Dita Von Teese on Her Sensual Debut Album

Dita Von Teese’s burlesque work lends itself to projection on behalf of the audience. “There’s a lot of humor involved. There’s a lot of fantasy and spectacle and glamour,” she told Vogue back in 2016. Now, the artist has just released her self-titled debut album, a collaboration with French singer-songwriter Sébastien Tellier, that proves the extent to which she inspires her fans.

Though one might assume Von Teese is just another celebrity attempting to fulfill their latent pop star dreams (remember Kim Kardashian West’s singing career?), she actually had no intention of singing or making an album whatsoever. Von Teese had been a fan of Tellier’s for years, and even invited him to one of the premieres of her famous burlesque shows at the Crazy Horse in Paris a few years back, but it wasn’t until Tellier’s manager sent Von Teese an email, saying that he’d written an entire album just for her, that Von Teese had even considered becoming a recording artist.

“He had given me a bunch of demos in advance with him singing the lyrics that he’d written for me,” Von Teese says of Tellier, who wrote the album with some help from his wife, Amandine de la Richardière. (It wasn’t fully finished when Von Teese accepted the offer; Tellier included some details about Von Teese’s life that he gleaned once the two started recording.) “It was a little bit like this fantasy of me and my life, which I quite liked,” she said.

The resulting collection of songs finds Von Teese embodying the role of a French chanteuse with her breathy, sensual vocals that float above Tellier’s playful, languid arrangements—and fits squarely within the lineage of iconic collaborations like that of Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg. “It was really an exercise in vulnerability,” Von Teese says of the project. While she’s a pro at producing and performing in her burlesque shows, she says that something about singing makes her feel even more exposed, ironically enough. “I have a lot of confidence about putting an image onstage I created, but with the voice, you can’t really manipulate that,” she says. “Do I walk away from something because I’m afraid people won’t like it or because it puts me out of my comfort zone? I decided the only thing to do is to accept and do it, and so here we are.”

The album’s cover art depicts Von Teese and Tellier lounging in creamy silk blouses and plunging satin shirts, but Von Teese says that she’s been taking her live show in a more experimental stylistic direction. She used a remixed version of “Bird of Prey” to accompany a high-gloss, fetishistic act where she rides a giant lipstick, all while wearing custom Christian Louboutin Victorian-era crotch-high boots, complete with diamond spurs. And she used an instrumental of one of the album’s songs in her last appearance at the Crazy Horse in a truly forward-thinking act. “It was a very modern striptease, something that had never been done before. All the clothes were made out of amazing light projections and would fall off and unzip and morph and change,” Von Teese describes.

Since she’s not exactly a live singer, she’s not quite sure if they’re going to translate the album onstage anytime soon. “If I were going to explore the idea of making it a show, I would do it on my own terms,” she says. Of course, fans of hers can always expect to be kept guessing, as Tellier describes in the album’s press release. “After having worked with Dita, I can say without exaggerating that she’s a fantasy factory . . . when you think that you’ve finally pierced her mystery, she turns out to be more than ever, a creature of dreams, totally out of reach.”