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Is burlesque empowering or degrading to women?

12 1
18.07.2025

As burlesque queen Dita Von Teese puts on a new London show, the art form, which blends glamour, striptease and humour, is having a moment again – but the debate around it continues.

Grab your nipple pasties and tip your bowler hat: burlesque is back. The art form, which blends vintage glamour, coquettish striptease, and a winking knowingness, is one that seems to blow in-and-out of fashion: it was huge in the 2000s, then faded from view. "When it's needed as a discursive form, it comes up," says Jacki Wilson, associate professor of performance and gender at the University of Leeds. And while in recent years, in the UK at least, drag has replaced burlesque as the trending cabaret act de jour, a couple of big new shows suggest burlesque might just be slinking back into the spotlight.

"I think it's having a true renaissance, actually – all over the world," burlesque performer Tosca Rivola tells the BBC. She'd know: her show Diamonds and Dust, a "narrative" burlesque show starring Dita Von Teese, has just opened in London. And while Von Teese may be the enduring queen of the art form, even she benefited from the Taylor Swift effect recently, being introduced to a new audience when she starred as a fairy godmother in the video for the singer's 2022 single Bejeweled. Also about to open in the West End is Burlesque the Musical – a stage version of the Christina Aguilera and Cher-starring 2010 film, while at Edinburgh's globally-renowned Fringe Festival this summer, a new International Burlesque Festival is set to run across five venues for the whole month, in response to a "major increase in burlesque productions staged at the Fringe" last year, according to organisers. And if an ultra-glam version of burlesque has endured more in the US than the UK over the last 15 years, it's also enjoying something of a renaissance there. When a Met Gala after-party centres around a burlesque performance by Teyana Taylor and FKA Twigs, as it did this year, it's clearly more hot ticket than old hat.

Or is it? Many of these offerings feel doubly retro: a throwback 20 years to the last mainstream period of an art form that was already harking back to a different era. Is the revival of interest in burlesque actually part of a broader wave of specifically millennial nostalgia? Burlesque the Musical is clearly targeting the same millennial audiences who have flocked to other movie-to-musical adaptations such as Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, Legally Blonde and Clueless. And the fact that Von Teese is still the big draw for Diamonds and Dust suggests a looking back rather than any great leap forward. Glancing at social media, there is plenty of burlesque on Instagram and TikTok, but not too much evidence of Gen Z rediscovering or reinventing it just yet.

Before we get lost in........

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