‘Beauty and dolls are synonymous’: Inside OPIA’s chaotic club looks

Follow the stomp of pleaser heels and bejewelled Converse on wet asphalt and they’ll lead you down an east London sidestreet. Nearby, yet another industrial venue is shaking with the promise of a night of hedonism beneath its sweaty ceilings. It’s no secret that somewhere in the city, at any given hour, there’s a DJ feeding a crowd of sweat-slicked queers bumps of crescendoing BPMs. And no one knows this better than the party girl duo OPIA – AKA Bambi Dyboski and Bautista Botto-Barilli – who’ve been stomping their way through London’s underground one function at a time.

Known for their chaotic club glamour and bimbo antics, the duo have built an empire on the belief that beauty is best when it’s messy. The self-proclaimed “unionised partygirls” bring their unfiltered energy to underground events, chaotic street interviews and general raucous across London and beyond. This caught the attention of Converse who has been collaborating with the pair on runway showcases and a Lovechuck series – where hair by Dazed Beauty Community member Rati and make-up by Saint Maretto sees faces from the OPIA ecosystem transformed with the archetypal Chuck-kid glamour. Think peroxide fringes clinging to sweaty foreheads, glitter clotting in the corners of eyes, and looks best danced into the ground.

“Club spaces are inherently ones of messiness,” Bautista tells Dazed. “Even if you go glammed up to the nines, you leave and you’re ones.” It’s this collapse between beauty and chaos that underpins the OPIA philosophy. I’m told that a signature OPIA girl look can expect concealer lips, huge lashes and a CSM design that you can’t even walk in. “Your hair will be tangled, your make-up will have melted off, your outfit will be covered in dirt. I think there’s beauty in that,” they add. “If we’re already starting in a messy framework, then you can really test out anything, and you can go balls to the walls, crazy”.

This establishment of beauty as something transient opens up space for LGBTQ+ partygoers to play with their identities. In Raving, club theorist McKenzie Wark explores how the dancefloor acts as an antidote to gender dysphoria. “While raving there’s just happy flesh… a trans body homing in on its own estrangement, losing itself, in these alien beats,” Wark writes. This theory plays out in the OPIA ethos, where a fleeting dissolution of self lets bodies slip outside fixed definitions and rebuild however they wish, between layers of glamour and sweat.

This process of becoming is amplified by beauty, as Saint Maretto, the MUA behind the campaign’s warped, high-glamour looks, explains. “Beauty, in all its forms, is one of our oldest tools. It’s a language of resistance and a mechanism for survival,” they tell Dazed. “Beauty in these spaces carries the legacy of those who came before; it isn’t just personal. Beauty and dolls are synonymous – they always have been.”

It’s the slip of selfhood that OPIA attributes to the dancefloor becoming beauty’s best playground. Beauty that began as resistance in the ballroom basements of New York with Black and Latinx club kids and pushed through to industrial venues all around the globe and eventually runways and editorials. Pioneering sexual and gender expression, the dancefloor became a site where beauty is at its most elastic – smeared, sweated out, and endlessly remade under strobing lights.

While vanity can be quick to be dismissed as something superficial, Bautista attributes this as a political arsenal for queer people. “It’s very political for queers to be like, ‘You know what, I do want to feel pretty, and I do want to take time to acknowledge myself as pretty, even if it’s not your pretty, it’s my pretty.’” It’s this process of self-reconstruction that Bautista explains has allowed them to build up an image they are happy with. “I’ve never felt as beautiful as I do now, once I accepted being ugly and alternative and just letting myself go to these clubs and sweat out all of my hair and make-up and everything.”

While the dancefloor has long been celebrated as a place of experimentation, OPIA are keen to bring their thriving nighttime scene into the daylight. “Our scene is always pigeon-holed as the after-parties and never the party,” says Bambi. “We have a full ecosystem of talented creatives: designers, artists, DJs already happening here, so we’re keen to bring that up from the underground into the mainstream.” Opia-tes to the front!