I often find myself writing a construction like this:

ax.set_xticklabels([x.get_text() for x in ax.get_xticklabels()],rotation=90)

This just looks ugly and it feels to me like this should have the same effect:

ax.set_xticklabels(rotation=90)

which would just require handling labels=None and defaulting to the current labels.

Or is there already a more idiomatic way to do this that I'm missing?