The STANS’ LEXICON collection explores fan culture through its slang in the late 2010s. This is a fun, unapologetic, chronically online perfume gift.
Design Intent
STANS’ LEXICON’s chief intent was to celebrate ball culture and uplift those in need of the confidence and community ballroom provides to so many. I also wanted this collection to mirror and question the growing intersection of ball with social structures historically hostile to the actual ballroom community.
I wanted this collection to be a literal introductory lexicon and time capsule of this period- and a spiritual lexicon of how I perceived the general public perceiving ball culture.
I noticed that much of this social integration could be traced to social media and online fandom, where this same discourse would also occur.
For this reason, each scent in the collection- SNAPPED, FAVE, and CORNY- is named for the mix of ballroom slang and internetspeak used in social threads and online forums.
I also wanted to flip this power balance of recognition and credit, humbly naming each perfume ‘house’ in the collection after the idioms used to forge social bonds within the voguing community. Ballroom houses commonly name themselves for iconic fashion houses and cultural icons, yet many of these subjects have and continue to take inspiration from the ball community without credit or thanks (i.e. paying ballroom dust).
Through the lens of fandom, a broader intent was to explore how changes to collective social identity and social osmosis affect ballroom. Algorithmic content discovery and the addictive design of smartphones and social platforms have created an attention economy at the cost of nuance and difference- awareness of ballroom may be growing but many resisting and disengaging from the hard truths within society that necessitate ballroom. Given that the rise of ball was in part to self validate as a community in the face of social erasure, there is a cynical irony in this though the commercialisation of ballroom and the rise of public figures in ball also challenges this irony.
Scent Memory // Actually Smells Like
The scents themselves are fun, quirky and above all nonthreatening. This was a calculated artistic decision to show the hollowness of representation when its parameters are externally defined. This reflects the compromises queer and ballroom tend to navigate for survival and success.
Hoped Impact & Legacy
STANS’ LEXICON is here to thank the art of vogue as a medium to express and accept the authentic self. Perfume can have this same impact, yet it often encourages comparison and exclusion or shame.
When people wear a perfume in this collection- be it SNAPPED, FAVE or CORNY- I want them to feel the strength, safety and serenity that was always inside of them. I want my scents to protect, love and accept the wearer exactly and completely as they are.
WE STAN HARD. | 3 x 10 ml Perfume Gift
The STANS’ LEXICON collection explores fan culture through its slang in the late 2010s. This is a fun, unapologetic, chronically online perfume gift.