TIL it’s the right of women of all ages to go topless wherever men can in the states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma, including all their cities.
See how Indiana is red there? I had friends in college in Indiana back in the 90s who stripped to help pay for their schooling and they had to put round band-aids over their nipples. They could bare their breasts, inside a building, but not their nipples.
Blue laws are hell to work around as a performer. Thankfully NYC is pretty lax.
That said, the silver lining is that nipple pasties are an absolute central part of burlesque now and you can find everything from cheap disposables to custom made works of art
To be honest nipple pasties are HELLA sexy. Just makes it even better when they get taken off later on. But who knows, maybe the reason I think so is because of burlesque popularizing them.