Burlesque Making A Comeback

From Bettie Page to Dita Von Teese to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, the glammed out strip tease performance art known as Burlesque is being restyled, revamped and coming back in a big way-making the ideas of sex, fetishism, and femininity more emphasized than every before. Today, more and more female pop stars feel that they must up their style and performances in order to stay in toe with Lady Gaga whose increasingly strange music videos have made her more popular than ever. Lady Gaga's fetish clothing items and racy, over the top dance performances have helped bring back the strip tease art form of burlesque performance. Burlesque started in the 1930s when the age of feminism was on the rise. Burlesque made way for playboy, pinup girls, porn and fetishism. Burlesque performances were done in strip clubs and caberets as not only a form of entertainment but also a form of empowerment for women. Even as the decades have gone on, the performers and advocaters of burlesque never let the message of beautiful and powerful women fade away. Burlesque has been one of the biggest supporters and action-takers for feminism since it was first invented in the early 20th century. I think that although Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Beyonce and other female pop stars music videos and performances have gone above and beyond strange according to the general public, their concepts that are ultimately restyling this age old art of burlesque is a good and important message. Burlesque has always tried to send the message that their is no standard of beauty for women. A woman can be short, tall, fat, thin, tattooed, muscular, bald or bottle blonde, as long as a woman can be confident with herself, she is empowered above all others. With Lady Gaga's controversial dance moves and costumes, I believe she brings back this message and this power-and as other celebrity pop stars follow her lead, they pick up where pinups like Bettie Page and burlesque queens like Dita Von Teese have left off.