Inside Dita Von Teese’s Real Life as a Not

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