"I'm really good at one thing, and I know what that is. I'm really good at creating the illusion"
She’s the sex symbol of the moment and she’s married to rock’s enfant terrible, Marilyn Manson, but what is glamour girl Dita Von Teese really all about? The poster girl of the Burlesque revival talks to Vicky Allan about her new book on the history of the showgirl, feminism and how the right kind of garter belt could change your life
Before meetingDita Von Teese, I had developed a cosy imaginary picture of the burlesque stripper and her husband, antichrist superstar, Marilyn Manson, secluded inside the walls of their LA mansion, baking cupcakes and calling each other by their real, Middle America names, Brian and Heather. Another muffin, Heather darling? Why thank you, Brian honey, can you just check that the seam on my stocking is straight?
It was the cupcakes that did it for me. There was a story circulating on the internet about how Manson had baked cupcakes for his wife on Valentine’s Day. It seemed to open up a whole world of potential domesticity behind the dark facade of Von Teese fetish and Manson rock hate. But, sinking into a sofa in a Soho hotel, Von Teese tells me this is not the case, that these stories are a fabricated, “total press lies”. Manson does not bake. “He would never bake cupcakes in a million years.” Conceivably she might bake cupcakes herself, though none were baked for Valentine’s Day. “He doesn’t cook,” she says, “he doesn’t clean. He does not do those things. He is the epitome of a rock star.”
The talk around Dita Von Teese is that she is in some ways the sex symbol of the moment, and not just because last year, at a castle in Ireland, in purple taffeta Vivienne Westwood, she married rock’s enfant terrible in a wedding that was exclusively photographed for Vogue. Rather, it’s that with her Martini glass showgirl routine and retro fan dances, she is the poster-girl of a Burlesque revival which began in America in 1994 and now, a decade later, has brought feathers and rhinestone solidly mainstream: so much so that at the Edinburgh Festival last year, the Famous Spiegeltent seemed to jostle with magician strippers, male belly-dancers and tantalising acrobats.
Teese is at the head of all this tease, the scene’s most famous artiste and one of its old-timers. She was there, after all, in the strip joints of America in the early Nineties, doing her Martini glass routine in biker bars where punters were more used to tattoos than vintage lingerie. For years she hauled her giant glass out on to the stage herself, did her own deals, cleaned up afterwards and braved the perplexed audiences who failed to be transfixed as she was by the retro detail on her costumes. She might have looked glamorous, but back then her life wasn’t all glamour. Now, pretty much, it is. Now she gets picked up in a Rolls Royce, transported in first-class flights and gets to stay in “fabulous hotels” where Moschino clothes and shoes are delivered to her room. She has two vintage cars: a 1939 Chrysler and a Jaguar S-type. She has appeared in a couple of films, including The Death Of Salvador Dali for which she won a Beverly Hills Film Festival award for Best Actress. With her new book, Burlesque And The Art Of The Teese/Fetish And The Art of Teese, she combines a history of the showgirl and fetish with a few lessons in the art of glamour. It is, it seems, a popular subject. On her recent visit to Britain, not only did she appear on Jonathan Ross, but also turned out for a book-signing on Oxford Street so packed they had to turn fans away.
The back heel of von Teese’s stocking is reinforced into a darkened semi-triangular shadow. She shoots her calf out backwards and skims the line of the seam with her finger as she starts to describe the detail on an authentic Forties haute couture stocking. “If you ask somebody who is a real stocking fetishist,” she says, “they will know about all this. It’s not just any stocking. They’re handmade, sewn, it’s not a fake seam, and they have a reinforced toe and heel.” It’s hard not to feel under-groomed in her presence. Her appearance is immaculate, from the raven-black dyed hair to the dark red fake fingernails and the stockings that complete the look and suggest further layers of vintage fetish. Even the most dedicated adherent of tights, she reassures me can be persuaded to fall for the stocking. Apart from anything else they are an anti-waste measure: each time you get a ladder you can throw away one leg rather than two. “I’d say to people who are devoted to their tights,” she says, “if you wear the right kind of garter belt, one that’s really well made, and well-made stockings, it will change your life.” I tell her I might give it a try. “It’s worth a shot,” she says.
Von Teese likes to talk about stockings. One of her earliest formative stories is centred around them. Back in the time she was living in Orange County, then a teenager called Heather Sweet, she was given by her mother a plastic egg containing a pair of dull, flesh-coloured tights. Heather Sweet was crushed. This was not what she had imagined when she had looked in her father’s Playboy magazines or seen the hints of lingerie on her favourite old films. Worse still was the white trainer bra that followed. At the time she was working in a Pizza restaurant and nipped off to the lingerie store next door and bought some underwear more in line with her expectations. Sweet’s mother was a glamorous lady herself, a manicurist, and in fact had a garter belt hidden away in her own drawer, but it wasn’t from her mother or her two sisters that she learned style. It was from the movies of the Thirties and Forties, her icons, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, Betty Grable. “I was always,” she recalls, “arguing with my mother and asking why I couldn’t wear my fancy dresses that were made for special occasions every day. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t.”
Since then Von Teese has been passionate about glamour and grooming. At school, she and her best friend stood out in their Fifties dresses and retro chic. Sweatpants have always been anathema. And even now, if she is just going out to the drugstore, she will slip on a Fifties skirt and cardigan and tie her hair up in a chignon. “For me, I always think it’s very interesting the transformation you can make with hair and make-up. What’s so great is with all these things you can be whoever you want to be. If it were 100 years ago, everyone took the time to get dressed. It was considered good manners to put yourself together well.”
Curiously, in person, von Teese is no big tease. She seems, rather, a little more Heather Sweet, softly spoken and impassive as she gently responds to questions. There is an almost disconcerting straightness about her, as if beneath the raven black hair dye, the foundation, the suspender belts and the false nails, she really is still the blonde, freckly small-town girl of her youth. But then, even her burlesque act doesn’t seem that risqué. In these days of lap-dancing and increasingly hardcore p*rn, the old-fashioned striptease and fan dance seem more squeaky-clean cute and kitsch than seedy. For her, it is about a “wink and a smile”. “There’s a little bit of an innocence and that’s deliberate. It’s a bit humorous and funny and sweet.”
Women like her.
Of the fans registered at her website, 70% are female and only 30% male. Perhaps this is because for all her trim, swimming-pool toned body (she laps the pool for an hour every night) and classic proportions, she doesn’t seem to have been blessed with a conventional all-American style of beauty.
Von Teese’s allure and glamour are almost entirely based around artifice. She has a hard-lined, thin-lipped face that if you look past the layers of make-up doesn’t really seem all that devastatingly sexy. Yet, in her Moschino heels and black pencil skirt, she is the essence of femme fatale. “Women,” she says, “are happy to see a different kind of sex symbol. They’re happy to see you don’t just have to look like Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson and you don’t just have to be blonde and tanned and wear a mini-skirt to be sexy. It’s easy for a girl of any shape or size to capture the spirit of glamour. Glamour is something you create. It’s artifice. It’s about using all the tools you have available to you. Glamour is being enchanting to people.”
In many ways what Von Teese represents is the triumph of making the most of what you’ve got. As a child she had wanted to be a ballerina, and learned to dance from the age of five, but knew she was never really quite good enough. Yet now she is more famous as a burlesque dancer than she might ever have been in ballet. “I’m okay at this, I’m okay at that,” she says. “But I’m really good at one thing, and I know what that is. I’m really good at creating the illusion. It’s true, I’m not the best dancer in the world. There are girls who can dance circles round me, but I wanted it more than anyone else. I wanted to be successful.”
She'll show you how couture and rock & roll collide at NY Fashion Week.
-> rollingstone.com
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