Ken Morris and Jaheda Choudhury both grew up around needles and thread. Ken’s uncle was a tailor who had a shop in Chorlton.
He’d be packed off to be babysat there during the school summer holidays, and he’d watch him all day long with his tailor’s chalk making suits, transfixed. One of his brothers was also a pattern cutter, and his mum was a machinist, so he was raised watching the seemingly effortless work of skilled craftspeople.
Likewise, Jaheda’s mum, like many women of Asian immigrant families, took in bulk sewing jobs at their home in Sheffield to make a living. So she grew up with a full-scale industrial sewing machine in the sitting room.
READ MORE: The very best pubs in Manchester and Salford
It was perhaps always preordained that they’d end up where they are, creators of some of the most eye-catching and fabulous fashion artistry coming out of Manchester in recent years. And both are at the epicentre of the city’s enduring and ever-growing vogue ball scene.
Voguing gained its mainstream exposure, of course, thanks to Madonna’s 1990 single Vogue, and its famous MTV-rotating video, though she herself had appropriated it from the thriving dance style, which was set to a score of pulsing house music and spawned in New York clubs of the 1980s.
Voguing’s cultural significance was also cemented with the documentary film Paris Is Burning, which concerned itself with New York ballroom movement and its battling ‘vogue houses’. It won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, shining a light on those involved in the scene, and continues to inspire today.
Now, as then, vogue houses of all kinds form and groups of dancers compete with each other in fierce face-offs on staged runways, a celebration of queer culture in all its dazzling glory, though there are straight houses too. The trademark dance moves, evolving from the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s, are vital of course, but they’d be much diminished without the stunning costumery that comes with it. There could not be one without the other.
READ MORE: Manchester Pride has promised to go back to its roots, here's why it needs to
READ MORE: Manchester Pride Parade 2022 time, route and where to watch it
Ken, whose day job is barbering, only started taking to the sewing machine around five years ago. When he’d seen some of the cardboard signs and placards used during Manchester Pride marches, he thought he could do better. So he knocked up some more impressive flags for friends to use instead.
“I knew I could sew, I’d just never really executed it or told anyone about it,” he says. “So I went out and bought a mini sewing machine, and sewed them up some banners. When they saw it, they were like ‘bloody hell, we didn’t know you could sew!’ So people started to ask me to put things like that on clothing, and from that it just evolved, and I was asked to become part of House of Noir.”
House of Noir is the vogue house which Ken makes his complex and beautiful creations for, though he’s quick to stress that while competition might be fierce on stage, the community around it will drop everything to help each other whenever a zip needs sewing or an urgent repair doing during any given ball.
His house is one celebrating queer, trans and intersex artists of colour, and was spawned only last year, but is already a force to be reckoned with in the scene, performing at balls all over the country and often sweeping the board. In his work are clear echoes of style icons like Grace Jones, even George Clinton and Funkadelic.
Because he’d always seen sewing around him, making clothes himself didn’t feel like such a leap. He remembers the long summers he’d spend watching his uncle in his shop on Wilbraham Road. “I’d sit and watch him, calmly cutting and drawing out patterns,” he says.
“He was a craftsman. I learned a lot from him, and that legacy lives on. He made me a pair of school trousers as a kid. I remember all my mates had zip flies, but proper tailored trousers have button flies, and I cried my eyes out because I was the odd one out!”
Both his grandmother and his mum, who bought a large industrial sewing machine from the factory where she worked as a machinist, made costumes for the Moss Side Carnival all through the 80s and 90s. He’d watch them lay patterns out too. “I guess I’m self taught, but with good advisory,” he jokes. “When I ask my mum or my brother for advice on certain things, I always get a masterclass.”
He’d been aware of the vogue scene in Manchester since his early 20s - he’s in his 40s now - when balls would take place at venues like the Nia Centre in Hulme, but the germ of the scene had begun to form in the mid-80s as DJs from New York would arrive in the city to play venues like the Hacienda, with vogue moves quickly crossing the Atlantic too.
“The thing about vogue ball culture is that it was never truly dependent on having a gay audience,” he goes on. “It was a gay entity and a safe space for people to come out and feel good about themselves, and to be appreciated for who they are. But gay people would go on nights out, and want to bring their straight allies and friends.
“And you’d find that when clubs self segregate, like gay-only or straight-only or lesbian only, you create a division in your community. The magical part about the vogue ball culture is that sense of community. So we created a place for it, a place where everyone is welcome.”
Jaheda’s experience - she and Ken have become firm friends through the scene - is not dissimilar. Sewing was always there, growing up in Sheffield. An immigrant Bengali family, her parents arrived in the UK in the 1970s, and while her father worked in the steel factories, her mother would repair clothes in bulk. She’d be paid in weight, working from home.
During the day, she works as a freelance dresser and costume maker at the Palace Theatre and the Opera House, and has had a hand in every show from The Lion King to Sister Act (“Every show that’s come through the Palace or Opera House, I’ve stitched something, washed something, iron summat, fixed summat or stuck some sequins on it”, she jokes) and was formerly a jobbing actor herself, as well as a musician.
But her true passion is spreading her message through her own costume making. Her vogue ball work harks back to her heritage, which fits the bill perfectly for her own house, House of Spice, which celebrates South Asian and Middle Eastern cultures.
“My heritage figures in everything I do, because I can’t escape it,” she says. “In the same way that my heart beats. Everything I do has an essence of the South Asian, because that’s my ancestry, and everything I do will have a queer twist too.”
Some of her pieces face-off cultural and political messages, like arranged marriages and female genital mutilation. She had worked as a dresser on the ball scene before becoming directly involved in House of Spice, via its ‘house mother’ Lucky Roy Singh (every house has a leader, known as the house mother, and other artists within the house include Jazzy Spice/BollyButch, Huss, Bengum Spice and Saffy Saffron Spice).
“I just fell in love with these kids, instantly,” she says of the house, which only formed earlier this year. “They have so much enthusiasm and skill. Me and Lucky got on straight away, and there was no turning back. How I feel right now is I’m putting my money where my mouth is. This means more to be than anything, more than anything I’ve ever done.”
Other houses in the Manchester scene include House of Ghetto, and then from Liverpool, the famous House of Suarez and in Birmingham, the likes of House of Babs. Recent events have taken place to crowds bursting at the seems at venues like Gorilla and the Contact Theatre. As veteran house mothers like Darren Pritchard, the dancer and artist who founded House of Ghetto and pioneered the Manchester scene, Ken and Jaheda hope to leave their own legacy too, by creating their own joint studio. It won’t merely be a workplace. They want it to be much more than that.
“When we’re hustling in that space, every single drag artist, or artist of any kind will be able to reach out to us and access skilled costume makers, who understand theatre and understand design,” she says. “A costume that can be built so you can roll around on stage, and it’ll still together, maybe go on tour, or a piece that can turn from a pair of jeans into, I don’t know, a tree. On whatever budget. Even if you have no budget. We’re on the ground, in the community. We want to be able to give people the idea that ‘you can’.
“I want this experience to be fulfilling not just for me, but the whole of our community. I want to leave a legacy that says ‘we did this’, so that when Ken and I are too old to hold up a sewing needle, somebody’s already there making newer, bigger, badder creations.”
You can find out more about House of Noir by following them on Instagram.
House of Spice will be appearing at the Bollox Queer Pride event at the Deaf Institute on Sunday (August 28).
Get the latest What's On news - from food and drink to music and nightlife - straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter.
Read more of today's top stories here
READ NEXT:
- "Get in the bin, Emma": Street food hub calls out woman for claiming rainbow cookie event ‘sexualises’ children
The new food hall and live venue made ‘with love’ that’s breathing life into an ‘iconic building’
Velvet Hotel finishes huge expansion on Canal Street - and has suite with its own private bar
'Manchester Pride has promised to go back to its roots - this why it needs to'
