12/14/2023 0 Comments Strike a poseBy the time the long, hot summer of 1990 rolled around, Madonna’s “Vogue” was topping charts around the world-eventually becoming that year’s best-selling single-and this subcultural movement had officially boiled over into the zeitgeist. The judges included Vogue’s André Leon Talley, the supermodel Iman, and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne somewhere within the crowd, according to queer folklore, was Madonna herself, witnessing the legendary Houses of LaBeija and Ninja storm the runway with their dips, pops, and spins. Duly fascinated, she invited them downtown for a ball like nobody had seen before. to stock designers like John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood. Bartsch had witnessed many of these dancers and misfits “mopping” (or, to put it politely, borrowing without intent of return) from her avant-garde boutique off Spring Street, one of the first in the U.S. In 1989, Susanne Bartsch held the first annual Love Ball as an AIDS fundraiser. After many decades in the shadows, the pageantry of the Harlem ball scene, a community of African American and Latinx creatives seeking to build their own world of self-expression through the medium of dance and DIY fashion, was poised to hit the mainstream. ![]() ![]() Back in the 1980s, the word “vogue” would have recalled little more than a magazine-that is, unless, you were immersed in New York City counterculture, where it had taken on another meaning entirely.
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