Question 1

What does “pop dip and spin” mean?

Accepted Answer

The original name of vogue, and still the correct name for the old-way category.

Question 2

Where does “pop dip and spin” come from?

Accepted Answer

Vogue came out of the Harlem ball scene in the 1970s, among Black and Latino gay and trans people, and is generally credited to Paris Dupree. Jamal Milan of the House of Milan, an in-scene participant from 1987, records that Pop, Dip and Spin was the category's original name and that around 1989 and 1990 ball organizers began advertising the same style as old way to separate the earlier generation from younger competitors who had introduced extreme stretch; the descriptive name gave way to the retrospective one. Death drop is an outsider label. It arrived through the drag world and mass television — So You Think You Can Dance and America's Best Dance Crew from 2009, then RuPaul's Drag Race — and ballroom figures including Dashaun Wesley of the House of Lanvin, Twiggy Pucci Garçon and Jack Mizrahi have said publicly and repeatedly that the move is a dip. Shablam is likewise a corruption: the ballroom exclamation is shawam, credited to Jack Mizrahi, and it is a hype cue shouted into the move, not the move's name. Note that the "original name" claim rests on one named in-scene witness rather than a dated primary document; a pre-1989 ball flyer would settle it.