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| Baltimore, Maryland |
(at a glance)
Organizational Structure
- Composed of high school age to college age
- Can be based in the community or in academic settings
- Receive sponsorships from local area designers for some shows
- High community involvement
- Ran in a business style with CEO's as the head and officers with titles reminiscent of corporate companies
- Feminine and dynamic aesthetic
- Influenced by vogue dance and gay ballroom scene
- Flashy fashion, but uniform like dance squads
- High emphasis on choreography
- Mechanical-not much variation
- Produce many short mini shows for competitions
- Walk in local fashion shows
- Girl group routine
- Ballroom European runway (girls)
- Boy routine
- Ballroom All-American or European runway (boys)
- Girl (or Full gender) group routine
- Ending European Runway or Flood
- Shows range from 5-9 minutes in length
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| Models Inc - Lies, Secrets, and Rumors - 2010 |
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Performance modeling in this area is heavily inspired and borrows from the gay ballroom scene. Many of the troupes focus on elaborate, precise choreography and perform epic group routines that take up the stage and all of time/space. What's so interesting about many of these groups is that they are formed by high school aged members; though there are a few organizations composed of college aged individuals. These troupes can be found anchored to local schools or survive as community based initiatives, where members get together after work, school, and etc. The community based troupes have the ability to exist outside academic institutions mainly due to DC's efficient transportation system (i.e. the metro) and dense urban population. The upside to being a free standing troupe is that the organization doesn't have to worry about school rules and criticisms from faculty or parents (depending on the age of the models participating). Such freedom of expression in an already liberal area of the nation allows for a cutting edge style of performance modeling to flourish. However, it is not the only factor that makes DMV troupes so successful and admired.
Below:
Xquisite Models perform at a competition. The routine was sickening, but the fashion was boring (to me). What do you guys think?
Competitions in the DMV area are hot, heavy, and bad! Competition is what the DMV troupes live for. Competition leads to innovation! By competing against each other so much every year and coming hard, these groups are forced to do better, look better, and strive for crowd pleasing techniques to please the judges, this factor accounts for their colorful, eye catching style. DMV troupes are about getting the crowd hype and interregional rivalry, they are flashy.
I have friends that are stuck on these area troupes. I mean, they're great at what they do, but they have lost the essence of certain performance modeling elements to me. Mainly fashion and production, look up most videos of these groups (Xquisite Models, Models Inc., Living Legends Entertainment, and etc)and you will see what I have already pointed out as fashion faux pas, all "black everything", uniformity, or excessive ready-to-wear. However this is not always the case. There are times when DMV troupes utilize the cosmopolitan locations they are based in and come up with some off the wall creative fashion ideas, but this is not a consistent thing. Why southerners continue to look to the North for inspiration instead of being original and having confidence in their own artistic perspective is beyond me to answer. Yet, while on the subject, let's move on the southern regions in the next post.
Below:
Models Inc. puts on it's Fashion Fusion show, good fashion that was different. Loved the gender bending, common errors were made but overall a stand out piece.
Source for photos, includes a cute mini article on Models Inc.
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