Getting Juicy: Inside the Iconic House of Juicy Couture’s 15 year anniversary ball

'Juicy is a kiki house but we are not a ki,' house mother Nicki Juicy says

Voguing and ballroom are everywhere, and have been for years. “Pose,” the blockbuster Ryan Murphy produced FX show; “My House,” the intimate New York City docuseries from Viceland; “Legendary,” the high-octane competition show from HBO’s streaming platform Max; Beyoncé’s shimmering disco ball of a Renaissance tour (and soon accompanying film) — and more.

And outside of voguing and the ballroom culture that is home to that dance form, there’s been one connective thread through all of those projects: the Iconic House of Juicy Couture, which celebrated itself with a ball that lasted more than seven hours over the weekend.

Dancers participate in the Grand March (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

“We were there to celebrate us celebrating [the community],” Nicki Juicy, who was promoted to the overall mother of the house on Saturday, tells Brooklyn Magazine. “That was our motto: Yeah, everyone is coming to celebrate the contributions we’ve made to ballroom over the last 15 years, but we wanted to celebrate them as well.”

The ball was massive for a kiki function, a subset of ballroom, generally thought to cater to the community’s youngest members with events that are often held at smaller venues. The crowd packed out the Amazura Concert Hall in Flushing, which has hosted a handful of mainstream balls this year that struggled to fill the space.

On Saturday, though, community members huddled around (and stood atop) house tables in cohesive dress codes: The House of Old Navy wore nautical stripes, the House of Dior was decked out in all-silver as if they were headed to a Renaissance tour stop, the House of Mulan wore blue denim with Yonce Mulan in a full-length gown seemingly made from two pairs of jeans, and the House of Telfar was in leather motocross-inspired jackets and leather pants.

Bougie Sadeena (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

Their tables bordered the wide “runway” where the battles happened, opened at one end by an arch of white and gold balloons and closed at the other with a stage where the judging panel sat, with large oversized gold cut outs spelling J-U-I-C-Y at their feet.

“Everyone put everything they had into this ball,” Kemar Old Navy, the overall overseer for that house, says. “I was very surprised. You could tell people had really been anticipating this ball and working up to it with practices and rehearsals. It really showed on the floor.” And it was no doubt, in part, because of the quality Juicy Couture has put out for the past 15 years — the event itself was themed the “G.O.A.T. Ball,” a name befitting a house some would indeed consider one of the greatest of all time.

“Juicy is a kiki house, but we are not a ki,” Nicki says, using ki with its colloquial meaning of a “joke” or “something not to be taken seriously.”

Photo by Stephanie Keith

‘An eye for greatness’
Launched by Courtney Juicy Couture, the group has become the standard in not only the kiki scene but in ballroom — Juicy is one of three existing iconic, Hall of Fame kiki houses which have been in operation for 15 years. Though the kiki scene is thought to be a younger sibling of sorts to the mainstream scene, when the House of Juicy competed on the third season of “Legendary,” they swept the competition in a runaway win beating out eight mainstream houses.

Which makes sense given that many of the mainstream scene’s brightest stars got their start here. That includes Tati Miyake-Mugler who you may have seen on “My House” or “Pose;” it also includes Malik Miyake-Mugler, who won a much-covered voguing battle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art judged by Anna Wintour, danced backup on tour with Saucy Santana, and appeared in a Tiffany & Co. commercial with Beyoncé; and even Honey Balenciaga who was a breakout star of “Legendary” season 2 and a key (often viral) dancer in Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour. All of them were at Saturday’s ball, resplendent in white and gold alongside members of the house from across the U.S. as well as from chapters in Russia, Paris and Australia.

Honey Balenciaga, center, prepares to dance (Stephanie Keith)

“Juicy has an eye for greatness in every sense of how you can take that,” Brooklyn Juicy, a breakout star of “Legendary” season 3, says. “Courtney can look at somebody and just be like ‘you’re going to be fab or you need to do this.’ And that’s just been passed down from Courtney to Tati, from Tati to Nicki, and from Nicki to me. Everybody in Juicy has that.”

Over the years, Juicy has become a house known for productions — elaborate, orchestrated performances including multiple members of the house executing choreography in a scene where many err on individuality. Like everything else from the house, that is also a product of Courtney, a Brooklynite who also founded the dance company Masterz at Work, which has performed her choreography at the Guggenheim Museum amongst other places. Ever about the work — and about those for whom she serves as mother and mentor — Courtney declined an interview for this piece hoping to shift the focus to others. It’s a hard shift to make though as every interview with those under her tutelage contains some version of “Courtney saved me.”

Photo by Stephanie Keith

“When I first met her I didn’t know who she was, I just knew of her,” Nicki says. That fateful meeting was about eight years ago. “She just seemed like everybody’s idol. She seemed like a celebrity, not just within ballroom but within LGBT culture.” Courtney has been dubbed the Queen of Broooklyn and the Queen of New York at times. And she has instilled in the house of Juicy a mantra: Hard work beats talent, every time.

Photo by Stephanie Keith

“We can fix talent,” Nicki says, contradicting an often-repeated notion that things can’t be taught. “If you work hard, you can beat anybody on the floor and become the best. Because we only make the best.”

The result is a culture of perfection and excellence that starts at a young age (some are recruited as young at 15). It’s resulted in Juicy’s becoming the house to beat at every ball they attend and a standard bearer for the scene writ large.

But on Saturday, as is typical for a house ball, they took the night off, opting to celebrate and watch from the sidelines as other houses battled it out for categories like a $3,000 fem queen performance matchup. London Mulan took home the cash.

“The Juicys always win.” Nicki says. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, the Juicys win. So we wanted everyone else to know what that felt like.”

Here are a few more photos from the ball.