Irma Vep, The Last Breath: An unstable outlaw of a gender.
Irma Vep was born fully formed in 1915, a woman who was never a girl, a gangster whose name was an anagram for “vampire,” and a popular enigma whose mouth had two meanings: Lips closed, she had a secret; mouth wide, she was ready to suck the life out of everything. She terrorized the upper class.
Wearing a black bodysuit, Irma Vep was shifty and slippery, infiltrating upstanding drawing rooms to plot robberies and murders. In an era when proper women wouldn’t be caught dead acting or writing, Irma Vep—the vamp—was a perfect representative character for Musidora, the woman who played her…
