By the time I entered The Crystal Ballroom at The LaLiT New Delhi on August 22, the evening was already beginning to look like a Kitty Su night. Sequins caught the light, faces were painted for performance, and people seemed to have dressed with the understanding that ordinary was not really an option. But this was not just another night at Delhi’s best-known queer nightclub. Kitty Su was turning 15, and it had come to its 15th anniversary party with something new: a beauty brand.

The launch of Kitty Su Beauty was the most interesting part of an evening otherwise packed with the usual Kitty Su ingredients: drag, music, performance, big personalities and plenty of drama. The idea is to take the club’s long relationship with queer culture and self-expression and put it into a lipstick tube. It also feels like a natural progression.

Since opening in 2011, Kitty Su has become a space where drag performers, DJs and queer audiences have been able to claim the room rather than simply occupy it. For many, the significance of the place has had less to do with being a nightclub and more to do with what happens when you walk through its doors: you can dress differently, perform differently, flirt with another version of yourself and not have to explain it. Kitty Su Beauty takes that freedom out of the club.

The first collection is deliberately small: three weightless matte liquid lipsticks and two treatment glosses. There is no attempt to overwhelm consumers with a sprawling catalogue. The products keep in view the practical demands of performance, too, having been developed with drag performer and makeup artist Hash Brownie. Drag makeup has to survive stage lights, movement, sweat and long nights. It needs to perform rather than photograph well. Kitty Su Beauty comes from that world, rather than merely borrowing its visual language.

One shade in particular seemed to have been waiting for the occasion. Hotline, a vivid red, became part of the evening’s visual vocabulary, echoed in the dramatic crimson look worn by Rakhi Sawant when she arrived.

For Keshav Suri, the executive director of The LaLiT, the launch was personal. He has watched Kitty Su grow from a nightclub into one of the country’s better-known spaces for queer nightlife and performance. He was warm and visibly happy through the evening, even as people kept pulling him away in different directions. For him, the beauty line is another way of extending what the club has always represented. He speaks of it as a way of giving back to his “queens”. There is something appealing about that idea because the brand does not have to manufacture a queer identity for itself. The community was there first.

His partner, Cyril Feuillebois, whose experience in the beauty business goes back to his founding of Kronokare in 2008, brings the commercial experience to the venture. Kitty Su Beauty is a consumer-facing brand, taking the business beyond the hotel and nightclub ecosystem. According to Cyril, this is for anyone who wants to be “loud and proud”. It is not restricted by gender or designed around one narrow idea of who gets to wear makeup.

Keshav put the proposition rather more playfully during the evening, joking that he would rather spend his money on a beauty brand made for his own community than continue buying from 'heterosexual beauty brands. It was funny, but it also got to the heart of the exercise. Queer people have always been customers of the beauty industry. Kitty Su Beauty is asking what happens when they also become the people owning and selling part of that industry.

The launch shared the ballroom with Battle Royale II, the drag competition that has become another important part of Kitty Su’s story. Despite its name, this was the fifth edition of the series, which began around Kitty Su’s 14th anniversary and subsequently travelled to Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Hosted by Betta Naan Stop, the competition brought together performers from across the country, including Velvet Vortex, Noor Sins, Dark Fantasy, Miss Bhenji, Amit The Shining Star and Trixie Prema. The performers were judged on the things that make drag more than costume: lip-syncing, charisma, creativity, storytelling and stage presence. The judging panel included drag artists Zeesh and Lush Monsoon, with Rakhi Sawant joining them later in the evening. Rakhi, inevitably, created her own orbit.

She arrived in a dramatic red look and told cameras, “I have become a drag queen today,” before speaking about her support for the LGBTQ+ community. Later, after changing into an even more elaborate, jewel-heavy outfit, she joined the judges and was greeted by loud chants of her name.

There was something oddly fitting about her being there. Rakhi has always understood the value of transformation: of makeup, costume, exaggeration and refusing to enter a room quietly. For one night, at least, she seemed perfectly at home in Kitty Su’s particular language of excess. But the celebrity moment was ultimately secondary to what the evening was really celebrating.

Fifteen years is a considerable run for any nightclub. Kitty Su has survived long enough to become part of Delhi’s queer nightlife, particularly for a generation that found in its rooms a rare sense of freedom. That history gives the beauty launch a sense of purpose that a conventional celebrity makeup collaboration would not have. The brand is effectively saying that the things people came to Kitty Su for (colour, confidence, performance, reinvention) need not end when the night does.

There was, of course, food. The ballroom offered a roaming spread that moved comfortably between golgappas, avocado mousse, gochujang chicken, crispy fish fingers, truffle fries and lamb sliders. It was good party food and, as tends to happen at such evenings, an effective excuse for wandering back towards the buffet. Clubs are temporary by nature. The music stops, the lights come up and everyone goes home. A lipstick is different. It leaves the room with you. That may be the real ambition of Kitty Su Beauty: to bottle something of the confidence that has kept the club alive for 15 years. Kitty Su began as a place to come out at night. Its next chapter is about what you carry with you when you leave.