When the great fashion artist, portraitist, and bon viveur René Bouché died, in 1963, Vogue declared that “his life and work were one.”
An elusive goal. But tucked away in the Beverly Hills Hotel recently, with work and leisure in rare, lazy harmony, I congratulated myself on inching closer to it. About time. My 65th birthday—that incontrovertible portal into old age—hung over the horizon like thunder. What better way to spend it than in Las Vegas with a stripper? I have an understanding family.
When I say “stripper,” I mean the stripper: the unchallenged and unstoppable queen of burlesque Dita Von Teese, whose Las Vegas residency, Dita Las Vegas: A Jubilant Revue, at the Jubilee Theater, has been extended until June.
I met Dita almost 20 years ago, when I convinced a London newspaper to send me to Los Angeles to do a cover story for their weekend supplement. In those heady days, before the 2008 crash, budgets were seldom discussed, and such capers were not only possible but encouraged.
Waiting in the lobby of a jewel-box hotel in West Hollywood on a balmy afternoon back then, I caught the tail end of a conversation through an open window: “So, I just go up there and take my clothes off?”
In fact, Dita brought some of her favorite pieces to the sitting: corsets from Mr. Pearl, a cobweb of lace from her trousseau—she had recently married the musician Marilyn Manson—that she shook out to reveal an entirely transparent robe.
“It works best if you’re naked underneath,” she said, which was the way she’d planned to wear it at her wedding celebration in a Gothic castle in Tipperary. Ever the image-maker, she had imagined descending the stone steps by the light of a candelabra and demurred only when she remembered her grandmother would be among the guests.
How neatly that sums up Dita’s intrinsic duality. Part Betty Grable, part Bettie Page, she is the bad girl you could take home to mother, the good girl who wants to do right (but not right now).
A self-confessed “failed ballerina,” she wandered into a strip club in 1991, and since then, almost single-handedly, she has elevated the glamour, the grit, and the joy of burlesque into an art form, one discarded, star-spangled garter at a time.
She has performed her famed act, in which she splashes around in a giant martini glass with a green-olive sponge, around the world. (The original prop is now on display at the Burlesque Hall of Fame, in Las Vegas, although for years it was garrisoned in a warehouse near LAX.) After selling out the London Palladium and the Folies Bergère with her scaled-up touring shows, Dita may view Las Vegas as the last frontier (or, at any rate, the next logical step).
I traveled to Nevada to see the show, and the next day we had lunch at the Wynn Las Vegas. “I’d been asked to perform in Vegas many times over the years, but no one ever seemed to understand what I was doing,” she says. “They all wanted to put me into a lounge.”
This is no lounge act. In addition to Dita, there are 28 performers. Among them are burlesque superstars Dirty Martini, who channels Mae West and Sophie Tucker and who brings the house down with her “helicopter” finale, in which her tassels whirl in opposite directions. And Jett Adore, who arrives onstage in a 77 Excalibur driven by Dita (one of several vintage cars she owns that she has been known to take for a spin along the Strip). His act is an homage to Liberace, complete with white feather cape and rhinestone piano.
Backstage at the Jubilee Theater, Dita gleefully showed off the vintage Bob Mackie costumes, miracles of scale and construction, that have been languishing in the theater’s storage room since 2016. Also backstage was the vast, tipped hull of a model Titanic. Topless dancers on a sinking ship is surely a spectacle ripe for revival.
As the architect of her image, her persona, and her enduring success, accusations of anti-feminism perplex Dita. Nor does she hold with the idea of objectification and the male gaze, not least because her audience is female by a large margin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a group of straight guys in the house,” she points out.
For the show’s finale, Dita, bathed in a lilac spotlight, wore a dress dusted with $12,000 worth of Swarovski crystals—that’s with a discount—assembled by three different artisans. It would be a full two minutes before it hit the floor. “I just love showbiz,” she says. Me, too.
David Downton is an Editor at Large at Air Mail