Ballet dancers, circus performers and dance-hall ladies of Montmartre provided staple subjects for the artist from the late 1880s through the early 1890s. Lautrec had been struck by Baudelaire's essay "The Painter of Modern Life" in which he calls on artists to leave the seclusion of their studios and go outdoors to directly capture contemporary life. Rejecting the stiff, unnatural pose of the professional model, he began observing modern life. The artist now focused on unrehearsed gestures thereby eliminating unnecessary details from his paintings. Consequently, Lautrec found it necessary to abbreviate his technique and fortunately, his facile draughtsmaÿnship allowed him to develop a style using very rapid strokes of thinned oil, most of which was concentrated on the subject with the background left to just a bare minimum.

In Danseuse ajustant son maillot, Lautrec has caught the young dancer adjusting her pink tights backstage unaware of our observation of her private moment. Taking from Degas, who made a practice of cutting his figures at unexpected angles, the artist places the dancer on an oblique angle. With exquisite as well as economical use of lines, Lautrec records only the necessary detail adding to the intensity of this portrait. The thinly washed transparent tutu acts as a foil to the thickly painted pink tights.

Charles Stuckey discusses Lautrec's interest in capturing that transient moment of observed reality:

Unaware that they are being observed, their private
meditation is witnessed but not understood. Lautrec
had the profound insight to scrutinize people
looking, or as they follow their thought along paths of
glances over shoulders and across rooms, or tracked
backwards into private reveries. Confronting the
visual act increases our awareness of all that it
can mean to see, and this was Lautrec's poetry.
(C. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings, Chicago,
1979, p. 28)