By Alix Sharkey, Photographs: Lionel Deluy

ita Von Teese appears at the restaurant door, a porcelain doll with blue eyes and blood-red lips. She’s wearing a tight black blouse with a bow at the neck, and a tight black pencil skirt and peep-toe platforms. She seems to have blown in from a gothic version of 1944.

She walks over, sits unnervingly close to me and immediately points to her ring finger. There’s no ring.

Wait, didn’t she just get married to gothic rocker and scourge of the Religious Right, Marilyn Manson, in an extravagant ceremony in an Irish castle? Weren’t they supposedly head over six-inch heels in love? Could it be Splitsville already?

All these questions run through my mind, but instead I say, "What happened?"

"My engagement ring ... It has this seven-carat diamond, but it wasn’t sitting right, so I’ve sent it away to get the setting adjusted."

And the wedding band?

"Doesn’t look right without the diamond."

So you’re single again tonight, is that what you’re saying?

"Well," she says, with a look that manages to be coy and mocking at the same time, "I must say it feels strange to be out on a Saturday night without an escort."

Ah, Dita. From the second she opens her mouth, she’s playing with me. Teese by name, tease by nature. Guys are suckers for that kind of talk. We walk straight into it, every time. So even as I tell her that she sounds like a very old-fashioned girl, I cannot believe the words are really coming out of my mouth. She has me acting a part she has already written for me, and we haven’t even ordered drinks.

But what else would you expect from Dita Von Teese, leading light of the New Burlesque? In case you’ve been asleep in a cave the last few years, Dita is the spearhead of a broad revival of burlesque, the theatrical form of striptease that reigned during the ’40s and ’50s, before the arrival of free love, feminism and strip clubs. Burlesque was stripping, of course, but it usually involved a lot more than a cute girl taking her underpants off.

At its best, burlesque was about young women working intimate nightclubs, exciting and arousing their audiences with a heady mix of saucy innuendo, provocative costumes, fluttering eyelashes and sexy dance routines—and, of course, a slow, tantalizing striptease that climaxed with a healthy dose of good ol’ T&A ...

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