"A pair of pasties is a miracle of engineering"

Burlesque dancer Fancy Feast reveals the blood and guts behind costuming the striptease.

Burlesque performer Fancy Feast. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“A pair of pasties is a miracle of engineering,” writes the burlesque performer Fancy Feast in her new book of essays, Naked.

It’s also a labor of love. As Fancy explains: “One must fashion matching shallow cones made of fabric, foam, glue, and buckram millinery material dotted in the center with line-to-hook fishing swivels so they can be tipped with tassels and cover in glitter and rhinestones.”

Fancy spends about two hours making a pair of pasties — bejeweled objets d’art that she’ll flash onstage at the end of her act for a scant 20 seconds.

This commitment to the bit — to beauty, to surprise, disgust, titillation, or horror, but mostly to transformation — distinguishes the burlesque artist. “Who else would spend this much time debating the relative sparkle-to-cost ratios of Chinese crystal, resin rhinestones, DMC, or Swarovski?” Fancy writes. “What size, what glue? We all have different answers, but we all know that it matters.”

Fancy spends much of Naked, well, naked — literally, emotionally, often both at the same time. She gives a sex workshop to women who have just survived cancer. She is paid to sit on a chaise lounge naked and shovel cake into her mouth for parties. She strips for a motorcycle convention in remote North Dakota (and kinda maybe fears for her life).

I asked her about all this and more for an interview I did with her for The New York Post. But, of course, I was fascinated by her elaborate costumes, which can be glamorous or grotesque, sexy or hilarious, but always meticulously crafted. I loved how someone would take such painstaking care and thought with something that they’re going to ceremoniously shed in the course of a 5-or-so-minute routine.

But in burlesque, costume often drive the performance. Fancy told me that she usually builds her stripteases around her outfit, instead of cobbling together a look based on a song or idea or dance. I asked her why:

Fancy: Costumes impact how a performer moves, and also what a performer is taking off and in what order. So I have to make sure I have the entire costume ready to go — including things like wig and shoes, which can also impact mobility — before I start figuring out the act.

So oftentimes I will have a song that I really want to perform to, or I'll have an image or a scene that feels really compelling. But until I get those pieces into place, I really can't do much with it.

And if I'm having things professionally made by costumers I'm sort of at their mercy at the mercy of their timeline.

Raquel: Wow! Do you ever just pick up something and think, Oh, that might work one day, and then you'll hit on a song or an idea that this piece of a costume would be perfect for?

Fancy: Absolutely. I pull from a lot of different sources when I'm costuming. So for some performers there's like a pipeline of, oh, this is lingerie that's like no longer good enough to wear in my day to day life. So I'm gonna put some appliqué on it and turn it into a costume piece. Or I’ve found things in thrift stores that have ended up being really, really cool pieces that I thought I could throw on stage. I don't tend to put [them] on stage if they're not somehow altered. The idea of having things that are completely just off the rack isn't as compelling to me because it's something that people could just buy in stores. And I think that that sort of loses the fantasy.

But, like a lot of performers, I will sometimes decide to try out an act or concept with a starter costume, with something that didn't cost me a lot of money, before deciding if I want to invest in updating the costume and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. But I get trapped — like I'll keep using the old first draft version of the costume for like five years.

Some of her costumes are straightforward; a ballgown accessorized with opera gloves and a fan is a classic striptease standby. Yet many of Fancy’s getups have a conceptual bent. (When she was Miss Coney Island she came out dressed in a literal trash bag!) Her “favorite” costume, by Diego Montoya, an Emmy Award winning costumer who works with the RuPaul Drag Race girls, has a combination of elements that Fancy looks for in not only an ensemble but in a routine: glamour, surprise, and a meta-commentary on the act of stripping and nakedness as its own kind of costume or disguise:

Fancy: It is a flesh toned, dripping-in-sparkle gown that's very fitted, with mermaid tulle at the bottom that juts out. But what I love the most about this costume is that it's designed to to rip off in pieces that are full of red velvety blood and viscera. So I come on stage looking absolutely pristine, super glamorous. And then I'm ripping these chunks of like bloody flesh off of myself.

I don't know if you saw the Robbie Williams music video “Rock DJ.” In it, he continually rips off his skin and his and his flesh. The notion of nudity, obviously, is very compelling to me. So I wanted to, to be more naked than naked. I wanted to do an act where I where I take my skin off. It's like people want more of me, so I just like give them everything.

But ironically, I end up fully clothed at the end of the act. It just looks like I am showing my musculature and stuff.

I love that, because in a way, the burlesque dancer is clothed even when she has nothing on at all. She may bare her body, but it is a skin worn by her alter ego, a character that she creates for the stage. Someone who is often more confident, more brash, more confrontational and in-your-face. In a way, Fancy is more exposed in her probing, vulnerable essays than she is at the club, donning a g-string and pasties. For the striptease artist, nudity is just part of the costume.