Close readers of Vogue.com know that Dita Von Teese, the Queen of Burlesque, has recently been diversifying her talents. Last year she released a beauty book, Your Beauty Mark: The Ultimate Guide to Eccentric Glamour, and also found time to design a lingerie collection. But after performing a sold-out, two-week run at Paris’s famed Crazy Horse theater, Von Teese is returning to her roots with a world-touring new burlesque show, Strip Strip Hooray! Before a series of West Coast shows began this week, we caught up with the star by phone to talk costume mishaps, nude selfies, and burlesque feminism.
You have been a muse to several major fashion designers, including Jean Paul Gaultier and Zac Posen. Will they be designing some of the costumes that you’ll be wearing onstage for Strip Strip Hooray!?
Well, Catherine D’Lish has been making a lot of the rhinestone-heavy costumes of the show. I have these spectacles of Swarovski that have hundreds of thousands of rhinestones on them. They’re mind-boggling in terms of showgirl costumes, so I’m wearing a lot of those things because they’re showstoppers.
Christian Louboutin made all of my shoes custom. So we have this pair of cowboy boots that he made for me that have big ol’ Swarovski spurs that spin. He loves making showgirl shoes. He just made a whole fleet of showgirl shoes for my Crazy Horse Paris shows. So of course I’m going to be wearing those on this tour as well. And I just had a dress made from Ralph & Russo. They made a beautiful Swarovski-beaded gown that’s amazing. Zuhair Murad also made a beautiful dress that I’m not sure yet if I’m going to wear in this show; I’m trying to find a place to fit it in.
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Do these heavily embellished dresses ever make it difficult for you to perform a striptease onstage?
They’re hard to maneuver in, sure, but the look of it is astonishing. In fact, the dress that I wear for my finale is an Asian-inspired gown covered in big Swarovski [crystals] with a 4-foot train with long sleeves. We used one of those special-effect Swarovski stones, which looks like an oil slick. It has all these colors in it, and it looks electric onstage. People actually ask me if the dress is electrified or plugged in. I always say that I really enjoy the opulence of costumes more than I enjoy learning choreography. I would rather have been a Ziegfeld girl walking down the stairs in all the feathers and rhinestones than having to tap dance all over the place.
Have you ever had a costume malfunction?
Oh, yes. There was one costume that I did for the Crazy Horse a few years ago. Mr. Pearl, who makes all the corsetry for Christian Lacroix and Jean Paul Gaultier, made this corset for me, where the only way out was by unlacing from the top of the shoulders all the way down the butt into the crotch. It’s so beautiful, I thought nobody has ever done a striptease out of a corset like that. I set my mind to become the Houdini of burlesque. So I had a few mishaps with that, especially at the beginning. I had a giant pair of scissors that were covered in Swarovski jewels that I would have the stage assistant bring out just in case I got stuck.
Did you ever have to take the scissors to it?
Yeah, twice, but that’s two times out of 75 shows. And people love when they see the mistakes. Also, everyone loves watching someone getting cut out of a corset—it’s so dramatic.
You’ve often been credited for re-popularizing burlesque. What do you think about the current state of burlesque?
I think it’s been amazing to watch the evolution of it. When I started performing burlesque in the early ’90s, my audience was very distinctive: It was fetishists, and a lot of men—even some men who were much older who remembered burlesque, in fact. It was amazing to watch its evolution from this very niche thing to this modern feminist movement. At my shows, it’s like 80 percent women now. The men that are there are the partners of the women, or they’re gays. I have never found a group of straight guys that are there together to ogle girls anymore.
Where have all the fetishists gone?
I think the fetishists are still there. But I think I moved on in a lot of ways. I was the poster girl, the modern answer to Bettie Page. I was on the cover of all the fetish magazines and I was the only one doing retro-style pinups. I moved on, and now there are so many girls who are fetish pinup models. It’s a huge thing. They’re doing what I was doing in the early ’90s, and I’m kind of doing what I love, which is burlesque shows and designing lingerie and writing my beauty book.
Did you see the recent Instagram post by Emily Ratajkowski and Kim Kardashian West in which they said they would not be ashamed of their naked bodies? Do you think posting nude selfies is feminist?
I feel two ways about it. The thing that I always say about what I do for a living, which could be perceived as empowering or degrading, is that everyone’s got a right to their opinion. It’s really how you view it. It’s not about what that person is doing; it’s about how people translate it. One person can go see a burlesque show and feel inspired and empowered and that they want to do the same. Just like someone could look at those photos and say, “I’m going to do that, too, and I’m not going to be ashamed of my body.” Or someone can watch a burlesque show and say, “I felt uncomfortable” or “I didn’t understand it.” It’s not for anyone to decide except for the person who’s doing it. And if you don’t like it, Don’t look at it. Don’t follow Kim Kardashian if you don’t want to look at her nude selfies! And don’t come to a burlesque show if you don’t want to see girls stripteasing.
Why do women watch burlesque?
There’s a lot of humor involved. There’s a lot of fantasy and spectacle and glamour. For me, one of the reasons I started making burlesque shows and posing for pinups was because I felt like I didn’t have many modern models of sensuality that I could relate to, because I don’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model covered in sand running down the beach. I can’t relate to that beauty.
Burlesque is the idea of creation: the red lipstick, the red nails, the high heels, black stockings, and garter belts, which accentuate and hide things maybe we don’t like about ourselves. Corsetry, which enhances the waist. It’s these symbols of transformation that we can all relate to, and we can all create if we want to. There’s never anything that is too overtly sexual onstage, but it’s still erotic. The combination of all these things is what makes it magical.
Do a lot of people come to you for advice on how to feel sexier?
They do, and I really just explain where I’m coming from. You know, I’m a blonde girl from a farming town in Michigan. I can be very ordinary. I’ve been there before. The reason I started doing all of this, dressing myself in retro-style glamour, was because I felt like finally I had something in common with a sex symbol. My idols are women from the past, like Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Rita Hayworth. I felt like I could capture the spirit of that. A lot of people ask me about confidence, and I tell them. This is how I found my confidence.
When I do photo shoots and people want to strip me of my red lipstick, and they want my hair to be straight, and they want me to be normal, I feel really vulnerable. I don’t like how that feels. So just notice the things that make you feel good and do those things. And notice the things that don’t make you feel good, and don’t do those things. Simple.
You recently said your show at Paris’s Crazy Horse was the first time you were “truly buck naked” onstage, and that’s something you never do. Why do it now?
You know, I love classic 1940s and ’50s style. I love corsets, pasties, and G-strings and feathers and rhinestones. But my friend Ali Mahdavi, who’s a great director and photographer, had this fantasy of doing a technological striptease, so we used all light. It was the first time that technology had ever been used that way, but it was very dependent on being totally naked so the light could create the costumes on my body. It was really something special. But it was an interesting feeling for me to be standing there onstage totally nude, bathed in light. It was really interesting, all the feelings that it brought up for me.
What was going through your mind?
I had to really overcome my vulnerability. It scared me straight! I had to make sure I was in the right spot at the right time, because if I’m not, then people could see everything. But it was something that I had to overcome. I’m usually in control of the striptease, and I think that having the light in control and having to follow the light—that wasn’t so easy.
Are you going to incorporate this new technology into your show?
No, it’s very specific. It has to be in a very small place to work, like the Crazy Horse. Also, it’s extremely expensive technology. Personally, I’d rather spend all my money on rhinestones and feathers and a mechanical bull I can ride.
How did you come up with the name Dita Von Teese?
I was just Dita for many years. I had seen a movie with an actress named Dita Parlo, and I thought, God, that’s such a cool name. I wanted to be known with just a simple first name—Cher, Madonna. Then when I first posed for Playboy, in 1993 or 1994, they told me I had to pick a last name. So I opened up the phone book at the bikini club [I worked in at the time]. I was with a friend and I was like, “Let’s look under a Von something.” It sounds really exotic and glamorous. So I found the name Von Treese and I called Playboy and said, “I’m going to be Dita Von Treese.” I remember so well going to the newsstand and picking up the magazine, and it said Dita Von Teese. I called them and they said, “Oh, we’ll fix it. We’ll fix it.” The next month, same thing: Dita Von Teese. I left it because I didn’t really care. I didn’t know I was going to go on to trademark it all over the world! I had a laugh once when somebody once said, “Oh, her name is so fabricated.” And I’m like, “It’s a typo!”