Dita Von Teese

Biography

Heather Renée Sweet (born September 28, 1972), known professionally as Dita Von Teese, is an American vedette, burlesque dancer, model, actress, and businesswoman. She is credited with re-popularizing burlesque performance, earning the moniker "Queen of Burlesque". Von Teese has appeared in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, RuPaul's Drag Race, The Masked Dancer, The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell, among other television productions. She is also known for her short marriage to singer Marilyn Manson as well as performing in his music videos. Von Teese has released two books on burlesque history, fetishism and beauty. She has toured the world with her burlesque shows in cities like London, Berlin, New York and Paris. Among her special guests on the tours are Dirty Martini, Perle Noire, Ginger Valentine, Jett Adore and Playboy model Gia Genevieve. Von Teese has been a special guest at the Parisian venue Crazy Horse several times. From 2007 to 2013, she was a global ambassador for Cointreau and in 2010–2011 she was the face of Perrier. She has also created four perfumes under the brand Dita Von Teese Perfumes. She also has her own brand of lingerie, as well as stockings under the name Secrets in Lace and luxurious cardigans for Australian online store Wheels & Dollbaby.

== Early life == Von Teese was born Heather Renée Sweet in Rochester, Michigan, the second of three daughters. When she was five, her family moved to West Branch, Michigan. Describing her hometown, she says, "It's a universe away from the colored Klieg lights of Hollywood and Paris. But on weekend afternoons, my mom and I had a front seat on a rocket ship to those faraway worlds by way of the old movies starring the most glamorous creatures – Betty Grable, Mae West, Carmen Miranda, Marlene Dietrich... They were our muses." Her father was a machinist and her mother a manicurist. She is of English, Scottish, Armenian, and German heritage. Von Teese has stated that one of her grandmothers was half-Armenian and was adopted. Von Teese is known for her fascination with 1940s cinema and classic vintage style. This began at a young age and was fostered by her mother, who would buy clothes for her daughter to dress up. Her mother was a fan of old, Golden Age-era Hollywood films, and from her, Von Teese developed a fascination with the actresses of that day, especially Betty Grable. She was classically trained as a ballet dancer from an early age, and danced solo at age 13 for a local ballet company. Though she originally wanted to be a ballerina, Von Teese states that "by 15, I was as good as I'd ever be." She was later to incorporate this element into her burlesque shows, where she frequently goes en pointe. The family relocated from Michigan to Orange County, California, when her father's job moved. Von Teese attended University High School in Irvine, California. When Von Teese was a teenager, her mother took her to buy her first bra, made from plain white cotton, and gave her a plastic egg containing a pair of wrinkly, flesh-colored pantyhose. Von Teese says she was disappointed, as she had been hoping to receive beautiful lacy garments and stockings, of the type she had glimpsed in her father's Playboy magazines. This fueled her passion for lingerie. She worked in a lingerie store as a salesgirl when she was 15, eventually as a buyer. Von Teese has been fond of wearing elaborate lingerie such as corsets and basques with fully fashioned stockings ever since. In college, Von Teese studied historic costuming and aspired to work as a stylist for films. She is a trained costume designer, often designing (and copyrighting) her photo shoots herself. At 18, Von Teese had her famous beauty mark tattooed on her left cheek. She originally intended to have a star tattooed but the tattoo parlor refused. In her first book, she states that she visited a strip club for the first time at age 19 and was soon hired alongside her job at a beauty counter. She was stunned by the other strippers' lack of originality and wanted to incorporate vintage and fetish style into her performance.

== Career == Von Teese chose her stage name by adopting the name Dita as a tribute to silent film actress Dita Parlo. For her breakthrough December 2002 Playboy cover, she was required to have a surname, so she chose Von Treese from the phonebook. Playboy misspelled it Von Teese, a name which she then kept. Von Teese is known for her signature painted eyes, heavily penciled brows, swipe of crimson lipstick, and blue-black locks. She says, "I have my signature look and I'm sticking to it, because it's the look that is one hundred percent me, and one hundred percent created by me. I might be a one-trick for it. But it's a pretty good trick!"

=== Fetish and glamour modeling === Von Teese achieved some level of recognition in the fetish world as a tightlacer. Through the wearing of a corset for many years, she had reduced her waistline to 22 inches (56 cm), and can be laced down as far as 16.5 inches (42 cm). Von Teese appeared on numerous fetish magazine covers, including Bizarre and Marquis. It was around this time when she appeared on the cover of Midori's book, The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage. Von Teese was featured in Playboy in 1999, 2001, and 2002, with a cover-featured pictorial in 2002. German metal band Atrocity chose her as the cover model for their 2008 album, Werk 80 II. She has stated in print, "I love fetish for its powers of transformation and also for its beauty." Among her heroes of vintage fetish history are John Willie, Bettie Page, and Irving Klaw.

=== Burlesque ===

Von Teese is best known for her burlesque routines and is frequently dubbed the "Queen of Burlesque" in the press. Von Teese began performing burlesque in 1992, and, as a proponent of Neo-Burlesque, has helped to popularize its revival. In her own words, she "puts the tease back into striptease" with long, elaborate dance shows with props and characters, often inspired by 1930s and 1940s musicals and films. Some of her more famous dances have involved a carousel horse, a giant powder compact, a filigree heart and a clawfoot bathtub with a working shower head. Her feather fan dance, inspired by burlesque dancer Sally Rand, featured the world's largest feather fans, now on display in Hollywood's Museum of Sex. Von Teese's signature acts feature:

The Martini Glass The Opium Den Le Bain Noir (re-invented for the 2009 Crazy Horse show) Bird of Paradise Lazy (based on Marilyn Monroe's performance in There's No Business Like Show Business) The Champagne Glass The Black Swan (based on the ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) Her burlesque career has included some memorable performances. She once appeared at a benefit for the New York Academy of Art wearing nothing but $5 million worth of diamonds. Additionally, Von Teese became the first guest star at the Crazy Horse cabaret club in Paris with her appearance in October 2006. In 2006, Von Teese appeared on an episode of America's Next Top Model (cycle 7) doing a workshop to teach the contestants about sensuality by means of burlesque dancing and posing. In 2007, Von Teese performed at the adult entertainment event Erotica 07 in London alongside Italian rock band Belladonna. Von Teese's first book (in collaboration with Bronwyn Garrity), which consisted of her opinions on the history of burlesque and fetish, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese / Fetish and the Art of the Teese, was published in 2006 by HarperCollins (and in New York by Regan Books). Vanity Fair called her a "Burlesque Superheroine". Von Teese participated in the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 in Moscow, Russia, as part of the stage performance for the German entry "Miss Kiss Kiss Bang". The act placed 20th out of 25 participants in the final round of the contest. Later, she said her cleavage was censored during the show because it was too voluptuous. Von Teese has toured the world with four full-length revues: "Strip, Strip Hooray", "The Art of the Teese", "Dita Von Teese and the Copper Coupe" and the 2019 "Glamonatrix" tour (postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic), which continued in Europe and the UK in 2022 and the US in 2023.

=== Television and acting ===