SunTrip

LAS VEGAS - Sporting updated hairdos and red carpet-worthy fashion, a crop of 52 newly made-over aspiring beauty queens compete for the top tiara in Saturday's Miss America Pageant.

The long-struggling pageant has promised a new look for this year's beauty battle set to air at 8 p.m. EST on TLC. "Entertainment Tonight" reporter Mark Steines will emcee the contest.

Among the contestants: Miss Utah Jill Stevens, an Army medic who served in Afghanistan; Miss Michigan Kirsten Haglund, granddaughter of Miss Michigan 1944; and Miss Iowa Diana Reed, a fire juggling baton twirler and entrepreneur.

The crowning at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip will cap a four-week reality series that followed the contestants as they were pushed to shed the dated look of Miss Americas past and adopt a hipper style.

The show was the 87-year-old pageant's latest in a series of attempts to find an audience with a younger demographic after more than a decade of declining ratings.

The fading institution has struggled to find a television home since being dropped from network television in 2004. It spent a two-year stint on Country Music Television before being picked up last summer by TLC, a cable channel reaching 93 million homes in the U.S.

TLC added the pageant to its reality-TV stable, and announced plans to reinvent the look of the show and find an "It girl" ready for modern celebrity.

The crowning of a Miss America began when Warren Harding was president as a publicity stunt to persuade tourists on Atlantic City's Boardwalk to stick around after Labor Day. The quaint bathing revue blossomed in the age of television into an American pop culture staple.

But it has not fared well in the age of reality television, despite a series of recent experiments that have added quiz shows, viewer voting and "new" style.

It moved to the Las Vegas Strip in 2006 and promised a back-to-basics formula that would revel in its old-school charm. The show continued to lose viewers. It fell to an all-time low of 2.4 million viewers in 2007 and was dropped by CMT.

This year's reality TV infusion, "Miss America: Reality Check," was notable for taking a decidedly irreverent tone with the long-revered pageant. Style experts took shots at the earnest contestants' hair, makeup, talent and stiff parade wave.

Saturday's crowning has been billed as the big reveal. Contestants will wear blue jeans and show off their new confident attitude on the catwalks, producers say. One contestant will make it to the final 16 as "America's Choice," based on voting via text messages from the reality show's viewers.

The winner will take home a $50,000 scholarship and embark on a year of promoting the pageant, her platform issue and the Children's Miracle Network, a pageant partner.

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On the Net: Miss America Pageant: http://www.missamerica.org/

TLC: http://tlc.discovery.com/