At 17, she found work in a strip club where all the other girls were blonde and tanned and wore neon bikinis “and swung around the pole without putting any creativity in to it”. She wore corsets, stockings, opera-length gloves. “I only had two minutes on stage at a time and I’d make $2,000.” Didn’t it feel … hmmm … how to put this … a little un-feminist? “I’d say it’s pretty liberating to get $10,000 for 10 minutes’ work.” Word spread. There were photo-shoots. She studied burlesque and then there were performances: at Marc Jacobs’ Christmas party; for Garrard during New York Fashion week; a private dinner for Diane Von Furstenberg. Then it was the cover of Playboy, which her father thought was fantastic. “It was a validation, of sorts. That may seem strange but if you’ve grown up in America looking at Playboy and all the stars on the covers, it does mean something.” Her father used to keep his Playboys under the bed. “That’s how imaginative he was.
