Kiss Kiss

James Dobson of JIMMY D takes us behind the scenes of the KISS KISS party in Pōneke Wellington.

Partying is fun. I remember living in London in the early 2000s and going to a club night called ‘Nag Nag Nag’ when electro-clash music was really starting to take off. One particular night Peaches was performing and Kylie Minogue turned up circled by an army of minders, all in a seedy bar near Tottenham Court Road station. I got photographed mid-dance for I-D magazine and my love of partying was truly cemented.

When I moved back to New Zealand I launched my label [Jimmy D] and a few years later started a club night called “It’s Time To Get Dumb” with some friends. It was still very much on an electro-clash kinda vibe—there was a lot of The Klaxons playing and A LOT of fluro colours on the dance floor. ‘Time to Get Dumb’ was the antithesis of partying in Auckland at the time, everything else was trying to be super slick but we wanted something shambolic, messy and unpredictable (still my favourite kind of club night).

Fast forward many years and I was interrogating ideas of gender with my clothing. I began to wonder why these ideas were only about things from the neck down … what was it about makeup that freaked me out so much? Other than influencers like Manny MUA or James Charles who had a very specific cookie-cutter approach to beauty, there was a lack of people and places to find inspiration for men’s makeup looks. In response to this I started Beauty Benders with my friend Andrey. Our Instagram is a visual mood-board for de-gendered beauty that inspire us, punctuated every once in a while with our own looks. Discovering makeup has made me process my own insecurities about how I look and made me face my own internalised homophobia. I vividly remember feeling incredibly ashamed after the first night I went out with lipstick on, which as a gay fashion designer was incredibly confusing and confronting. Having makeup help me work through that has been hugely liberating.

After moving to Pōneke just over a year ago the only aspect of Tāmaki Makaurau that I missed (other than good friends and Coco’s Cantina!) were nights like ‘Filth’ and ‘Nympho’, which were the perfect excuses to dress up and be liberated through fashion and makeup. I’ve now been super lucky to meet people here in Pōneke that are really determined to stick around and promote the talent that pushes the musical scene forward—people like Kat Lang/Kate Butch who run “Third Party”, a queer-centric club night of bonkers deconstructed dance music.

I met Josh Quinton many years ago through ‘Time to Get Dumb’ co-creator Lula Fortune (we also frequently post his looks on our Beauty Benders account). Josh is a little bit of a London it-boy, with a visual style informed by both the club scene and vintage culture—70s decadence meets camp kitsch. He's DJ'd at events for Vivienne Westwood, Vogue Paris, Riccardo Tisci's birthday party in Ibiza, and even Kate Moss' 40th. Josh reached out to say he was going to be in New Zealand on holiday and that he’d love to DJ somewhere and so I worked with the aforementioned Kate Butch and ‘Jimmy D Presents: Kiss Kiss’ was born.

We wanted ‘Kiss Kiss’ to be about dressing up and feeling yourself, obviously with Jimmy D and Beauty Benders we want people to have a space to really feel free to fully express themselves. We worked with the bar Humdinger which has a suitably luxurious red floor to ceiling paint job which we got them to amp up by flooding the space with red light. Josh’s dark electronic disco was sandwiched between a pop-culture infused set by Beauty Benders that was a deranged industrial pop ode to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Kate Butch’s thumping gay pop shit-post of a set.

There were Margaritas and Watermelon Daiquiris. It was sexy, everyone turned up looking hot and ready to have fun. Standing outside, peering through the Venetian blinds at the packed dance floor, with Josh seductively swivelling his hips with his signature coiffed tower of hair, the red light and puffs of dry ice were all kind of beautiful. Cheesy, but true.