In this work I recreated a dressing room of an American burlesque performer in the 1920s, drawing from my own experience as a modern burlesque performer. The modern burlesque community holds feminist ideals as part of its collective ethos and regularly refers to the ‘body positive movement’, an offshoot of second wave feminism that began in the 1960s. When considering this image, my first thought was to create the aesthetics of a 1920s burlesque dressing room, but I could not overlook the political undertones of today’s burlesque movement and reflect on the concurrent origins of burlesque and feminism in the 1920s.
