Exclusive | Meet the Hooters Girls who want to bring back the chains glory days: I just cant part with them

Hailey Slobodzian grew up dreaming of becoming a Hooters Girl, trying on her mother’s vintage orange-and-white uniform whenever she could.Her mother, now 51, 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, where she would go into the wrestling ring and would hold up the cards, but she’d be 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, the Florida native was following in her mother’s footsteps, 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.Hooters has built its identity around that carefully cultivated image, helping create the iconic fantasy that lives on today.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 image, however, has arguably outlasted the restaurants themselves.As Hooters looks to the future amid restaurant closures across the country — including its last Jacksonville outpost, which shuttered this week after 40 years, another longtime fixture lost amid its bankruptcy restructuring — its most recognizable asset may be the one thing that has never gone out of style: the Hooters Girl. Neil Kiefer, CEO of Florida-based Hooters Inc., and the other founders are determined to rebuild, pushing back on the notion that the closures signal a fading brand.

They’re betting that the women in those signature orange shorts and tank tops can help bring it back.The challenge, though, is preserving the signature sex appeal of the Hooters Girl that helped define its identity while adapting to changing cultural expectations and emphasizing a fam...