Dita Von Teese, From Burlesque to a Brand DITA VON TEESE doesn't so much enter a room as materialize there. Before you have quite registered her presence, she is shaking your hand and offering tea, the moment like some deft conjurer's trick. "I'm a magician," she murmurs as if on cue. I make you see something that wasn't there before. That bit of apparent sorcery, she says, is "the very definition of power and glamour." Watching Ms. Von Teese sip her lemon jasmine brew, her yellow dressing gown setting off jet hair and pale skin, you might take her at her word. You might even succumb to the darkly eccentric ambience of her home in the Los Feliz neighborhood, the waning afternoon light fixing on her menagerie of stuffed swans, a peacock and an imperious ostrich casting a haughty eye on visitors. But she is quick to break the spell. "I want people to understand more about me," she says. "People are always asking, "What is it that she does exactly?" " What she does, of course, is drop her clothes onstage, as artfully as her idol Gypsy Rose Lee. Fetish queen, fashion avatar, America's sultry doyenne of burlesque, Ms. Von Teese, nee Heather Sweet of Rochester, Mich., is the toast of at least one generation of would-be calendar girls. And she is far too canny at this stage to even think of throwing down her scepter. Which may be why, at 40, she is redoubling her efforts to cash in on her notoriety by becoming the latest cult phenomenon to turn her name into a brand. At a cocktail party last month at Decades, the luxury vintage shop here on Melrose Avenue, she peeled the wraps from a capsule fashion line, her first. Conceived with Lime Door, an Australian brand-development company, the five-piece collection of curvy-yet-covered-up, retro-flavored items is lavishly detailed with silk or tulle linings and touches of grosgrain. The line is the latest in a series of recent product introductions that include a fragrance, cosmetics, lingerie and hosiery (seamed, of course) that are expected to cement her status as a purveyor of genteel kink. She is gambling that her fans, 80 percent of whom are women, she says, will take the bait. Her champions don't doubt it. "You can tell when somebody is the real deal," said Ron Robinson, the president of the vanguard Los Angeles boutique of the same name, which stocks her fragrance and will, once they become available in the United States, carry her lipsticks and skin balms made by the German brand ArtDeco, as well as a separate line of scarlet press-on nails. "Dita is mature and sophisticated, beautiful and approachable," Mr. Robinson said. Tell me that that's not a brand. CERTAINLY, she has bewitched the fashion world, gathering admirers like Christian Louboutin, Marc Jacobs (whose front row she has graced) and Jean Paul Gaultier, on whose runway she once performed an exotically elegant strip tease. She has appeared in a MAC cosmetics Viva Glam campaign. Her act, provocative in an airbrushed sort of way, has emboldened Cointreau, the upscale spirits brand, to name her its global ambassador. She has a string of imitators, most prominently Katy Perry, who has unabashedly appropriated Ms. Von Teese's femme fatale persona, down to her loosely marcelled waves and winged eyeliner. And this fall she completed a national tour, her show, "Burlesque: Strip Strip Hooray," playing to sold-out houses from Portland, Ore., to New Orleans. All good. But if Ms. Von Teese hopes to become a household name, the kind that sells bijoux and bedding, she has her work cut out for her. Her fashion line, sold exclusively for now at Decades and on shopdecadesinc.com, and priced from about $600 to $1,000, has performed well, said Melissa Dishell, Ms. Von Teese's manager and business partner. "But our version of "well" is not the Kardashians" version of "well." " Ms. Dishell provided no figures.