Who’s a Pretty Burlesque Princess Now
The first thing I noticed was there was a subtle split over whether burlesque and pinup had their own set of beauty standards and expectations. A few of my respondents contended that there were no such thing as set standards – that a “burlesque beauty” could look like anything, be any size or any colour. British performer Tempest Devyne describes beauty as “seeing someone confident in their own skin, it’s a sparkle in the eyes that shows an awareness, a softness, a kindness of heart”, while Rev. Jay Leal, producer of USA’s Curl Up & Dye Burlesque, describes a burlesque beauty as “the sexy / naughty underbelly of vintage class and elegance”.
The others described a set of traits defining a burlesque/pinup beauty, many repeated: hourglass figure, pincurls in highlight-less dark hair with a Bettie Page fringe, alabaster skin, well-placed tattoos. Perth’s Iskra Valentine and England’s Lucy Longlegs, who both had darker complexions thanks to Russian-South Asian heritage, described teenage years of attempting to bleach their skin with lemon juice, tumeric, and other concoctions to better match the looks of people idolized within their gothic alternative communities; the already-pale Miss Bertie Page of Brisbane has talked about touching up her crotch before shows.
Another factor that was often repeated was the importance of good grooming – tidy hair, polished feet in stockings, fully shaved, well-done nails and makeup. Mackenzie Dulcet of Canberra talks about choosing clothes that flatter one’s body – “I know most burlesque gals just love their frilly boyshorts and g-strings, but my stumpy legs are always going to look better in a pair of lacy briefs so I break those babies out!” – while Melbourne’s Lil’ Thelma Thunderbird expresses her disappointment at attending burlesque shows where she sees “girls with stockings but no shoes, no stockings with dirty bare feet, costumes that need mending, no nailpolish or makeup”.
But what really defines good grooming? Many women find the prospect of shaving or waxing body hair to be problematic politically and personally (Hair in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues opens with a statement on the topic’s high contention amongst the people surveyed for the play): would they lose out for having fuzzier legs than normal? Who ultimately decides what is “flattering” – the wearer of the outfit, or the people running fashion lines and beauty magazines?
Such expectations, says Rev. Leal, exist from established burlesque traditions. But where did these traditions come from, and what happens if you decide to break with tradition? You may end up with Simone de la Getto, who started all-black troupe Harlem Shake Burlesque in San Francisco in 2003 after being tired of being the only black performer in her area. In an Hour.Ca interview, she describes the reaction from one of their earlier shows:
Before I would never notice, because I would go on stage and do my thing and love it, be happy, la la la la la, and my friends would be like, ‘Okay, the audience was in shock. They’re there with their mouths open.’ And I’d be like, ‘Really?’ Because I’m just there on stage, making sure I don’t fuck up, listening to the music and trying to keep the choreography, and smiling and having a great time. And then one day I actually saw the audience while we were performing, because the light bounced off the stage and I could actually see who I was dancing for – and here I was looking at people with gaping mouths. They’d been screaming for the group before, but for us… so I was like, ‘What, are we bad? Are we doing something wrong?’ And then at the end, we got this uproarious applause. I was so confused.
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