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If you know anything about Paris ball culture, chances are it’s because of Kiddy Smile. In the video for his breakout 2016 single “Let a B!tch Know,” which now has over 1 million views on YouTube, he is flanked by torch-bearing friends who vogue amid the towering Brutalist buildings of his neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, locally known as the banlieues. While the video gives some indication of Smile’s vibrant sense of style, it doesn’t quite do justice to his towering height. Well over 6 feet tall, the French producer swept into the Vogue offices a few days before New York Fashion Week this past February, dressed in a flowing black trench coat that only accentuated his frame. He was accompanied by his friend and mentor Steffie Mizrahi, a pioneer of Paris’s fledging ballroom scene.
Smile and Mizrahi first met on the Paris underground club scene in 2013, and it wasn’t long before she asked him to host one of her balls. “She said, ‘There’s more to dancing than this.’ I was like, ‘Wait, what?’” says Smile, a former hip-hop dancer. “Hip-hop was more about class—you could be there and express yourself as a person of color who didn’t have a lot of means, but I never felt like I could fully be a gay man in that world. When I discovered ballroom, I was like, Oh, this is something that’s about the intersectionality of my existence. I was like, ‘I wish I had something like that when I was younger.’ Steffi said, ‘It’s never too late.’”
Smile wasn’t the only one who Mizrahi took under her wing. As she gently points out at the beginning of our meeting, Mizrahi paved the way for a younger generation of French queer kids. “Can I say that?” she asks, turning to Smile with a tentative look. Smile rolls his eyes in response. “She’s really humble, but the truth is she really did build the scene. It’s a very thriving community,” he says.
Her most recent function, the Cleopatra Ball Part 2, which she organized with cocreator, dancer, and friend Lasseindra Ninja, is a testament to the transplanted house system’s ascent in Paris. The event, a reprisal of Mizrahi and Ninja’s first Cleopatra Ball in 2014, filled up the almost 70,0000-square-foot Le Carreau du Temple at the start of Paris Fashion Week this past February with more than 2,000 people—some participants, others spectators. The initial Cleopatra Ball was the first large-scale event the two had organized together. It was also the first time many of their mentees had competed in categories, Smile included. “Mother Steffi spent nine months teaching me how to walk. I wanted to walk other balls before that, but she was like, ‘I don’t think you’re ready.’ I waited patiently for nine months, and then the Cleopatra Ball. I didn’t win, even though I should have,” Smile says with a smirk.
Mizrahi, whose parents are from Benin and Haiti, essentially grew up between three countries at once, moving back and forth between Switzerland, where she was born, Paris, and Libreville in Gabon. In her teenage years, she worked at Disneyland Paris as an entertainer, dressing up as Pluto and Lumière from Beauty and the Beast, in the hopes of being transferred to one of the Disney parks in the United States. “You needed to be able to speak good English, which I didn’t at the time, so my dream was crushed,” says Mizrahi who saw America as a promised land of sorts for sexual expression. She eventually came to New York some years later for what was meant to be a short vacation, quickly immersing herself in the city’s vibrant ball culture. “I had a friend in the ballroom scene who really greeted me and took me in like family, and this is how I was able to grasp the culture and understand what it was about,” says Mizrahi. She ended up staying for 13 years. It wasn’t until her birth mother died in 2009 that she felt it was time to go back home to Paris.
Once back in France, the last thing Mizrahi had expected was to meet someone who shared her interest in voguing. And yet in Ninja she found a kindred spirit. “I never would have thought that my passion for this culture would lead me to meet someone out there [in Paris] that also wanted to express her queerness and herself,” Mizrahi says of Ninja. When they first met in 2009, Ninja was in the habit of voguing at hip-hop festivals, because there were no balls in France to speak of. She was always the only competitor in drag, and cis women made up the majority of the other contestants.
Mizrahi pushed Ninja to bring the art form back into its original context, as in her opinion, voguing didn’t belong in that more mainstream setting. “I was trying to make her understand that this dance is a part of a culture and you need to express yourself within this format to be understood,” says Mizrahi. “She pushed me to create things and to do things. At first I didn’t want to share or create anything,” says Ninja. “It was very selfish. She would say, ‘You have ball knowledge. You should share with the girls, and create something.’”
Like Mizrahi, Ninja was also a third-culture kid. Although born in France, she never lived there much when she was younger. Instead, she lived in French Guiana, where her mother is from, and she spent a good amount of time in New York, where her father lived. With the help of an in-the-know friend, Ninja started to sneak off to balls when she was 12 and 13. She competed in a few categories while she was still in the U.S., such as runway and realness—her first time in drag—but it wasn’t until she moved back to Paris in 2005 after a brief stint in London that she started spreading the knowledge she’d gained in New York. “I arrived back in Paris in 2005, which is the same year that YouTube came out,” Ninja says speaking on the phone from Paris. “One of the girls I was hanging out with was really interested in voguing because she saw it on YouTube. I was like, ‘Okay, you like this? I know a little bit of it. I can teach you what I know about it.’ That’s how it started.”
Once they had gathered a small group of interested people—Ninja says it was about five at the start—to teach the basic framework of the ball system, they began organizing their own functions and put a distinctly Parisian spin on the proceedings. “I created the category of Baby Vogue,” says Ninja of these French idiosyncrasies, a category for voguers who are still in the process of finding their footing. “It’s like a transition category—it’s a huge transition, and then they find themselves,” Ninja says. “In New York it’s different, because you have people who can teach you and pass you the torch. Here, the fact that it’s just the two of us, we had to start from scratch.”
Both Ninja and Smile emphasize that the French ballroom scene is rooted in the heritage of its participants. “Some of our parents chose to come to Europe to give themselves and their kids better lives, and I think what we’re bringing into this scene is our culture,” says Smile. “Our music is inspired by the West Indies and different parts of Africa, and even the moves that we’re doing when we’re dancing and the themes of our balls, it’s really implicated in the culture of our parents and our backgrounds.”
The ethos behind the Cleopatra Ball itself brings this deeply layered sense of identity to the fore, while highlighting a French style element. Ninja had wanted to do something centered around Egypt for a long time. “I wanted people to understand that Cleopatra was not white, had never been white, and would never be white. She was an African queen, a black queen,” she says. “It was a way for me to give our people here a sort of pride, because when it comes to black history, it’s always being rewritten or erased.”
And fittingly, the inspiration for the runway category of both the Cleopatra Balls was one of Ninja’s favorite fashion shows, the iconic Spring 2004 Dior couture collection by then creative director John Galliano. Fashion history obsessives will remember the veritable visual feast of Ancient Egyptian references: towering headpieces fit for Nefertiti, hieroglyph-printed gowns, and skirts made from wrapped-around fabric that created an illusion of mummification. “It was based on Egypt, but the way they brought it here to Paris, they still did it their own way,” Ninja says.
The ballroom participants went with this very same approach when it came to crafting their outfits. There were gilded bodysuits, sequined puff sleeves, and intricately jeweled headpieces, all made by hand. “I was really proud of them because these were all their own creations,” says Ninja.
The scene might still be relatively small, but it’s created a ripple effect throughout Europe. Mizrahi says that analogous scenes have popped up in London, Italy, and Spain. Even ballroom veterans on the other side of the Atlantic have started to take notice. “At first, America used to laugh at us, but now they’re traveling to participate in our events. It’s getting bigger and bigger, and I think it’s because the LGBT youth need safe places to express themselves,” says Smile. I ask Mizrahi if she was surprised at how well the culture translated to France, hoping for a personal take in response, but she deflects away from her own experience. “One thing I knew from the beginning was that this movement was bigger than me, that it would grow and go places,” she says. “I understood how this culture had helped me and that it would impact others, too—help them grow.”
