The shop was artfully cluttered with antique display racks and cabinets to give it a pleasantly retro feel so that even the English could enjoy frilly underwear safe in the knowledge that it came wrapped up with an ironic postmodern bow. On one wall there were framed photographs of women, all either monochrome or in the faded tones of 1960s color photography. The women were mostly half naked or dressed in corsets and the kind of frilly knickers that probably got my father in a twist. One was the famous Morley portrait of Christine Keeler sitting backward on a rather uncomfortable-looking Scandinavian chair. Several had been autographed and I recognized one of the names—Rusty Gaynor, the legendary queen of Soho strippers in the 1960s.

The manageress checked carefully through the receipts.

“Definitely not a man,” she said. “Not in these sizes. Although judging from the rest of the items, we’re talking about a big healthy girl here. If I had to make a guess I would say these were bought for a stage act.”

“What kind of act?”

“A burlesque dancer,” she said. “Without a doubt. Probably one of Alex’s girls. Alexander Smith, puts on shows down at the Purple Pussycat. Very tasteful.”

“A stripper you mean?” I asked.

“Oh dear,” said the manageress. “You mustn’t call them that.”

THE DIFFERENCE between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class.

“We don’t have poles onstage,” said Alexander Smith, burlesque impresario. He was a thin fox-faced man in a fawn-colored suit with 1970s lapels but not, because there are limits to decency, a kipper tie. Instead he wore a plum-colored ascot with matching pocket handkerchief and, probably, silk socks. He was so completely camp that it didn’t really come as too much of a surprise that he was married with grandkids. No gay man would have to work that hard. Smith cheerfully showed me the photographs of “her indoors”—his wife—along with little Penelope and Esmerelda, and explained why poles were the work of the devil.

“Inventions of Beelzebub himself,” he said. “Stripping is about getting your kit off in time to the music. There’s no real eroticism to it, the punters want to see her minge and she wants to get paid. Wham bam, no thank you, ma’am.”

Over his shoulder I watched as a fit-looking white woman on the club’s small stage rotated her hips to Lounge Against the Machine’s cover of “Baby’s Got Back.” She was wearing a dancer’s leotard and a baggy pink sweat top and I had to admit that, despite the lack of minge, I was suitably entranced. Smith turned to see what I was watching.

“It’s about glamour,” he said. “And the art of sensuality. The sort of show you could bring your mother to.”

Not my mother, I thought. She doesn’t do ironic postmodernism.