Fashionable Burlesque

Radical, Chic - New York Times

Perhaps Ms. Prada is onto something. Perhaps what we are missing from the Paris Hilton landscape we now inhabit are costumes better suited to a comic strip life. Maybe what Patricia Dunn, the disgraced chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard, needs to put her career back on track is a Balenciaga robot get-up or one of Martin Margiela’s Wonder Woman costumes, constructed with illusion effects in the color of nude pantyhose.

<--FEMININE MYSTIQUES Balenciaga robot wear, above. Dita Von Teese, top left, burlesque star, went from martini glass to bird cage. Miuccia Prada favored the Betty Grable look in swimwear in Milan.

Because no mention of the fashion scene is complete without a Hilton reference, one feels obliged to report that she was sighted in Milan slouching around the lobby of the Hotel Principe wearing grungy yellow sweat clothes from Juicy Couture. (There is no sign of her here.)

Could it be that we have all overplayed our distaste for the multitasking hotel heiress? Why pick on her for embodying mute femininity as a cartoon? There are an awful lot of stereotypes being lovingly revitalized lately, as the editors of the feminist journal Bitch have been quick to note. Look at the suddenly everywhere burlesque performer Dita Von Teese, a fashion circuit fixture, and her Gypsy Rose Lee ascent from anonymity.

At the Undercover show here on Monday the fine-boned Ms. Von Teese (born Heather Renée Sweet) submitted herself to the paparazzi with the steely demureness of a geisha.

“I think most performers are shy offstage,” she said.

Wearing a fitted tartan suit with a peplum, black suede pumps and seamed stockings, and with her poreless skin powdered white, her naturally blond hair dyed black and set in finger waves and her fingernails lacquered red, she was like a human hourglass, a catalog of masculine erotic obsession, a frame out of Buñuel. (Some ice water, please!)

Ms. Von Teese flew into Paris from Istanbul, where she had performed at a party given by a Turkish retailing magnate for Zac Posen and several hundred of his closest friends.

“It was a new piece,” Mr. Posen said on Sunday, at yet another party held in his honor, this one in the arcades of the Palais-Royal. “She’s in a bird cage, and there’s a waterfall.” In her previous act, Ms. Von Teese stripped while lying inside a giant martini glass.

Because this is another retro moment in fashion, it feels less unnatural than usual to bring up “The Second Sex.” Nobody reads that cornerstone of modern feminism anymore, of course, but anyone who did might be entertained by Simone de Beauvoir’s once shocking assertion that the entire landscape of femininity was conjured up by men in order find another way “to lock women up therein.”

As it happens, everybody got locked up in that jail. We were all left banging our heads against what are probably false oppositions (hetero and homo, natural and unnatural). It may not seem obvious where fashion fits into all of this. Yet it is worth keeping an eye on how the once hermetic and marginal realm of fashion, now a global force, quietly and in its own way pushes at the boundaries, moving some pretty radical notions into the mainstream.