All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
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 Live Nation first approached her 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 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. One dancer 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?’”
The point of it all, for Von Teese, is “celebrating beauty, glamour, eroticism, and fetishism in a joyful, playful way. That’s what I love. That’s what I believe in. And I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s okay.”
Here, Von Teese invites Vogue into her real life as a not-quite showgirl, from making breakfast at home in LA to taking the stage in Las Vegas.
Friday morning
I wake up at my home in Los Angeles. If I don’t have a show in Las Vegas, I’m typically up by 8 a.m. I had planned to fly to Las Vegas for our show tonight, but I realized I had a big pile of things to take back with me: things from the dry cleaner, costumes that I hand-washed, and some mending. Sometimes it’s just easier to drive.
Plus, I like having my car in Vegas so I can go off the Strip if I want. I’m always with my assistant, Cali, who is a master Swarovski crystallizer, among her many talents. We don’t listen to music while we drive; I cannot imagine us singing along in harmony while we’re on our way. We usually listen to a true-crime podcast or a book. The last audiobook we listened to was Cher’s autobiography, which was amazing.
When I’m in Vegas, I stay at The Palazzo, which is very convenient. I’m not a gambler, but I actually like to walk around the casino and say hi to people. It’s all part of the fun of being on the Strip.
As soon as I arrive, I head to The Veneitian because we have a new dancer who needs to be fitted for her costumes. Her name is Zelia Rose, and she’s an incredible burlesque dancer who just finished performing in Hamilton and Six in Australia. We work with a really amazing wardrobe team who also did work on Juiblee!, and they are also part of the fitting, but I always have opinions because I like to study things really closely. I want elastics dyed to match skin tone, things like that. I’m very detail oriented, which can be a blessing and a curse: Sometimes I’ll spot something wrong onstage, and it’ll just get stuck in my head.
Next, it’s time to check on my fitting room. I manage it all myself, as well as do all of my own hair and makeup for the show. So I go in and make sure all my makeup brushes are clean, lay everything out, and get ready to, well, get ready. I also have a bunch of posters and things I need to sign for the merch area. There’s a David Downton illustration for sale, so I swipe on Charlotte Tilbury’s Cinematic Red—which has been my favorite classic red lipstick lately—to kiss them.
I like to squeeze in a nap, but I like to multitask. So I take a short nap, less than 30 minutes, on a warm pulsed electromagnetic field mat and under a Celluma Pro red-light shield. I also put on a meditation that helps me fall asleep. It’s quick, but it really helps before a show.
Right after my nap, it’s time to start getting ready for the show. I get to the theater three or four hours before the show starts, and I take a shower, stretch, and then it’s time for the technical rehearsal. We walk through a few routines and make sure everything in the theater looks good.
When it comes to doing my makeup, I can be as fast or slow as I want to be. I could get it done in an hour if I had to, but I don’t like to do that. Then it’s time for my typical preshow meal, which is from this place called Milos. I eat half of the meal now and half after the show. While I eat, I read this new Las Vegas magazine. Next to it is my Smythson journal that says “Striptease,” where I take all of my show notes. Then it’s showtime!
Every night, the show either starts at 8 or 9 p.m. I have a 15-minute grace period in case there’s a costume problem, and it runs for an hour and a half with a 10-minute intermission. That’s there so I can put on the most complicated costumes of the show, which is surprisingly not the Bob Mackie costume. This is the only place in Vegas where you can see authentic vintage showgirl costumes in action.
But of course, my Martini Dance is what people are waiting for. This is the dance I did with Taylor Swift in the “Bejeweled” video, and it’s really what I am famous for; I have been doing it for 25 years. In the late ’60s, there was a novelty act where a girl sat in a Champagne glass. My friend Catherine D’lish—and I give her credit for this, she created the choreography that she and I evolved together—found it so cool. It had never been done in a giant martini glass filled with water before.
The first thing I do when I walk offstage is get the heavy equipment off of me. I take the heavy backpack holding the costume up off, take the tiara off—I can’t even turn with it on or else I’d take out four people!—and then my production manager will come over and ask for any notes. We’ll discuss anything that may have gone wrong or wasn’t quite right. Then I get dressed for the meet-and-greet, which usually has about 50 fans after the show. They’ll come onstage and take a photo; famous burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee’s son has come by a few times, which is really special, along with Jon Hamm, Josh Groban, and, of course, Pamela Anderson, when she was filming The Last Showgirl. But my most treasured thing is the letters I get from women saying what it means to them to see someone embracing their sensuality.
That ends around 11 p.m., and by then I’m really hungry. My dancers and I will head over to the employee dining room to have dinner together. There’s no glam team to put it all on, and there’s no glam team to take it off, either. I have to do a really intense shower to get it off. I start with a body oil cleanser and sometimes exfoliate with scrub gloves. I’ll also have to take a shower in the morning because it takes a while to get it all off.
Finally, I’m home. Usually I like to check Instagram and look at the photos people shared from the show. People like to get really dressed up to attend, and it’s so special. It’s hard to turn off after a night show, so I lean really heavily on sleep meditations. I like Insight Timer; they are my bedtime stories.
The next morning
I wake up at 8 a.m. for something special. The Liberace Museum used to be my favorite thing to do in Vegas—well, Juiblee! and the Liberace Museum. And while it sadly closed, the collection now lives in this private villa where they do tours.
When I first opened my show at a different location, I drove a car onstage to perform a striptease. We crystallized it, inspired by Liberace’s car. So during the tour we saw all his old clothing, and his cars were there too.
Then it’s time to do it all over again for Saturday night’s show!
