How Marc Jacobs is giving back to ball culture

In the middle of New York’s West Village, there’s a men’s restroom scrawled with the instantly recognisable line drawings of Keith Haring. In these toilets, the walls are covered with entangled nude figures, touching, sucking and fucking, an erotic homage to the carefree days of queer sexual culture before the AIDS crisis struck. Haring created the work over the course of several days in 1989 for a show marking the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots at the LGBTQ+ community space, The Center, his last major mural before his death only nine months later.

35 years on and just down the hall from the bathroom, a ball is taking place. Marking Pride month once again, the event is showcasing and celebrating the talents of the House of Marc Jacobs, a ballroom house set up in 2021 with the express blessing of Jacobs himself. To the delighted cheers of the audience, members of the house – and others including Balenciaga and Juicy Couture – dip, duck-walk and vogue down the runway, battling it out for trophies. Of course everyone is a winner at this ball because, as Jacobs likes to remind us, everyone is perfect – it’s the running motto of the night since the ball is part of a Pride month campaign in support of Perfect, Marc Jacobs’s fragrance celebrating self-acceptance and love.

Taking on the role of host at the ball was house founder and father, Jamari Amour, an experienced voguer and dancer, who won the first season of Legendary back in 2020. After meeting Jacobs and gaining his blessing, Amour set up the house and has spent his time since then supporting and nurturing his house family. “The House of Marc Jacobs means a lot to me, it’s been a safe haven,” says Jamari. “I come from a very nurturing background, between my biological parents and my gay parents. But a lot of people in ballroom don’t have parents or get kicked out of their home and so I’ve become a father figure. Now that love that I received, I give that back to my kids.”

From its beginnings in the late 20th century, ballroom culture and houses provided escape, community and love for people who were denied these things by their biological families and wider society. Its discovery by the mainstream in the 1980s brought certain levels of fame and acceptance to those involved in balls but this attention has also been a double-edged sword, as brands and artists outside of the community have taken advantage of it for profit and clout without offering much in return.

“It’s a love-hate situation: I love that my community is getting its light and its just due finally but they are also culture grabbers. They just come into the culture, grab what they want and leave,” says Amour. “They use our identity, they use our words, our vogue, and then throw crumbs at us. They make millions of dollars [during Pride] and then we’re stuck on the back burner again.” Having said that, Amour is grateful to be a part of the Marc Jacobs brand which he feels has a more authentic connection to the culture thanks to Jacobs’ past. “Marc understands ballroom and he sees it, and it’s amazing to know that we can book things through them and get the recognition we deserve.”

Smokii Jaii, another of the house’s fathers and a judge at the ball, has been voguing for 20 years. He agrees that good and bad have stemmed from ballroom’s mainstream visibility. “You can’t get sweet without a little sour,” he says. “But visibility helps with pride and is important to be able to achieve the type of legacy that we’re trying to assist with.”

To build a legacy, you need to have solid foundations, which Jaii and Amour are working to create through nurturing the members of their house and their talent. “It’s been an amazing journey. We’re finding our footing and now we have a core group of individuals that you can only establish through time,” says Jaii. For him, training involves working not just on ball techniques but also on mindset. “The biggest thing is being able to train individuals to be able to hit the floor but also to be confident, that way even if you don’t get the prize, you’ve worked every single moment to make it to that night, [in a way] you’ve gotten a prize. So that’s something we try to instil and that we look for.”

It’s the family support behind closed doors, Jaii says, that encourages and allows the younger members to feel comfortable practising and messing up, and he always encourages them to lean on the leaders in their house to be parents and guide them through the process. “We just try to uplift each other and support each other and give each other strength to walk through the streets and make it normal for this to be our normal,” agrees Amour. “We push and support each other in every aspect and way, supporting them in school and work outside of ballroom as well.”

Increasingly, Amour is finding that many of his followers on social media are looking to him for inspiration and representation, rather than solely dancing techniques. “It’s crazy when people tell me, ‘you’re inspiring me to do so much,’ because I’m just a dancer but I also do understand that seeing me be myself authentically and expressing myself does open up a lot of doors. I didn’t realise that until after Legendary when people would message me and tell me, ‘you’ve helped me understand who I am as a person.’”

In this way, ballroom becomes a vehicle to give love and support and, as it always has done, to create moments of escape and fantasy from a world that is still persecuting and discriminating against the queer community. “We get to be in a space where it’s magical and it’s fun and then [for some people] you go to work and you’re miserable. Some people can’t even get jobs because they’re gay,” says Amour. “So I always tell all my kids to encourage each other and to support each other. The brighter picture is always being able to just have that love and support.” Or as Jaii puts it: “Many legs, one body, a sound mind, keeps it going.”