Dita Von Teese is perhaps the world's classiest—and most successful—stripper. The self-styled "Queen Of Burlesque" has tailored a career from feathers and pearls, leading the "burlesque revival" of the past few years and becoming the thinking person's sexual icon along the way. A lifetime aficionado of classic films and pin-up girls, Von Teese is featured in Indie Sex, a four-part miniseries examining the history of sex in cinema, airing this week on IFC. The A.V. Club recently spoke to Von Teese about celebrity skin, old-school glamour, and, of course, sex.
The A.V. Club: One of the main points of the Indie Sex series is that explicit sex is nothing new, in film or real life. So why do we have this perception of people 50, 60 years ago being really buttoned-up about sex?
Dita Von Teese: People have always been interested in sex. There have been periods where there was more censorship, but you can find explicit hardcore pornography from the invention of the camera. People haven't changed—even though sometimes there have been periods in film where they haven't shown much sex, or they would use innuendo to put the idea of sex into people's heads, you can find sex scenes or love scenes in the '30s. Then maybe in the '40s and '50s, there were a lot of rules about what they could show in film. People have always been interested in seeing sex and in seeing the female form, and obviously that was what burlesque was about.
It's interesting that there's a big burlesque revival right now, but we're seeing a really commercialized version. We're not seeing the strip. I perform the strip, but a lot of the commercialized, mainstream burlesque clubs and people that are trying to bring this back don't really understand the history of it. They forget that there was a past to it, and even the big stars like Gypsy Rose Lee and Lili St. Cyr stripped down to pasties and G-strings back in the '30s and '40s and '50s. So it's really important to me to remind people that that's really what burlesque was. It wasn't about singing "Fever" and dancing around in hot pants and fishnets and calling it burlesque because there's a retro vibe to it—it was about the striptease. People went to see burlesque shows to admire the female form and to get the idea of sex into their heads, because they couldn't see it in a lot of films at that time.
AVC: A lot of people try to politicize the burlesque revival, making it about feminism or sexual politics.
DVT: I think that's fine if someone wants to use it that way. Me personally, I want to entertain people above all. When you look back at burlesque in history and the real golden age of burlesque, those entertainers were there to entertain, and there wasn't usually some big political message behind what they were doing. They were there to make people forget about their problems, and I want to uphold that tradition. I've been accused of putting political messages in some of my shows, and I'm always surprised to hear someone's take on it. But for me, it's all about being entertaining and being true to the history of striptease and reminding people that striptease had a great history. There was a time when these stars were somewhat respectable and mainstream, and the people appreciated that what they were doing was as artistic as anything else you'd see on the stage.
AVC: Another perception of the burlesque revival is that it stems from this idea that our culture is so sexually permissive that the only direction left to go is backward, to a more innocent, glamorous time. But it seems like the old days weren't necessarily that innocent.
DTV: There's a really great book and movie that Liz Goldwyn wrote and directed called Pretty Things, and she has these interviews with some of the old burlesque stars. The funny thing is, you have some of them saying, "Yeah, we flashed, sometimes I didn't want to wear a G-string, sometimes I didn't want to wear pasties, and sometimes I went with men for money." There were all kinds, just like there are all kinds now, and I think it's great that we have all kinds of options. It wasn't a kinder, gentler time back in the '30s and '40s, they weren't all Gypsy Rose Lee and Lili St. Cyr and Sally Rand.
AVC: You grew up in a small town in Michigan. How did this stuff make it onto your radar?
DVT: When I was a little girl, I watched all old movies. My mother liked old movies, and she loved shopping for antiques, so I was around old things all the time. We'd go antique shopping and I'd find a hat or a pair of gloves or a vintage dress, and my mom would let me have those things to play dress-up with. So it came from there, and from watching old movie stars like Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe and Hedy Lamarr. I saw the glamour of them and the way they were painted and coiffed and styled, and I thought "Well, I can turn myself into that. That's not natural, it's all very contrived and created."
Being from Michigan, I wanted to experience a little glamour in my life, because all I saw was what I saw on TV and in the movies. As I got older, I always felt like I was very plain and ordinary-looking, and I wanted to take what I learned from watching these women and seeing pictures of Marilyn Monroe, who was a very pretty girl, but no one remembered her as that pretty girl. It was when she underwent a full makeover and her hair was bleached blonde and curled and her lips were painted and her eyelashes were a mile long—that image was really created, it wasn't natural beauty. And let's be honest, we wouldn't have remembered her for being Norma Jean, we remember her as the icon that was created. And I thought, "Well, since I don't feel very pretty, I can do my best to use what I've got." And that's what I did, I taught myself how to paint and how to curl my hair.
AVC: How did the sexual aspect come into the picture? When did it turn from fashion to fetish?
DVT: When I was old enough. I was surrounding myself, reading old movie-star biographies and dressing a little off-center, dressing vintage when I was a teenager. Then in the early '90s, when I was 17, 18 years old, I started looking through books of pin-up models from the era. I discovered Bettie Page and I started looking at the magazines she actually appeared in. I wanted to recreate those pin-up pictures. One thing leads to another. I wanted a corset, I was obsessed with lingerie. I worked in a lingerie store, and I wanted to buy a corset, and when I finally found a place that sold them, I walked in and it was a fetish store. So it all kind of came together at once for me, this '40s fetishism, this severe look of a John Willie painted girl. Those things all really appealed to me. A light bulb went on in my head, and I thought, "Why shouldn't I be recreating this stuff? No one's really doing that." The fetish scene at that time was about piercings and tattoos and girls shaved bald and really severe images of bitches with whips, and I wanted to bring this elegant fetishism back into the mainstream.
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