Editor’s Note: Fit Check is a series about style and personal expression in the Bay Area. See other installments here.
Gericault De La Rose — a.k.a. Bimbo Moschino — is glowing on a warm afternoon in April, twin butterflies fluttering around her in the garden behind her apartment. She’s in head-to-toe pastels, poised and Sailor Moon chic.
When she first moved to Oakland from Chicago in 2021 to get her MFA at UC Berkeley, De La Rose didn’t feel this sure of herself. She didn’t have a community.
“I had to start over,” she says. “I literally cried every weekend.”
Unbeknownst to her, the revival of a queer subculture was just starting to pop off in her neighborhood. It would redefine her life in the Bay — and it was just a short walk from her front door.
One fall morning, while boredom-scrolling on Instagram in bed, she stopped on a flyer for a ballroom event at Soundwave Studios in Oakland.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, Oakland has a ballroom scene?’” she remembers. “I went over by myself later that week.”
It was dark, and the music was pumping at full volume. De La Rose was wearing black tights, black short shorts, a tank top and Adidas Superstars. Her hair was long at the time, and she felt confident and elegant. The night began with the traditional “Legends, Statements, Stars” acknowledgements, which honor all the local ballroom icons who have paved the way.
Back then, even after years of being in the Chicago ballroom scene, De La Rose didn’t really know how to vogue. But she decided to join in anyway. That night, she got 10s from the judges for the first time in her life.
De La Rose, who belongs to The Kiki House of Moschino, is part of a ballroom legacy that began in the ’70s and ’80s in New York City. Per tradition, De La Rose and her siblings compete against other houses in runway, vogue and other categories. Though ballroom has gotten mainstream attention and counts Beyoncé among its fans, it remains a vital way for queer and gender-nonconforming people of color come together as chosen families in the face of societal rejection and other forms of adversity.
Ballroom was the first home De La Rose found in the Bay Area. It’s also been a space where she’s been able to explore her relationship with style as a trans woman of color.
“It was something that I really craved,” she said. “Because yeah, there’s a lot of queer spaces in Oakland, but a lot of them are white.”
De La Rose started medically transitioning when she was 25 years old. She says that before then, she didn’t really know what she was doing when it came to clothes.
“It was 100% giving Kohl’s,” she laughs. “Khakis, polo shirts — it was very normcore.”
But then something clicked, and an aesthetic fell into place.
“I was like, OK: pastels, pink,” she says. “I kind of just want to look like a Pokémon trainer, not gonna lie. Also Jules from Euphoria.”
De La Rose’s quintessential silhouette is a short pleated skirt, knee-high socks, chunky sneakers and legs for days. Her proclivity for the whimsically feminine shows up in her work as a visual artist, too. For her MFA thesis show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, De La Rose made a chandelier out of draped pastel pink, purple, yellow and blue fabric meant to “capture the splendor of transformation.”
“For me, being trans was not wanting to be a secret anymore,” she says. “I want to be vibrant. I want to be seen.”
And when De La Rose is wearing an outfit that does all that, she feels “like the baddest bitch in the world.”
Still, clothes shopping as a trans woman comes with its challenges.
“Not all clothing brands are tailored to six-foot-tall women,” she explains. “It’s really hard for me to find pants that have a feminine cut, that accentuate the hips more.”
So De La Rose does what queer and trans folks have always done: alter, transform and experiment, needle and thread in hand.
“The best dressed people are in the ballroom scene, no shade,” De La Rose says. “Let’s say I go to the Castro, and I go to these gay clubs. It’s giving jeans, maybe a white T-shirt and maybe a black leather jacket, copy-pasted onto everyone.”
De La Rose doesn’t just mean in the Bay Area: Ballroom scenes are part of LGBTQ+ communities all over the world, with some of the most influential ones in Paris and New York.
So what makes ballroom folks more stylish?
“They know their brands, and they also know how to experiment with their silhouette,” she explains. “The spectrum of masculinity to femininity is all explored.”
In a world of binary clothes, ballroom folks have dreamt up looks that aren’t just new and custom. They can also compete.
“Everything is intentional,” she says. “Because the minute you step into ballroom, the competition starts.”
That innovation at a high level is what sets ballroom apart. And you know it when you see it, says De La Rose. To get her point across, she pulls up a photo of her ballroom mentor, Soho, after a recent Oakland to All ball.
He’s in a look to turns heads: long, lime green leather gloves, a white tee printed with a pointy-eared Doberman, a midi cargo skirt and a crocheted, lime green balaclava with dozens of knitted tentacles cascading from chin to chest with the caption, “Urban Streetwear w/ a touch of Futurama Cunt 👽🛸.”
The outfit is stunning, daring and tells an otherworldly story. It’s a feast in texture alone. It’s the anti-copy paste. And it’s exactly what De La Rose is talking about.
De La Rose pulls up another photo, this one of her ballroom brother, Clover, in a look that masters layering and proportions.
“Creativity,” she says, zooming in. “Like, hello! You see what I mean?”
