Inside Dita Von Teese’s Real Life as a Not-Quite-Showgirl

Are there any actual showgirls left in Las Vegas? The answer, according to burlesque megastar Dita Von Teese, is complicated.

“Everybody is arguing over what it means to be a showgirl, with the new Taylor Swift album coming out,” she tells me over the phone one morning from her kitchen in Los Angeles. Her own name, she realizes, is likely part of that conversation: In 2023, Von Teese opened the feathery, flashy, rhinestone-encrusted Dita Von Teese at Voltaire, a revue at The Venetian in Las Vegas. But, she notes, “the real Las Vegas showgirl basically went extinct with the closing of Jubilee! in 2016.”

That’s when Von Teese—and her residency—became the heir to the Bob Mackie showgirl headpiece, both figuratively and literally. When she was first approached by Live Nation about opening a show in Las Vegas, Jubilee!—which opened on the Strip in 1981—had been closed for a few years. That’s when Von Teese discovered all of the show’s old costumes in a basement. “I was lucky enough to take a curated selection of these vintage showgirl costumes with me and bring them into my own show,” she says.

While Von Teese is delighted to pay homage in both costume and performance, she would never dare to call herself a showgirl. “There are rules when it comes to being a showgirl that I don’t meet,” she explains. “You have to be a certain weight, a certain height, a certain age. There’s an incredible history behind it all, and I really respect it, but I’m not even tall enough!”

And, anyway, Von Teese’s show is firmly its own thing. “Just like how showgirls have codes, my show has codes, too,” she says. “First, we threw out the age parameters, because I don’t fit into the age of a showgirl. Second, the height and weight. I wanted body representation and size representation. And forget it when it comes to gender parameters, too! I’m putting muscle men in feathered headdresses. There’s one dancer who was a part of Jubilee! and he told me he was never even allowed to touch the headdress. I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Well, would you like to wear it?’”