The Life of a Showgirl ✨ Some showgirls sparkle. Phil Herold blinds you 🫣

This isn’t voyeurism; it’s collaboration. Phil Herold is fully aware and actively subverting the trope.

Phil forces you to reconcile the disconnect between the perfect able-bodied fantasy we tend to expect and a real, lived, physical truth that isn’t usually given the spotlight. It’s totally intentional. He forces you to reframe the discomfort into admiration for the audacity and perhaps even the solid wit behind it.

“Herold destabilizes the mythology of glamour by inserting his disabled body into a visual language that has historically erased it. The result is both parody and provocation — a reminder that beauty’s exclusions are never accidental.” - Phil Tarley, curator Artweek

The glamour posters for The Life of a Showgirl promise sequins, champagne, and a perfectly airbrushed fantasy. This is not that poster. This is Phil Herold — disabled, paraplegic, and entirely in on the joke — reclaiming space in a genre that almost never acknowledges bodies like his.

He posed for me deliberately, with the same deadpan allure those glossy campaigns sell, knowing full well how hard the contrast would land.

The jolt you feel when you first see it? That’s the point. It’s the price of confronting how narrow the idea of beauty has been allowed to stay.

A send-up of showbiz perfection and a 🖕 to the industry’s unwritten rules about who gets to be glamorous. 

Phil doesn’t want to “fit in” to their vision (he can’t); he wants to own it, blast it, even giggle at it then leave the glitter on the floor when he’s done. That’s not just parody. That’s showmanship 👏 

They sold you the fantasy. Phil Herold sold it back — with interest.

BTW, in case you’re wondering, Phil has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) — a genetic condition that slowly weakened his muscles but never managed to touch his sense of irony. Translation: the guy can’t walk, but he can still dismantle an entire mythology of glamour with a single pose. That’s not tragedy. That’s timing 🤩