girl-next-door relatability as it may seem. “She’s leaning into the idea that her public image is a gilded fantasy,” Nobile says, allowing her to present herself as both “the billionaire pop star who dazzles arenas every night, and the same old girl beneath the costumes. It would ring hollow if she just came back with a down-to-earth album of personal songs, as if the Eras tour never happened.” Even the title The Life of a Showgirl, he says, “seems to be suggesting that behind the sequins is a real woman.”

Swift isn’t the first pop star to draw from the 19th-century showgirl tradition. For her Man! I Feel Like a Woman! video, riffing on Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love, Shania Twain donned a top hat and tuxedo jacket to transform the original’s sleaze into sex appeal and female empowerment. Lady Marmalade, from the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack, emphasised showgirls’ solidarity. Kylie Minogue chose to celebrate her “long-term relationship” with fans with her art deco-inspired Showgirl tour of 2005; Lady Gaga acknowledged her debt to cabaret at last year’s Paris Olympics. Among pop’s new generation, Sabrina Carpenter’s skits draw from vaudeville while Addison Rae often wears sequins, tulle and lingerie-inspired looks.

For pop stars such as these, the showgirl offers both stage-ready looks and historical context – but she has never been mere spectacle, argues Alison J Carr, the Sheffield-based author of Viewing Pleasure and Being a Showgirl. Each showgirl extends the tradition and reflects the “pleasures and anxieties” of her time, she says. “There is no original showgirl: she’s always a quotation.”

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The iconic showgirl emerged from 19th-century social change: industrialisation and the shift to the city, the birth of nightlife and women’s increasing visibility in public. After emerging in Parisian music halls and cabarets, the style spread to England, where John Tiller’s legendary troupe popularised what was called “precision dance”.

The “kickline” of performers standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and their synchronised can-can dances, all seemed to reflect the dawning machine age and cast women as symbols of modernity, Carr says. “Forms of progress, for ill and for good, [were] showing up in what the showgirls were doing.”

Introduced to the US, the showgirl was quickly absorbed into the emerging entertainment business and “became part of Americana”, Carr says. Producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr developed the revues’ winking mix of sex appeal, glamour, comedy and theatrical performance. But by the 1970s and second-wave feminism, showgirls had been spurned along with beauty queens as creations of the male gaze, “dehumanising and objectifying”, Carr says.

There was little acknowledgment of showgirls as skilled professionals. Yet many were classically trained dancers, and performed in 2-3in heels and wore costumes weighing as much as 22lbs (10kgs). Most shows required them to be 5ft 8in or taller, so as to not appear swamped on stage; strong legs, back and core muscles were a must. “There’s a lot of steps, the dancers are running up and down … it’s incredibly physical,” says Carr.

When animated by the performer, however, the costumes’ glitz and glamour actually serve to highlight her humanity and talent, Carr says. “All that embellishment is saying that you’re important, you deserve to be seen, you’ve got something to say.”

Carr recalls seeing a troupe in Los Angeles, made up of women with different looks and builds. “You could see that all of them had just decided: ‘I’m going to be that beautiful woman in the kickline.’ It’s not contingent on what you look like, what you’re wearing – it’s that inner commitment ... You’re audacious because you know you’re that good.”

That would certainly seem to appeal to Swift, known for her formidable work ethic and ambition to be the biggest and the best. To prepare for the Eras tour and three-hour shows night after night, Swift sang the entire setlist aloud while running on a treadmill, daily, and did three months of dance training.

That professionalism, and commitment to putting on a stellar performance, defines the showgirl, Carr says. “You’ll see recordings of performers, and films, but this is the ephemera – the show is really the live encounter.” Likewise, Swift’s Eras Tour film was pitched as a way to relive the experience, not as as replacement; many fans attended more than once.

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But what does a real showgirl think of Swift’s self-coronation? “She absolutely looks like a showgirl,” says Lou Anne Chessik. Over her 12-year career, Chessik performed in Jubilee! – the longest-running revue in Las Vegas and the inspiration for this year’s Pamela Anderson drama The Last Showgirl – as well as other extravaganzas in Vegas, Reno and Tokyo.

“I loved being a showgirl, wearing all the amazing costumes, our camaraderie backstage,” says Chessik. But it was demanding work. Chessik worked six-month contracts, performing six to seven nights a week and two shows a night (three on Saturdays). She was even limited in how much time she could spend outdoors: “We could not have tan lines … but it probably saved my skin,” she says.

In 2007 Chessik founded the Showgirl Legacy Foundation to preserve those performers’ historic significance. She was delighted to see Swift posing in one of the original ensembles from Jubilee!, designed by Bob Mackie for the show’s “Jewel finale”. The bra, undergarments and armbands are described as French wirework, with set stones and nude fabric backing for a “nude illusion”. (Carpenter has also worn Mackie’s vintage designs.)

“I love that Swift appreciates the art of costuming from our era,” says Chessik. She also looks the part in the album artwork, between her 5ft 10in height and her “perfect” red lipstick, just like that worn by Chessik and her colleagues. But, she adds, “our hair was always pinned up and pulled back … and we never sat in our costumes.”

More than her stature or styling, Swift embodies the showgirl essence, Chessik says: “She is professional, charismatic, talented. ” She points to Swift’s comic timing in the Shake It Off video (“it reminds me of I Love Lucy”), the storytelling to her shows, and the hard work that goes into them.

She has “absolutely” earned the right to call herself a showgirl, Chessik concludes, along with Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and other contemporary entertainers. “They are the top performers of their time and genre – like we were.”

Certainly the “big showgirl spectacle”, at least, now belongs to stadium pop, Carr agrees. Showgirls still exist, often in coalition with drag, cabaret and burlesque performers, but performance opportunities and venues tend to be small-scale, independently run and as such vulnerable to closure. “The contemporary showgirl has a bit of precarity to her,” she says.

The same cannot be said of Swift, who is on her way to her second billion. If anything, Carr suggests, her wealth complicates her claim to the showgirl, who is typically self-made and anti-elitist. “To become a showgirl is not something that you’re born into – you become it, you opt into it.”

With so many present-day performers “labouring in the margins” and showgirl history at risk of being lost, Swift might consider putting resources towards protecting the tradition, Carr suggests. Without that extra step, she risks coming across as simply “showing off”.

After all, most showgirls performed alongside dozens of others. Former chorus girls have told Carr of feeling empowered by “having many sisters”. Chessik recalls performing in casts of more than 100; even when there were leads, “not many people knew them by name”.

As “the lone showgirl”, Swift has skipped solidarity and gone straight to commanding the stage solo. “She is crowning herself, coronating herself, because she’s got everything that this era wants,” Carr says.

But, she adds, anyone can learn how to embrace their power and embody the showgirl’s spirit. Indeed, relative to the goddesses and queens to which female pop stars are often compared, she is closer to earth and even accessible. “It does take talent, panache, charisma, refining your craft, all of those things … but you don’t need to be a billionaire.”