Dita Von Teese reveals her costume secrets
From haute couture to repurposed pieces, burlesque star Dita Von Teese always dazzles.
Burlesque star Dita Von Teese has made a career out of her vintage-inspired striptease routines, but it’s a long-held irony that she has become better known for her personal style across the past two decades.
The performer is touring Australia with her Glamonatrix show, and her costumes shimmer with their own stories.
The show opened in Perth last week and by chance this journalist happened to be in town. An invitation from Wheels & Dollbaby founder Melanie Greensmith, with whom Von Teese has recently relaunched the brand’s cardigan collaboration, saw us take our seats at the Astor Theatre for the first night of the tour.
A passing post-show comment to Greensmith quickly moved into an email introduction to Von Teese, which saw us catch up at Perth’s new Westin hotel for a cup of tea and conversation about the dazzling display of costumes included in the show.
What is most fascinating is the organic way the costumes evolve from show to show.
In true theatrical tradition some pieces are repurposed from previous outings, updated and added to, while others are custom-made for the occasion.
“I kind of piece things together,” Von Teese says of her costumes. She’s looking impeccable the morning after her second Perth show, wearing a cream and black embroidered cardigan from the Wheels collection with black cigarette pants and mid-height black pumps by Christian Louboutin, a close friend who also collaborates on shoes for her shows.
“He’s one of my favourite people in the world. We love working together and he just comes up with the most outlandish ideas for shoes,” she says. “He’s always done the shoes (for my shows) ever since we met in the early 2000s and I’m grateful for that. He has his team I work with closely that does all the custom shoes in the atelier. They make amazing things for me.”
Von Teese says their working process isn’t at all regimented, with ideas being floated anywhere from a year in advance to two weeks out.
“(Sometimes) it’s me cornering him and he’ll sketch something out at dinner. Sometimes I’ll take a pair of shoes from the past and repurpose them. It’s an important part of the show,” she says.
What is specific to Von Teese is “a special Dita heel”, which is built out to create an exaggerated curve, as seen in 1950s stiletto silhouettes.
Sometimes even the most beautiful designs can be sidelined if they don’t work in the whole costume, however. Von Teese recalls a situation years ago, before her first Australian tour, where she was creating an opium den routine. “We wanted this naked foot, with just a big crystal ball between my toes like a flip-flop with some straps,” she says. Louboutin created four pairs of heels for this costume but the crystal-encrusted costume, which weighed about 25kg, meant Von Teese couldn’t carry the weight on those shoes.
“There has to be a little bit of practicality. I’m not going to go so far as to say I’m dancing my ass off, but I’ve got to move,” she says.
Von Teese has several other long-time costume collaborators including corsetier Mr Pearl, designer Jenny Packham and Catherine D’Lish, a burlesque performer and one of Von Teese’s closest friends who helped direct the current show. All are represented in the Glamonatrix show, in which Von Teese has four choreographed routines including group routines, augmented by solo performers including burlesque stars Zelia Rose, Jett Adore, Dirty Martini and Gia Genevieve.
Fans of Von Teese will be pleased some signature routines — the martini glass and the bucking bronco lipstick, for example — are included in the new show, albeit recostumed and reimagined.
For this outing the martini glass piece sees Von Teese start out in a custom-made tuxedo by Paris haute couturier Alexis Mabille (“I love that look”), flanked by a chorus of tuxedo-clad male dancers.
“The top hat is from the 30s, I’ve had it for almost two decades. It’s my treasured top hat that goes around the world with me. It’s looking a little rough around the edges if you look closely. I just love it,” she says. As for “the lipstick thing — the boots are the star of that show, really”, Von Teese says with a laugh, referring to the thigh-high patent leather beauties by Louboutin.
“(The look is) pieced together, the bra comes from one designer, the corset comes from a San Francisco designer I work with that is near to me, and the gloves are from my own collection.”
A new routine casts Von Teese as ringleader and tiger tamer, in a costume based on a Hussar uniform with gold frogging, train and red sash and rosette. Its first outing, ahead of a performance in Los Angeles last New Year’s Eve, almost didn’t happen. Her team had tracked down a company in England that made replica Hussar uniforms, but the outfit remained a no-show two days before the performance. Before buying a plane ticket for an English fan to escort it over, they asked the company to send a photo of the finished product. “It was the wrong colours and clearly not the right measurements. I thought: What am I gonna do?” she says.
She called her long-time local tailor, with a team of seamstresses, and asked: “Will you make me this uniform in 36 hours? And we did it. They busted it out and made it beautiful. Then of course what happens with everything is we keep adding to it.”
That goes for the matching hat by British milliner Stephen Jones: “I added more feathers.”
Packham has worked with Von Teese for many years and the performer takes the final curtain call for Glamonatrix wearing a crystal-embellished cape by the British designer, who is also a favourite of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton. “We have a fun relationship,” she says of Packham. “She’s always working on things for the duchess and she’s like: ‘It’s funny, we have the future queen and the queen of burlesque going on at the same time.’ ”
One thing that you can guarantee with any of Von Teese’s costumes is plenty of sparkle and, while Swarovski sponsored her for a time, it continues to benefit from her dazzling costumes.
“It’s not like we’re using a smattering of stones — we order a lot. When you have crystals dragging for four feet behind you, it’s a lot of crystal,” she says. The introduction of new colours into the Swarovski range offers inspiration when designing some of the costumes. “Catherine does most of the crystal costumes and we think, what’s a colour we didn’t tap into yet? A lot of times it’s (about using) colour schemes I haven’t worked with, ever,” she says.
The stockings worn throughout the show come from Von Teese’s line with Secrets In Lace, true to the original full fashion 50s styles in nylon, with back seams and a keyhole at the top back welt.
“They’re made in the original mills they were made on in the 1940s and 50s. We do special ones that have gold seams and silver seams and red seams for the show.
“It’s a very particular thing, some people don’t get it at all because they have wrinkles in them, there’s no Lycra, but that is part of the appeal.”
Her vintage-inspired lingerie line, created with Australian company Anderson Brockhurst Enterprises, features on fellow performer Genevieve.
Von Teese laughs when asked if there are multiples of her own costumes. “No! They’re too expensive,” she says, adding some of the costumes are worth up to $US65,000 ($95,000). “They’re just heavily insured.”
With the outer pieces being made to be removed, there are special tricks employed to make the process easier. “A lot of the time we do the closures ourselves later because we use a lot of heavy-duty magnets, flat trouser hooks all lined up, coat hooks. There are different closures for different functions. It’s trial and error.”
It also takes a different understanding for designers working on costumes created to be taken off, piece by piece.
“The first time I worked with Elie Saab he mastered it. I go through it with (designers) and say every piece when it comes off it has to look like another great outfit — it can’t look like I’m not wearing my pants. Every moment looks great just as is and you could take a photograph.”
The Glamonatrix tour continues in Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney before heading to New Zealand. Tickets via dita.net/shows
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