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Long before social media turned personal branding into a career, Hooters turned waitresses into stars —cultivating their looks and building fan bases that extended far beyond the restaurant.
That luster was one of the reasons Hailey Slobodzian grew up dreaming of following in her mother’s footsteps and becoming a Hooters Girl.
As a child, trying on her mom’s vintage orange-and-white uniform whenever she could, the iconic outfit was a symbol of femininity and empowerment — one that had propelled her mother Amy, now 51, to local fame and prosperity.
Amy was a Hooters girl in the 1990s, serving customers on the floor while also representing the brand on a much larger stage.
“She was a ring girl, and would hold up the cards in her Hooters uniform,” her proud 31-year-old daughter explained to The Post. “She did NASCAR, so she’d go out to the NASCAR track, and she’d pose in her uniform with the cars.”
By 17 and so enamored with the profession, Hailey was working at a Hooters in Fort Myers — and looking every bit the part: long brown hair, immaculate nails, a feminine, shapely figure and socks scrunched to just the right height.
“We would have something called a lineup,” she explained.
“All the girls stand up in a line, and the manager comes and walks in front of you and looks at your outfit and makes sure there are no rips in the pantyhose. Your shoes are clean. Your shirt is not stained,” she recalled.
“When I was working there, you had to turn around and make sure your butt cheeks weren’t hanging out. Then you had to hold your nails out and make sure your nails were the right color.”
To Hailey, this was simply part of the strict standards the brand held firm to for its girls — not unlike the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders or Radio City Rockettes — and was far from exploitative.
But struggling with criticism for being out of touch, un-family friendly and rising costs of food and labor, the company filed for bankruptcy restructuring in 2025.
Since then, multiple locations around the country have shuttered, including the last New York restaurant in June of this year, and just this week its last Jacksonville outpost, which closed after 40 years.
Now, the Hooter Girls are in danger of extinction. But many, like Hailey, are trying to stage a comeback — crediting the restaurant with launching their careers and forging lifelong sisterhoods among the “Girls”.
“I had no idea that there were so many different avenues involved with what was just a server job,” Hailey told The Post.
For Hailey, that involved being able to compete in bikini contests in stores, allowing her to catch the eye of the brand’s corporate execs scouting talent for bigger promotional opportunities.
Hailey, who put herself through nursing school while working at Hooters, said the job offered far more than a paycheck.
Following a path similar to her mother’s, she became a calendar girl, pageant contestant, and two-time fan favorite — one of the brand’s most recognizable faces, plastered on billboards and taxi cabs as fans traveled from out of state to see her.
That was part of the winning Hooters formula, argues Dariush Aghai, co-founder of creative brand agency Study Hall: the women were as much a part of the product as the food.
“The Hooters Girl wasn’t really a mascot. She was the brand,” he told The Post. “Hooters turned its own employees into the most recognizable expression of the company.”
“You knew exactly what Hooters was — most brands would kill for that level of clarity,” Aghai argued.
Hailey’s mother, Amy Slobodzian, recalled how being selected for promotional appearances could make a waitress feel like part of an exclusive club.
“Stepping away from it and being asked to do other things, it makes you feel like you’re one of the important girls of the clique,” the former waitress explained.
The status came with better pay, too.
“Back then, you got paid $25 an hour. That was a lot back then. Nobody was getting paid $25 an hour, but the promo girls were,” she added.
The exposure also brought fans — and a kind of parasocial intimacy that feels strikingly familiar today.
Some admirers took their interest further than others. One customer, Hailey said, started buying her jewelry and telling people they were dating.
“It got to the point I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she recalled. “But it comes with the territory.”
Hailey, now a mother and full-time nurse, laughs at the contrast between her two careers. At Hooters, she once raked in $5,000 in tips in a single night.
“I mean, those days are over. But it is crazy to think about being a nurse and what you make as a nurse versus what you make as a Hooters girl.”
The fans haven’t all forgotten her, either.
“I have people that still contact me to this day,” Hailey said. “Just like, ‘How’s life? How’s the baby?’ I love telling people that I was a Hooters girl… My husband’s a plastic surgeon, and he loves talking about it [too].”
Andrea Hill is another former Hooters Girl — who loved the restaurant chain so much she quit her job in television to rejoin the company to help try and revamp it.
Hill started as a waitress in a Chicago location at 20, working through college while studying broadcast journalism.
“I took the Hooters serving job because you didn’t need experience,” she explained. “They would hire you for your personality and your looks.”
When it came time to apply for sports media internships, she had no qualms about listing Hooters on her résumé. “I wasn’t ashamed,” Hill said.
She landed the internship while continuing to serve at Hooters. But when she later left television to return to Hooters full-time to work in a management position, people questioned the decision.
“People were like, ‘You’re going back to Hooters full time? What are you gonna do with your life?’” she recalled. “It’s hard to understand from the outside.”
Hill went on to train new hires, move into marketing and rise to executive vice president. Only after reaching the corporate side did she fully grasp Hooters’ reach in American culture.
“Hooters had an airline. Hooters had a magazine. Hooters had a casino. Hooters had radio shows,” Hill said. “It was never [just] a wing joint.”
Now, the company is betting that recognizability still has value.
“What’s happening now is incredibly cool because for the first time since the founders sold a trademark, we’re under one umbrella [through licensing deals, collaborations, and the forthcoming “Hooters: The Movie” to bring new attention to the brand],” Hill explained.
“It’s all franchisees working together, and everybody’s been around for a really long time. So when you talk about nostalgia, they have the memories.
“People remain interested because it is Americana,” Hill said. “It is nostalgia.”
And at the center of it all were the women.
Founder Ed Rossi, whom Hill described as a dreamer, quickly recognized that the Hooters Girl was the real draw.
Hill now sees Hooters’ early formula — turning servers into recognizable personalities through uniforms, calendars, pageants and appearances — as an early version of the celebrity-making machinery that would later fuel reality TV such as “Vanderpump Rules.”
“The blueprint certainly looks very familiar to Hooters’ footprint,” she said. “Even if it was subliminal or not intentional, the model has been there since 1983.”
But building that brand meant cultivating a very specific image — one that every Hooters Girl was expected to embody and one that’s been enforced since the early 1980s.
When Danielle Rothweiler joined Hooters as a Penn State junior in the early 2000s, she quickly learned the look was nonnegotiable.
“There’s definitely a look,” Rothweiler told The Post. “And they were very, very clear about that. That’s part of the uniform.”
Hair had to be worn down and loose, tattoos covered and jewelry kept to a minimum — even hair ties were banned from wrists.
Rothweiler, who served wings through her junior and senior years, embraced it all.
The required pantyhose were “better than Spanx,” she recalled, and the iconic tank tops were almost universally flattering.
But looking like a Hooters Girl was only part of the job — acting as one mattered just as much, according to Rothweiler.
The former waitress said servers were encouraged to linger and joke with customers — a level of familiarity that other restaurants might discourage.
“That’s what customers came there for,” she recalled.
Despite the hypersexualized uniforms, Rothweiler said she never felt objectified.
“If a customer ever made anybody feel uncomfortable, they handled it,” she said. “And the regulars that would come were very protective of the girls.”
She still keeps pieces of her old uniform and buys Hooters fry seasoning for her family — which she swears by over ketchup.
“I just can’t part with them because it’s so sentimental.”
When she drives past the shuttered Hooters in Wayne, N.J., where she said the old sign remains outside, she wishes someone would turn the lights back on.
“I really wish that they would make a comeback up here,” Rothweiler said.
Amy and her former Hooters Girls friends still talk about returning for reunion shifts, adding that she does Pilates and is in great shape.
At Hill’s college graduation, the Hooters Girls she worked with were the loudest people in the arena. And years later, at her grandmother’s funeral, Hill recalled two pews filled with those same women.
“That’s Hooters,” Hill said. “No one knows how important that is in your journey when you’re young, to have this sisterhood that’s supporting you, good or bad.”
“I [recently] had a reunion with the girls that I worked with downtown Chicago…we do these different dinners at the restaurants,” she continued. “We have all these different group chats and threads on social media. We support each other’s nonprofits.”
Some of those friendships even became family for the girls.
Hailey said that her three maids of honor at her wedding were all her Hooters friends. “I still talk to them now. It’s the longest friendships I’ve ever had in my life.”
