About Chippendales

Chippendales is a touring company best known for erotic male dancing.

After operating a Mobil gas station and a failed backgammon club, Indian immigrant and entrepreneur Somen "Steve" Banerjee bought a failed Los Angeles club named "Destiny II" and turned it into a nightclub that featured female mud wrestling and a "Female Exotic Dancing Night." It was the first of its kind in the United States.

In the mid '80s', Banerjee established a relationship with choreographer/director Steve Merrit. Banerjee asked Merritt and Donnelly to come up with ideas to turn what was basically a strip club into a venue that would attract upscale women.

Merritt and Donnelly conceived the idea of putting the male strippers into a kind of mini-Broadway show, with dancers, music and themes. Feeling that women would respond to male strippers if they were presented in a "safe" (female-only) environment where the women could let their hair down, and that was about fun and fantasy fulfillment, they created roles for the men to play: doctor, firemen, etc, and surrounded them with dancers and singers.

 To find strippers, they literally recruited the most attractive men they could find from the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica, and Merritt taught these untrained men how to perform. His intention was to do more than just provide the performance of a striptease, but to bring women's fantasies to life.