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 family-friendly, neighborhood atmosphere.

Now, some of the chain’s most vocal defenders are former Hooters Girls themselves, including Hailey, who credit the restaurant with launching careers and forging lifelong sisterhoods — and reject the notion that the experience was exploitative.

According to the 31-year-old, Hooters has always enforced strict standards for its girls, scrutinizing everything from their uniforms to their nails before each shift.

“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.”

The Hooters Girl was a carefully constructed brand identity, down to her hair, makeup, uniform, and figure — not unlike the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders or Radio City Rockettes. Those standards also drew criticism and legal challenges over the years.

But Hooters didn’t keep that image inside its restaurants.

Through calendars, pageants and promotional appearances, it turned its waitresses into marketing machines — and made the job about far more than serving food.

For Hailey, who put herself through nursing school while working at Hooters, the job offered 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.

She was, technically, still serving chicken wings.

But that was the Hooters formula: 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,” Dariush Aghai, co-founder of creative brand agency Study Hall, 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.

For Hailey, though, the larger Hooters machine was invisible when she first started.

“I had no idea that there were so many different avenues involved with what was just a server job,” the former waitress told The Post.

At individual restaurants, waitresses could compete in bikini contests, potentially catching the eye of the brand’s corporate execs scouting talent for bigger promotional opportunities.

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. “They [the other girls] see you leaving with the owners because usually it’s the owners that take you to these events.”

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,” Slobodzian 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 went from being a Hooters Girl to helping shape the brand behind the orange shorts.

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. You think that I’ve been around for a long time, 25 years is nothing.”

That history, Hill suggested, is part of what makes the brand endure.

“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. “That dynamic worked for me because I like to talk a lot, and I like to talk to literally anybody.”

That combination — a fantasy paired with a familiar, approachable personality — turned individual waitresses into an experience customers enjoyed.

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.”

More than two decades later, the job still fascinates people.

“People are always fascinated, like, ‘Oh my gosh, what was that like working there?’” she said.

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. “I miss having a place to go like that.”

Amy and her former Hooters Girls friends still talk about returning for reunion shifts, adding that she does Pilates and is in great shape.

“Wouldn’t it be so fun if they had a Veterans Day, where we all come back, and we all bartend?” she said, confident that she and a lot of her girlfriends could still “jump into a Hooters uniform and rock it.”

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.”