Fashion Brief
The Mugler Ball, which took place in Queens, New York last weekend, was probably the most fabulous party you weren’t invited to. A sea of gay and straight scenesters gathered at a ballroom to watch a mix of new and legendary vogue dancers compete on stage. It featured all that one would expect from the drag event of the year: theatre, excitement, drama, scandal and sequinned catsuits galore. But beyond these hallmarks, it revealed that vogue ballroom culture has reached a new level of cultural influence. FKA Twigs, who has been training with the vogue dancing legend Jamel Prodigy, took the stage for a 30-second routine of classic hand illusions before gracefully sliding to the floor into a dramatic dip, which is to voguing what the triple Salchow is to figure skating (ie, very difficult). Later that night, Rihanna got on to the stage to do a little preening of her own. Afterwards, pictures from the ball went viral thanks to the stream of famous guests such as Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing, who gushed, in all caps no less, on Instagram about his “FIRST VOGUEING [sic] BALL”.
Voguing, a form of dance that was created on the streets of Harlem by a subculture of young gay men in the 1980s, is most easily recognised for its flamboyant hand movements, twirls and poses based on the runway walks of models, and usually performed to house music and a chorus of men screaming “Werk!” and “Yaaaasss!” But it’s more complex than that. Voguing is an art that’s inextricably linked with ideas of fashion, luxury, and social and economic mobility; its dramatic hand and leg movements are based on elements of classical ballet, jazz and modern dance techniques such as those founded by Martha Graham and Lester Horton (many voguers are professional dancers).
Balls are the traditional voguing platform. They are judged competitions with some musical theatre, some fashion week and a bit of X-Factor style battles mixed in, and the Mugler Ball is reflective of a wider flirtation between ballroom culture and the worlds of fashion, art and music, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the early nineties when Madonna co-opted the movement for her Vogue video and reduced it to a series of MTV hits.
The critically adored fashion label Hood by Air, founded by the former vogue dancer Shayne Oliver, frequently incorporates references to voguing in their runway shows, and have had such an impact on the fashion industry that the New York Times recently speculated Oliver may have had an influence on the catwalks of Riccardo Tisci and Alexander Wang. And then there’s the gender fluid rapper Mykki Blanco, a fashion crowd favourite and Hood by Air collaborator, whose decidedly countercultural work is praised by very mainstream outlets such as Entertainment Weekly and Interview magazine; in his video, Wavvy, he dances in glam-rock drag at a black tie ball. Meanwhile, at the end of London fashion week in September, Christopher Kane, Roksanda Illincic, Jonathan Saunders, Hamish Bowles and a long list of other fashion notables joined the performance artist Jonny Woo for his staging of the Miss Hoi Polloi pageant at the Ace hotel. The event was based on the documentary The Queen, which chronicled a series of drag pageants hosted by Flawless Sabrina. And last week, MAC Cosmetics held a party to celebrate the iconic drag performance artist Joey Arias. “There’s a new generation exploring. There are more transsexuals, people are experimenting more,” Arias says.
It has been 24 years since the documentary Paris is Burning first put a spotlight on Harlem’s ballroom culture and the gender fluid black and latino young men who frequented it. Their styles were eclectic – elegant transwomen, melodramatic butch queens, rough banjee boys, and a myriad of permutations in between – but they were always well dressed, even going as far as to name their loosely organised crews after iconic fashion brands such as the House of Balenciaga or the House of St Laurent. In ballroom culture, the house you belong to is everything. More than a members’ only club, the house is a chosen “family” and social network; a safe place in a city where life can be difficult for a gay black boy. It was a particularly strong act of devotion to name one’s house after a fashion brand, considering the world of pret-a-porter was rarely accessible to them. But today, it’s the opposite. Fashion, art and music seem to be increasingly influenced by ballroom culture rather than the other way around, and it’s the young men who came up in that scene, long a countercultural fringe movement, who are the new arbiters of taste.
But before that happened, ballroom culture went the way of most fashion trends: in and then out. After co-opting it, Madonna turned it into a global phenomenon that climaxed with the release of her documentary, Truth or Dare in 1991. After that, mainstream interest in voguing died down, though musicians and model agencies hired some dancers for behind the scenes roles such as video choreography and catwalk coaching.
Rashaad Newsome, the contemporary artist based in New York, is arguably the godfather of the next generation ballroom movement. “I think it has to do with the work called Untitled I put in the 2010 Whitney Biennial,” he says. “Before that I had never seen work in a gallery or institution about ballroom culture.” Untitled featured a dancer demonstrating various styles of voguing on camera. It also cemented Newsome’s position as the connector – the Kevin Bacon, if you will – of all of the scene’s buzziest players. For example, the Untitled dancer was a then-unknown Shayne Oliver.
Last summer, Newsome put on his own vogue extravaganza called the King of Arms Ball. He brought together luminaries from the contemporary art and underground ballroom scene to watch dancing competitors, including the popular dancer Alex Mugler, a member of the iconic voguing collective, House of Mugler, the same group that had its own now legendary ball this past weekend. Newsome also works with Jamel Prodigy, the dancer who has been training FKA Twigs since he met her through a choreographer at a club. “He introduced me to this girl from London who really wanted to learn how to vogue. And then when I met her I realised hers was the face I had been seeing on posters all over New York. She wanted to get the authentic New York experience from a ballroom legend.”
It all seems to add up to an overall celebration of gender fluidity in fashion and beauty culture, a moment in which people who may have been relegated to the status of camp entertainment in years past are finally being taken seriously. Perhaps the most potent example of this is Redken, the mass-market beauty Behemoth, hiring Lea T, transgender model and countercultural heroine, as its latest face. “Gay is the new black,” as Prodigy puts it. And while the fashion and beauty worlds have always embraced, and to an extent been largely dominated by gay men, they haven’t been particularly open to transgenders. “It’s one of those things where everything that wasn’t, now is. And everything that was a ‘no’ is now a ‘yes’.”
It could be argued that fashion’s current celebration of gender nonconformity is a natural step in its slow but gradual shift towards diversity. Or possibly it’s the latest frontier in fashion’s perennial search for the new. Roger Joseph, a luxury brand consultant who is familiar with ballroom culture, thinks it’s a bit of both. “I think that when compared to the increasingly corporate art and fashion worlds, ballroom culture feels more real, inclusive and expansive.” He adds: “I think we’re seeing ballroom culture referenced more now because the fashion industry is beginning to reflect what it sees. If the lovely Laverne Cox, the transwoman star of the Netflix hit Orange is the New Black, can grace the cover of a storied American publication like Time magazine and bring compassion, eloquence and wit to conversations around gender and the trans community, then why wouldn’t designers want to seize its currency?”
- This article was amended on 20 November 2014. The article originally stated that Crystal LaBeija hosted the documentary The Queen and starred in Paris is Burning, both of which are incorrect. This has been corrected.
