Dita Von Teese hits the Perth Fashion Festival – The West Australian

Dita Von Teese has had what many might consider a fairly unglamorous day. She had dropped her iPhone in water just a week after smashing the screen, so had to hotfoot it down to her local Los Angeles Apple store for a replacement.

But dressed in her “uniform” of black capri pants, a simple blouse and Louboutin ballet flats teamed with big statement sunnies, a swipe of powder and a slick of matte red lipstick, Dita made the mundane magnificent.

“And while I was having my phone exchanged I did pop over from the Apple store to the MAC store and got a couple more Ruby Woo lipsticks.” MAC’s cult retro-matte blue-red shade Ruby Woo is Von Teese’s trademark. “You can never have too many,” she says with a girly giggle.

Dita has become extremely famous not just for that milk-skinned, tiny-waisted bod but also what she puts on it. The raven-haired burlesque dancer is always immaculately, breathtakingly put together, whether it’s strolling through the park or strutting her stuff on the red carpet.

She’s also the queen of airport chic — the place where even the most stylish can let down their guard. “The trick is red lipstick, sunglasses and a good coat,” she reveals. “I usually have no make-up on, except for a sweep of powder and a little red lipstick and sunglasses and a coat. Sometimes I’m not wearing anything under that coat.” (If you have the inclination and the time, Google “Dita Von Teese airport” for a gallery of fresh-off-a-flight fabulousness.)

She’ll be showing off her travel style when she lands at Perth Airport this week to be the star attraction at the Telstra Perth Fashion Festival. Dita will be making her West Australian catwalk debut for her good friend Melanie Greensmith’s glamour-girl label Wheels Dollbaby. The pair met when Dita was wooed by savvy Melanie.

“I’m not sure how many years ago it was now but on one of my visits to Australia I came to my hotel room and found this wonderful care package of Wheels Dollbaby and that’s when I discovered the brand. And I loved it, of course.”

The brand’s signature pin-up style was a natural fit for Dita and the two ladies would later meet in person, becoming fast friends. Both women share a passion for retro glamour and antiques and opulent, sexy spaces. “Not only do I love her line but we connected on our similar taste in home decor,” Dita says. “Every time I’ve been to Australia we’ve spent time together and we did this little cardigan sweater collaboration, reintroducing it in different colours every so often, so it’s been fun. I love collaborating with my friends, whose style I admire and get along so well with.”

The well-travelled former Mrs Marilyn Manson, 42, isn’t altogether sure if she’s been to Perth before but is excited about this visit nonetheless. “I have a lot of friends who are from there,” she says, mentioning the band Monarchy, whose member Andrew Armstrong was born here. Dita has done a few collaborations with the electronic band, most notably lending her voice to a curious cover of Blur’s Girls and Boys. “And I’m very excited because my very good friend David Downton, the fashion illustrator, is also going to be in town for the fashion festival so I’ll be surrounded by friends.”

It wasn’t always that way. Indeed Dita wasn’t always Dita — she was born Heather Sweet, a bashful blonde girl raised in a rural farming town in Michigan. When Heather was a teenager, her family moved to the other side of the country and settled in Orange County, California. She soon found herself the target of bullies.

“That was hard for me because I was not as advanced as the girls my age, I was still interested in playing with dolls and things like that and the girls my age, they teased me and they didn’t really want to hang out with me,” she recalls.

In her 20s, as she embraced her individuality and sexuality with gusto, she again found herself ostracised. But older and bolder, she quickly realised the beauty of being yourself.

“There was an “Aha!” moment when I was in my 20s and I was dressing in lingerie as outerwear and in vintage and people used to make fun of me all the time and I took a look at who was making fun of me and what they were wearing and thought ‘Oh, it’s actually a compliment that these people are mocking me’.”

It’s a lesson that’s stayed with her. “Any time I see someone who’s making fun of me or mocking me I think: ‘I do not want to be part of their tribe, I am clearly an outsider, I don’t want to do sports events, I don’t want to be part of that gang. My gang is different.’”

Dita says it’s also a lesson in confidence and conviction that other young women need to learn. “My motto in life is: ‘You can be a juicy ripe peach and there’ll still be someone who doesn’t like peaches’. There will always be someone who will find fault with what you are and what you’re doing.”

All of this explains why the story of the briefly famous “dancing man” resonated so strongly with Dita. For those who may not recall, “dancing man” is Sean O’Brien, an overweight Briton who was secretly filmed having a dance-like-nobody’s-watching boogie at a concert. Except people were watching — and filming. He suddenly stops dancing when he realises he’s being mocked and the look on his face is utterly heartbreaking. The cruel bully then uploaded the video to a file-sharing site, where the jibes continued.

But it was also picked up by a bunch of nice women who were horrified by the “body shaming” Sean was forced to endure and rallied around him — even raising money to bring him to the US for a special dance party. Dita was one of several celebrities who lent their support.

“It really touched me,” she says. “I was like: ‘What is wrong with people?’ I instantly reached out to the people who were organising the party and I said ‘I would love to be involved somehow’.” Initially she was to have performed at the big dance party but she was out of town. “So I couldn’t contribute to the evening that they had for him but I was like ‘I would like to meet him anyway’ so we went out to lunch and it was really nice.”

There’s an image on Dita’s Instagram account showing the beaming duo strutting from her shiny black 1953 Cadillac into a suburban Mexican restaurant. As if that’s not cool enough, Dita is also carrying a novelty taco clutch bag. She captioned the photo with the hastag #stopbullying.

“It was really a wonderful thing to meet these women who banded together and brought him to Americahe’s an amazing guy and it’s nice that people are willing to do something about it and put their foot down and stand up for people like that.”

She hopes the celebrity-led gesture (Pharrell Williams, Susan Sarandon and curvy singer Meaghan Trainor were among others who joined in) will inspire a generation of children not to tolerate bullying. “I really hope that there are kids who are doing things like this, I hope there’s more vigilante kids who are standing up against bullying, I hope it’s trickling down, because the hardest time is the school years and when you’re a kid and when you’re a teenager, that’s really the worst.”

And the internet, as Sean O’Brien found out, makes it easy to bully and body shame with impunity. “I see it a lot because I have a lingerie line and I’m always posting pictures of the models and I watch people beat up either way on these models like, ‘She’s fat’ or ‘She’s too skinny.’ The internet has turned things into a mess with the body-shaming thing and I find it really frustrating.”

She refuses to be intimidated by trolls who target her. “I don’t get upset about it, I think ‘Oh that poor personthose people are so sad. I can’t imagine typing something negative .’” In fact, she likes to counter all that negativity with a “special game” as she’s walking down the street. “I like to find that beautiful thing about every person, you know I always try to think, when I see someone that somebody might not at first glance think they’re attractive, I can find something that makes them wildly attractive,” she says, purring. “There’s world-class beauty in everybody.”

Dita will admit to a little self-doubt occasionally: “We’re constantly wanting to measure ourselves up to other women and everybody does it and we do it to ourselves. We all look in the mirror and kind of see things not as they really are and you just have to replace those cky thoughts with something to be gracious about.”

That’s where good lighting can help. “That’s one thing I learnt for sure,” she says with a laugh. “My entire house has a dimmer switch in every single room, from the bathroom to the kitchen. There’s a lot you can do with choosing flattering light, if you have light coming from every angle and even take a step further and use pink and peach lights or even further and paint your walls pink, you can create a cellulite-free zone. It’s really true! The other thing is you can actually go to such lengths and make your bedroom or wherever you find that you’re naked the most often, you can make that a place where you always look spectacular. The only problem is you go to the changing room to try on a bathing suit and you’re faced with that overhead lighting and you just want to go home.”

The often-naked burlesque performer is speaking from experience, after all. “The nudity in my shows or in photos, it’s so controlled or contrived and the lighting is everything, it’s really a far cry from what my realistic nudity is, you know? Rhinestones and feathers and beautiful pink and blue lights and extremely high heels and the costumesthis is much different than me standing in my bathroom. I don’t feel like it’s revealing my true full self.”

Dita is exceptionally careful about what she reveals about her personal life, as well. The day we talk the internet is alive with reports she’s bought a magnificent $3.9 million gothic mansion for herself and her Devon Rex cat, Aleister. “I like to maintain my privacy,” is all she’ll say.

But she’s happy to reveal a bit about her recreational indulgences such as dressage, which she had to abandon for a while after suffering a hip injury from dancing. “But I’m gettin’ back on the horse,” she says. The lover of all retro style also collects antiques and vintage cars.

As for her beauty regime, Dita swears by daily green smoothies and a mostly vegan diet to help preserve the look she created so many years ago when she realised she didn’t look quite like the Hollywood glamour girls she and her mum, Bonnie, idolised.

“As I grew older I started discovering that it was really this idea of creating beauty where it maybe didn’t exist in the first place, so I taught myself how to have that Hollywood makeover,” she explains. “I think I just realised that it’s something you can create, and anyone can create a mystique about themselves if they set their mind to it.”

Even better news for all us regular women is that Dita firmly believes the most attractive women are not necessarily “great beauties”.

“Some of the most fascinating and exciting women I’ve ever known they weren’t necessarily born just naturally supermodel beautiful — they’re really women who kind of cultivated their beauty, their sensuality, their wit, their wisdom and became these incredible seductresses of the highest level,” she says. “The women I admire, they’re not even famous; they’re not movie stars and supermodels. I like people who are eccentric, there’s such a magnificence in not caring what people think, like ‘Oh that’s a weird hat, why is she wearing that?’ or ‘Oh, she’s wearing too much make-up’. I like people who aren’t afraid of being whoever they want to be.”

Dita Von Teese will appear for Wheels Dollbaby for Telstra Perth Fashion Festival’s Closing Night at Ascot Racecourse on September 20 from 9.30pm. see telstraperthfashion festival.com.au for more details.

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