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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Adams Morgan Business Climate Benefiting from New Quality Retail, Services and …

Accompanying images can be viewed in the September 2015 issue PDF

By Anthony L. Harvey

For neighborhood-serving commercial establishments in Adams Morgan whose business models and offerings assume patrons from both the community and the Washington area generally, tourist traffic is the canary in the mine — no sound or appearance of tourists and business will be down, sometimes fatally, depending on the strength of the respective business and its capitalization and whether or not there was some larger factor at play, such as the recently completed reconstruction of 18th Street’s roadway and sidewalks.

And the recent 18th Street project (see, “Streetscape Project Completed; Adams Morgan Celebrates the New Look,” InTowner, September 2012 issue pdf, page 1.), as necessary as it was, played just that dead canary role for many businesses. Now, however, with the completion of a beautiful new 18th Street well in place, including its handsome, wide sidewalks, new street furniture and lighting, and hopefully more realistic rental and leasing packages for potential proprietors to attract more new businesses, tourists are being sighted in the heart of Adams Morgan and proprietors are anecdotally reporting steady — in spite of 2015’s severe winter weather — and recently rising receipts.

New retail shops, restaurants, and bars are opening, or posting signage proclaiming soon to open new or expanded establishments — filling presently vacant storefronts — and existing businesses are both expanding and creating new and similar shops, restaurants, and bars.

The heart of Adams Morgan’s 18th Street commercial and nightlife strip lies between Kalorama Road and Columbia Road together with the strip’s immediate westward arm of Columbia Road to Mintwood Place; it is the focus of this report. The bustling and thriving 18th Street and Florida Avenue nucleus of successful Adams Morgan businesses, and the relatively somnambulant stretch — other than the Safeway and CVS — of Columbia Road to Mozart Place are different matters to be considered perhaps on another day.

18th Street from Kalorama Road to Columbia Road

New and expanding restaurants, bars, shops, and non-profits are the highlights in this core part of commercial 18th Street, with the newest bar being, by all accounts, the delightful, live-comedy themed “dive bar” named “High Dive,” which recently opened in the space previously occupied by Pharmacy Bar. The bar’s attractive young owners do not take themselves too seriously; they obviously enjoy the irony of “High Dive” as a name — as in high diving board — by choosing a very attractive, sleek nautical design for the bar’s interior, complete with decorative portholes, and yet emphasizing that their “dive bar” is a contrarian gesture in an age of the decline of dive bars — witness the closing of Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, a 23-year iconic Adams Morgan night spot on Columbia Road, and the recent shuttering of the popular Dr. Clock’s Nowhere [dive] bar on the second floor above Rendezvous.

High Dive’s overriding themes are comedy acts during the week and a once-a-week open mike session. Beer and several mixed drinks are the menu — no food other than bar snacks — but patrons are invited to bring their own food. For those fearful of Adams Morgan loosing its touch of “edginess,” the English basement level at the old Pharmacy Bar, which one accesses by a tiny concrete staircase, is a cave-like venue named DC Vape Joint; it is an emporium featuring electronic cigarettes and has a dusky dungeons and dragons sort of vibe that’s billed as a full service shop that includes a vape lounge.

A terrific Korean-American restaurant called BUL Korean has opened in the old, and long vacant space that once housed Lautrec. The food is delicious, especially the flavorful and chewy pork spareribs and the homemade kimchi. After dealing with a DC government bureaucrat who informed the proprietors that the painting on the building replicating the great poster by Aristide Bruant of Toulouse Lautrec and a defining historic district icon for which no competing signage would be allowed and that awnings were not allowed in the historic district, BUL seems to be working out its signage and outdoor seating problems. BUL’s food is reasonably priced, with amply sized portions that are engagingly presented; it is happily located next door to one of Adams Morgan’s favorites, the fine French bistro La Fourchette.

Across 18th street from BUL is a magnificent new bike shop called Bicycle SPACE in the old Slaviya Restaurant and Lounge location (I can remember when the building housed Cities and before that Dance Place). Its large showroom-style plate glass windows showcase an amazing array of terrific looking bikes, and the proprietors come to Adams Morgan with a great reputation for sales and service. It will become even more vital to the neighborhood if, as rumored, City Bikes decamps for larger quarters outside the neighborhood that reportedly will include space for both storage and repairs — space which City Bikes lost when the City Paper building on Champlain Street was demolished by the developers of the so-called Christian Science Church Historic Hotel building.

Also on the west side of 18th is another large space comprising storefronts formerly occupied by the notorious nightclub NY NY Diva. One storefront will be occupied by a new traditional restaurant with an ABC license — two firms are vying for the space – and the other is already taken and attractive signage in its shop windows announces the coming attraction to be a handsome adult lingerie shop. The community rejoiced at the departure of NY NY Diva when the District shut it down in October of 2014 following its numerous health department, alcoholic beverage, fire code, and disorderly conduct violations.

Also on the west side of the street, closer toward Columbia Road is Donburi, a relatively new “Japanese rice bowls” eatery in the form of a single counter diner. The food is glorious, my favorite being the barbecued eel — a scrumptious dish. The panko coated shrimp and pork dishes are also outstanding, and the food is reasonably priced — both to eat at the counter and as takeout. Donburi has now received its beer and wine license and serves Saki and Japanese beer with its food — with a two-bottle limit per customer.

Directly across the street is another outstanding and relatively new restaurant, equally successful but larger, again with very reasonably priced dishes. Its ramen offerings are exquisitely spiced — with homemade buns, dumplings, broths, together with wonderful and amply portioned pork belly entrées. Always calm and crowded — but pleasantly so — and now expanding from its cozy and well-laid out English basement level to the main floor above.

The newest restaurant entrant on 18th Street, SONGBYRD Café and Music House, is located on the first floor and a second level of the former Federal and District restaurant and nightclub — another notorious Adams Morgan night spot that lost its license. Its name celebrates the legendary Charlie Byrd, whose live performances in a earlier nightclub establishment at this location — the Showboat Lounge — electrified audiences with Byrd’s unique acoustic guitar creations that fused and inflected traditions of folk, jazz, and bossa nova. SONGBYRD is a wonderfully ambitious establishment — already providing a coffeehouse environment serving delicious sandwiches and specialty coffee drinks, and offering such intriguing services as the sale of vintage vinyl records, a live, on-site, record recording capability, and with other complementary activities in the offing.

Columbia Road to Mintwood Place

Columbia Road immediately west of 18th Street has two new restaurants and an attractive retail store of note called URBAN DWELL, which is located in a handsome storefront in the recently built-out street level floor of the Alcazar apartment building. URBAN DWELL is chock full of attractively presented soft goods, primarily of small items — totes and leather goods, gift books and calendars, candles and gadget items for home, tee-shirts and clothing for children, and lots of games. It is very child and family friendly and has reasonable prices, notwithstanding its classic upscale appearance.

Several doors west from URBAN DWELL, at the corner with Mintwood Place is an outstanding Afghan restaurant that recently succeeded Napoleon, the French restaurant from the same proprietors. They have named their new establishment named Lapis after the beautiful blue semi-precious Lapis Lazuli stone of Afghanistan. I found the food is excellent, with the first three of five appetizers on a sampling menu from which I chose an onion and potato bolani, a spinach sambosa, and a shamee kebab to be absolutely extraordinary, as was the chutney sauce and white yoghurt served with them. My main dish, the chicken kebab, was excellent, served on a seasoned skewer containing a generous portion of boneless chicken breast, all reasonably priced and graciously served.

The second of the two new restaurants, Pops Sea Bar, is closer to Columbia Road — next door to Cashion’s Eat Place, another great favorite in Adams Morgan and the parent establishment of Pops. Oysters on the half shell and a variety of shell and fin fish fill a casual and relaxed oceanfront-style seafood restaurant and raw bar. The seafood I sampled was excellent, and the platters come with generous portions of sides, especially the fries. Catfish, red snapper, and crab cakes were the most popular items among those eating around me. Prices for the fin fish platters were modest, as were the portions of fish. Pops fills a real and important niche in Adams Morgan eateries.

With new establishments such as these joining with the terrific restaurants, retail shops, and bars already present in Adams Morgan, one can easily envision a coming renaissance in eating, entertainment, and shopping throughout the neighborhood’s commercial strips.

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