Welcome to the Undressing Room

La Mome Inette, Fetish Model, Modeling for Yva Richard in Paris in the 1930s

Welcome to Sex Worker Style! I’m celebrating how sex workers dress, why they wear what they wear to work, and how what they wear is both influenced by and influential upon fashion, dress, and culture outside of the sex industry. I am a primary source, having worked in many aspects of the sex industry. I experienced many secret details of fashion, dress, and costume, watching the interplay of workers’ preferences and aspirations, the motives of their employers, the tastes of customers and clients, and the directives of law enforcement affected those details.

Most of the posts here will be from my Instagram, but I’ll be adding more as the project develops. Feel free to send suggestions for study!

I’ve been a sex worker for nearly four decades, working primarily, but not only, as a stripper and dominatrix. I’ve been an anti-censorship activist since high school, and a sex workers’ rights activist and advocate since the 1990s. I’m the author of The Burlesque Handbook and Fierce: The History of Leopard Print. I’m also the Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque. I’m proud to be a survivor and an achiever, after having been bullied, threatened, harassed, and dismissed, told I would amount to nothing. If you’re a sex worker, you can too! And you don’t have to wait as long as I did — I published my first book at 47 years old, and my second eight years later. You can get started whenever it feels right to you.

For those of you who want to support my work, you can tip via venmo @joweldon, or join my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/m/sexworkerstyle for more insider tips and conversations. For all the visuals, follow me on Instagram at @sexworkerstyle. For burlesque classes, see schoolofburlesque.com.

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International Sex Workers’ Rights Day About That Red Umbrella Happy Women’s History Month! We strippers and hookers and weirdos are part of women’s history, too. Here’s Georgette Dante, who’s still performing today, in The Monster And The Stripper (1968). This film is also known as The Exotic Ones , and features June Ormond doing a fan dance in a diaper full of LSD. This glorious woman is The Maine Attraction. We worked together in Atlanta strip clubs in the 1990s, and somehow we moved both moved to New York and became performance artists. Her one-woman show “The Last Day of Black History Month: A Conversation With A Naked Black Southern Lesbian” is brilliant, and I hope when we are all back onstage I get to see it again. I can’t wait to see what she does next. I love her so much. ❤️🌟 Black history is not separate from White history, but since colonialism and the cult of white-male-defined academic authority have dominated the landscape of what’s considered base-level historicity, Black History Month is a necessary reminder to feature what’s been trivialized or erased. For those studying sex work (including sex workers who are doing research, like myself), these books by Black authors are essential reading to understand sex work, and I believe should be read earlier while researching rather than later. I started researching decades ago, and that can sometimes be an asset in terms of aggregated knowledge and experience, but it’s a deficit in terms of the mind set with which I began. It’s not just an obligation, though -- these books are full of data and insights and analysis and juicy, juicy stories that are wonderful, if sometimes challenging, to read. Marinka, January 6 1940-February 16 2021. Repost from @burlesquehall I mean Happy Valentine’s Day!
March 2021
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