Here’s part of a wonderful, epic feature by Catherine Keenan for the Sydney Morning Herald – “The Grand Illusion of Dita Von Teese”:
‘…The legend is that when Heather Sweet was growing up in Michigan, she developed a love of 1930s and ’40s movie stars from her manicurist mother (her father was a machinist, often out of work). She started dressing like them as a way of overcoming shyness. “I could become someone else when I was dressed like this,” she says. “I felt glamorous.”
Von Teese is hardly the first small-town American girl to try to make herself into someone else, but there was a “ker-ching” moment that seemed to cement it into place. It happened when she was heavily involved in the rave scene in her late teens, “with all that entails”, and ended up one early morning at a strip club. She couldn’t believe how bored and samey all the big-boobed blonde women looked. She thought: “I can do better than that.”
So she auditioned for Captain Cream (now called Captain’s Cabaret) – she assures me it was the classiest strip joint in Orange County, California – in a corset, long black gloves, stockings and garters. “The boss said, ‘You’re wearing a lot of clothes.’ ” But she got the job. “I saw all these girls getting a few bucks from 20 different guys. I’d get a hundred bucks from one guy.” Looking different, she realised, could really work to her advantage. Having identified this gap in the market, she went all out to fill it. Von Teese may have left much else behind from her dusty farm-town beginnings, but not, it would seem, its work ethic.
“I’m quite disciplined at things. I like to be the best at what I’m doing,” she says, crisply. So she got the boob job, started studying burlesque and, in no time, was the best – and most highly paid – stripper at Captain Cream.
Around then, she used to do impersonations of pin-up girls for a boyfriend, and she parleyed that into a business opportunity, too. They set up one of the first internet soft-porn sites, sending out photos of her in quaint little brown-paper packets. Her current website (run by her sister) is still a tidy little earner. You can pay a monthly fee for access to more than 20,000 pictures of Dita and her journal “for members’ eyes only”. You can even buy her used stockings for $US40. She has always been canny with money. Even when she first started stripping, she saved at least 15 per cent of what she earned, and invested it in mutual funds. “I still have those funds to this day.”
When, in 2002, Von Teese appeared on the cover of Playboy in an eye-wateringly tight corset, under the headline “The Return of Fetish”, her moment came to move out of the underworld. She carefully leveraged her fetish cred into the mainstream, making all that PVC and tight-lacing seem respectable simply because she seemed so respectable. Just outré enough to seem fascinating, but never so outré as to seem tasteless, she was, as she obviously knew, extremely marketable. She now flies around the world as global brand ambassador for Cointreau, and has struck lucrative deals with Wonderbra and Perrier. She’s a regular in the front row of fashion shows, and often features on best-dressed lists. At 38, she is dating 27-year-old French count Louis-Marie de Castelbajac, an artist and son of fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, and divides her time between Paris and LA…’
Full article here.
