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Photo: Jechtography
Photo: Jechtography

SocietyJuly 21, 2025

What a strip club run by strippers looks like

Guest writer
Photo: Jechtography
Photo: Jechtography

At this strip club the dancers kept all their tips, there were no unfair overheads or fines and definitely no exploitative management.

The lights are dim, the bar glows, and everywhere there are beautiful dancers in lingerie. They’re unnaturally tall in their eight-inch heels, glamorous with their criss-cross ribboned legs, perfect make-up and hair. I, in my ordinary clothing, feel short and human next to them. That’s part of the fantasy though – they’re professionals, they’re performing, and I’m there to spectate. 

It’s the Fired Up Stilettos (FUS) strip club takeover event and this is my Saturday night. 

FUS is a collective movement of strippers fighting for labour rights and legal protection. It was formed in 2023 when 19 strippers were fired via Facebook post from Calendar Girls for attempting to collectively bargain for fair pay and contractual rights. Strippers and sex workers have long worked under subpar employment conditions – despite strippers generally only working for one club, they are classified as independent contractors and therefore don’t have employee rights and protections. 

Strip clubs usually take huge cuts from their dancers’ tips and impose unfair and illegal fines on them. It’s also well known that sex workers face societal stigma and discrimination. Some sex workers struggle to find alternative employment if people know that they’ve done sex work. Agencies and forums have often failed to protect sex workers, even when sex workers have asked for help. As a result, sex workers have formed their own groups in order to help themselves.

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Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

FUS received media attention in 2024 when it called on parliament to grant sex workers the same labour rights as other independent contractors. In 2025, they continue to support collectivist action within workplace, creating and sharing educational resources so sex workers can know their rights, and campaigning for legislative change. Their takeover events dually serve as fundraisers to keep the movement running and demonstrations of what strip clubs run by strippers could look like. FUS strip clubs could be the industry standard – dancers keep all their tips, there are no unfair overheads or fines, and there’s definitely no exploitative management.

When I arrive at the secret location (only revealed on Saturday morning) I feel like I’ve stepped back in time. There are men with suspenders and grey felt caps, women in flapper dresses with feathers in their hair. A performer in a beaded cape sings in a smooth alto while playing cello. The bar serves Negronis, French 75 cocktails and sparkling wine. I order my first drink and move into the main space, where a pole has been set up in one corner, and dancer after dancer performs to songs of their choice. After they dance, they walk around the floor.

Photos: Jechtography

“Are you tipping tonight?” a dancer asks me.

I tuck $5 of strip club money into the waistband of her thong, determined to be a good strip club patron.

There’s something hypnotising about pole dancing. It’s one of the reasons I watch dancers on Instagram reels, admiring the grace of making something difficult look effortless. 

I started pole dancing in February, and it’s made me appreciate good pole dancers so much more. Pole dancing is hard. I often leave classes with new bruises on my feet or calves. There’s a unique kind of pain that comes from trying to hold up your whole body weight by grasping a metal pole with your inner thighs. Sometimes, when learning a new move, I feel as cumbersome as a spinning chicken on a stick.

These dancers are polished. They demonstrate clear control over their bodies. It’s the way they climb the pole and shift from position to position, the dramatic thwack of their heels against the floor. I watch, entranced, while their bodies contort and extend, stretch and spin. They rotate slowly then fast, limbs arranged in graceful formations. The performances feel like a celebration, with both performers and patrons cheering each time someone does something impressive.

I run into several people I know. Zouk dance friends. A guy I did English literature at university with. There are maybe 30-50 people at the event across the night, with a slightly different demographic to that of a commercial strip club. There are probably more women among the patrons. The crowd is also younger, as lots of dancers, friends and partners have come along to support.

The real difference though is that everyone is there because they support sex worker rights, and this inherently means that they respect sex workers. Almost every stripper has a story of sexual harassment or abuse. The FUS takeover event is partially so fun because dancers feel safe to do their jobs.

“Does this feel different to a normal strip club?” I ask one patron, who tells me he drove from Palmerston North to be here.

“Definitely,” he says. “There’s no seedy atmosphere.”

In the dressing room, office tables have been joined together and are covered in a chaotic mess of bags, takeaway containers, make-up and clothes. Dancers fix their make up, relax on the couch, take breaks from working. I ask if I can take some photos, and a few of the dancers say yes. I get one great shot of them, backs to me on the couch. I airdrop the photos and by the end of the night, it’s already been posted on three different accounts. You have to admire the hustle.

After all, it’s not just the pole dancing they have to do. Everything they do out on the floor is a performance, from the walking around and tip collecting to the conversations and private dance. It’s work, and some of the dancers do this physically and emotionally difficult work for several nights a week. A lot of the FUS dancers now work independently, unwilling to once again be subjected to the working conditions of strip clubs. Some of the dancers have OnlyFans. Some of them have “ordinary” jobs in completely different industries. It doesn’t matter. Sex workers and strippers deserve employment protection just like everyone else. As long as there is a market for sex, there will be people who do sex work: those people should be able to work safely.

In a lot of ways, the evening feels just like being at a particularly elaborate party. The night passes quickly in the sparkly blur of conversations, glasses of French 75, the spinning pole. At one stage, I slip outside for a smoke break with three of the dancers and the MC. We shelter from the wind in front of a garage. As we move to leave, the garage door cracks open with a violent screech and we all jump.

I leave around midnight, when the event ends. I have a heavy head, sore feet from dancing, and several promises to keep in touch. 

As I drift off to sleep, I keep seeing the dancers on the pole. In my head they’re still going round and round.

Keep going!
Julie Gunn at Sustainability Trust’s curtain bank in Wellington. (Photo: Emlou Lattimore).
Julie Gunn at Sustainability Trust’s curtain bank in Wellington. (Photo: Emlou Lattimore).

SocietyJuly 21, 2025

Curtain banks are in hot demand

Staff writer
Julie Gunn at Sustainability Trust’s curtain bank in Wellington. (Photo: Emlou Lattimore).
Julie Gunn at Sustainability Trust’s curtain bank in Wellington. (Photo: Emlou Lattimore).

Around the country, a network of curtain banks make and provide curtains that keep homes warm and electricity bills down. Demand is ever-growing, and they’re sewing frantically to keep up.

If you walk through Habitat for Humanity’s Ōtara superstore, down the external and currently chilly alleyway full of ceramic sinks, toilets and baths, there’s another reclaimed industrial building. On its bright blue painted side, there’s a white sign reading “CURTAIN BANK” over a set of glass doors. Inside, two industrial sewing machines are humming, their operators carefully running pieces of fabric and curtain tape through straight as an arrow. 

The irons are hot. There’s three big pattern-cutting tables and along the walls, shelves with bundles of curtains labelled with order numbers or dimensions. This is Habitat’s curtain bank, where last year the team sent out more curtains than ever before – 11,215 curtains for 732 families. It’s not like a food bank where people are only given what’s already there – almost every curtain is customised.

woman sitting at an industrial sewing machine, guiding a curtain through.
Linda, a sewist at Habitat for Humanity’s curtain bank in Ōtara, customising a preloved curtain. (Photo: Gabi Lardies)

This bank is just one of a network of 22 curtain banks scattered from Auckland all the way down to Invercargill. Most of the curtain banks don’t stand alone – they’re part of the Healthy Homes Initiative, with Health New Zealand saying curtains are the highest identified need – ahead of heaters, bedding, mould cleaning kits, blankets, window squeegees and small repairs. The Healthy Homes Initiative, which aims to help more families live in warm, dry homes, has been successful and cost-effective in reducing child hospitalisations, improving school attendance, reducing energy hardship and a raft of other health and social benefits. 

And yet, there’s not a mention of curtains in the Healthy Homes Standards. That means that landlords are not obliged to provide them, and so many don’t, especially at the lower end of the rental market. Many houses seen by Healthy Homes teams don’t have any curtains at all, or they might be thin or mouldy. Sometimes people have venetian blinds or roller blinds that don’t provide a thermal barrier. Often, people don’t realise how much of a difference curtains can make. 

four people smiling standing in front of a pattern cutting table with budnles of curtains. behind them are shevles full of curtains
Steve Munro (volunteer), Julie Gunn (manager), Pam Green (volunteer) and Juliet Daniel (head machinist) at the Sustainability Trust curtain bank in Wellington. (Photo: Emlou Lattimore).

In Wellington, orders are closed at the city’s only curtain bank, run by Sustainability Trust. The team of two full-time staff and 27 volunteers is still working on curtain orders from last year, and it’s not just sewing. Here, as well as providing curtains, the team aims to divert as much waste as possible from landfill. All the curtains begin with a donation, usually of a pre-loved curtain and occasionally of fabric. Donations need to be unpacked and checked for mold which is either cut, pulled or unpicked away. The rest is measured, laundered and filed in one of two little rooms that serve as the curtain library. Curtain tracks and their brackets are donated too. In another room they’re cleaned and refurbished. There’s also gliders, hooks and tape to sort and store. “I keep on taking up more space,” says Julie Gunn, the curtain bank manager. “There’s just a lot happening. We are getting lots of curtain donations coming in, which is good, but we need to keep up.”

Then comes actually filling orders. Measurements of the windows of a household come through home visits by the trust’s Heathy Homes team or other referral pathways. Best practice guidelines are followed so that the curtains are as effective as possible. The length must be “to the floor and a little bit more,” says Gunn, and the width must allow for plenty of folds and for the curtain to extend past the window frame, “so there’s less chance for that warm air to sneak in behind the curtain”. It’s also important that the curtains are lined to create an insulating layer of air. Gunn compares it to the puff in a puffer jacket. Ideally, the fabric is a tightly woven natural fibre, heavy and thick. Thermal backed curtains aren’t great as the backing deteriorates and can’t easily be washed. 

“There’s so much love and care that goes into each step of the process,” says Gunn. But the curtain bank needs more than that to run. At the end of the year, its major sponsorship is coming to an end. Even that sponsorship doesn’t cover costs – the shortfall is made up for by the Sustainability Trust. “We apply to every funding opportunity that comes along,” says Gunn. “We have noticed that there is more and more demand on the charitable and philanthropic funding that is available. That’s tough, because everyone applying to those funding opportunities is doing really good and really important work.”

Up in Auckland, the Habitat curtain bank services households across the city and in Northland. They can keep their wait times down – about two months in summer and six in winter – because compared to other curtain banks they are well-resourced and staffed. They purchase premade curtains and new curtain fabric, lining, tape and tracks. Still, even the premade curtains are almost always customised in some way to properly fit the window they are heading to. “These are top-end custom curtains,” says Jane, an experienced sewist there. She’s pressing a crisp seam on a chocolate brown curtain with flocked flowers. “For the most part people are really appreciative,” she says. 

woman at a pattern cutting table in a sewing room wearing an apron
Jane, a sewist at Habitat for Humanity’s curtain bank in Ōtara, customising a preloved curtain. (Photo: Gabi Lardies)

A national network of curtain banks tries to meet yearly. A couple of years ago, Curtain Call, a group that advocates adding curtains to the Healthy Homes Standards, sprung from the network. Curtain Call argues that leaving curtains out leaves a gap in the legislation, and in 2023 publicly campaigned, met with politicians and petitioned the government. With the coalition government, they changed their tack. Leana Hunt, operations manager in Habitat’s northern region, says “it’s not their [the government’s] priority right now”. Curtain Call is continuing to raise awareness among communities, without directly petitioning politicians. 

For as long as curtains aren’t in the standards, curtain banks will continue to face more demand than they can keep up with, but not without joy. “It is sad that there is so much need out there,” says Gunn from Wellington, “but it is a wonderful thing to be involved with.” When families open up their boxes of curtains, “I want all of that love to spill out onto them, because we love what we do.”

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Gabi Lardies
— Staff writer

Society