Ballroom’s Renaissance

On 29 July 2023, O’Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old Black gay man, was stabbed to death during a homophobic attack outside a petrol station in Brooklyn, New York. The reason? Sibley and his friends were playing Beyoncé’s Renaissance album and vogueing to the music.

This is the same year that Beyoncé made more than £400m ($500m, €459m) during her Renaissance World Tour, according to Live Nation. Her concerts featured swathes of dancers vogueing just like Sibley to the pop artist’s tunes on stage for thousands of audience members who had bought pricey tickets to watch the show. The self-defined ‘voguing diva’ Honey Balenciaga even found worldwide stardom thanks to viral performances that included dips, spins and less conventional feline-inspired crawling.

All of these dance figures were born in the ballroom scene, which emerged in New York in the 1970s. By organising underground balls, local working-class African-American and Latino-American LGBTQ+ individuals would create a platform for expression and acceptance.

The award-winning documentary Paris is Burning and Madonna’s worldwide hit Vogue in the 1990s, brought ballroom to a mainstream audience and showcased how balls centre around dance, fashion and performance. Between the 1990s and 2023, musicians – Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, FKA Twigs, among others –started incorporating elements of ballroom culture into their music videos and tours. So did film and television producers who brought to life FX’s Pose, HBO Max’s Legendary, Vice TV’s My House and the global hit reality competition Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Brands too are now waking up to ballroom culture. In 2023, Pose actress Dominique Jackson walked the runway for luxury fashion staple Mugler before posing for a Louboutin Beauty campaign. Adidas Rivalry featured a ballroom dancer in a promotional short film imagined with Rolling Stone Australia, while Adidas Originals chose Legendary’s host Dashaun Wesley as part of a star-studded campaign. Marriott International even enrolled the legendary House of Garçon (a house is a team of performers competing in balls worldwide and managed by an experienced leader known as the mother or father of the house) for its The Ballroom is Open campaign during Pride Month.

Those recent examples show how brands made the effort to find influential figures within the ballroom community to avoid cultural appropriation or pinkwashing.

I can’t help but wonder, however, what happens when more corporations start borrowing elements of ballroom for clout and benefit in an attempt to follow up on Beyoncé’s Renaissance success. It’s already happening. When singer Meghan Trainor samples a queer TikToker to introduce her song Mother, no money goes back to ballroom. When Bed, Bath & Beyond names a comforter Boi He Thick, a language inherited from AAVE immortalised in Paris Is Burning, no money goes back to ballroom. When dance moves popularised by drag performers are reproduced by Daisy Duck during an official Disney Magic cruise ship, no money goes back to ballroom.

What we should be seeing more of is brands taking a stand for LGBTQ+ rights by funding balls. Take Rihanna, who featured vogueing in her Savage x Fenty lingerie show on Amazon Prime and booked Legendary judge, ballroom icon and trans activist Leiomy Maldonado to walk the same show. Fenty Beauty, also owned by Rihanna, gave away £7,970 ($10,000, €9,165) as a prize to the winner of the Face category during a ball, according to Yusef Miyake-Mugler, the singer’s hair stylist and the father of the house of Miyake-Mugler. He told Vogue: ‘I think those things help elevate ballroom, even though I feel weird about cash prizes. I remember just walking a ball for a trophy and a gift card or a MetroCard. It was about getting your status and respect, and nowadays, it’s turned into a cash game.’

In May 2023, Mary J Blige’s Strength of a Woman festival joined forces with Pepsi and Live Nation to throw its own Purpose Ball with the help of insider Miss Lawrence Balenciaga, the Atlanta mother of the house of Balenciaga. Over £47,840 ($60,000, €54,995) in cash prizes were awarded to winners thanks to corporate sponsors. As balls enter new venues and sell tickets, fashion and beauty brands can enter that space and support performers just like they already do for actors, athletes or musicians.

I want to see houses becoming their own production companies, talent agencies and tour managers in order to own their narratives and talent. That’s why, in October 2023, the producers of Ru Paul’s Drag Race launched Avalon TV, a reality series keeping up with members of the house of Avalon.

French DJ Kiddy Smile, who hosted Paris’s largest and sold-out ball to date in October 2023 inside the Élysée Montmartre, starred in a Lancôme lipstick campaign in September 2023. Perhaps the next step would be for the L’Oréal-owned cosmetics brand to launch a new product at a ball. ‘It’s a trend. Fashion is about trends. The only thing we can do is be there, get your money and bounce. Enjoy it while it lasts,’ the DJ told The Guardian.

How long will the hype last? In the 1990s, when Madonna propelled the culture into the mainstream, houses and vogueing performers emerged worldwide from Brazil to Japan. Pose gave comfort to the trans community at a time of endless attacks by Conservative politicians and media outlets in countries such as the US and the UK. Renaissance reinforced the crucial role of LGBTQ+ individuals of colour in music and fashion, inspiring many more to walk their first ball. I’m confident that ballroom, especially vogueing, will continue to thrive and grow in mainstream spaces.

The question remains: will those in power credit and fund the community who invented it first or appropriate it as a tool for relevance and Beyoncé-approved cool? I count on the chronically online LGBTQ+ community to call out the brands and advertisers who will choose to cannibalise a movement they know very little about. For ballroom culture, the category is and will always remain: immortal extravaganza.

Further reading