Our space to be - Zalando joins forces with Pretty Girls Like Trap Music

Meet Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, a Rotterdam-based organisation that throws hip-hop and trap parties for non-men only! The team is intimately concerned with celebrating women and people who remain on the outskirts of maleness with intensity and fervour, especially within male-dominated industries and spaces such as nightlife. Club nights with reverberating bass, heavy trap, and smooth flows – a space to shake ass with no lingering concerns about safety or public perception. The organisation, now collaborating with Zalando to formally celebrate women once again within the international buzz of Women’s day on the 8th of March, brings women from different paths of life together to foster a community that can withstand anything. With dreams to expand beyond nightlife and integrate educational and social efforts into their domain, Pretty Girls Like Trap Music is here to stay and build spaces for women by women. 

Hey, excited to speak with you! How are you today? 

A bit busy, but very exciting times are coming!

A lot of preparation for the event, I imagine! Can you tell me what inspired your platform and how did Pretty Girls Like Trap Music come together?

Lara Jade: I used to go to a women-only gym and I kind of contemplated changing gyms, but then I thought about all the benefits I experienced from being in a women-only space that I hadn’t thought about before, especially clothing-wise. Then I started to think a bit more about women-only as a concept, and I thought, why is this not applied more in different settings? I thought about nightlife. I wasn’t in nightlife at all, I was just a student in Communications. It started as an idea, something I just wanted to try. Elise and I are very good friends – immediately from the beginning she offered her help, and after the craze of the first edition, we’ve done it together ever since. 

It’s so interesting that the gym has essentially been the only public place where this separation is normalised. When it comes to nightlife, how does the only-women concept change the atmosphere of a space?

Lara Jade: There have been a few women-only parties already, especially in Queer nightlife. We try to focus on everybody who identifies as a woman or women plus, which includes gender identities that fall a bit beyond that or identify as non-binary, etc. Women are taught to pay attention to things regarding their safety.

Elise: I feel like those precautions go out of the window the moment you step into a female-only setting within nightlife. Obviously, unpleasant or unsafe experiences may arise in any context; it’s not an ultimate equation between it being female-only and therefore safe. But still, I feel like a space being female-only changes a lot of the atmosphere and resolves some of the tensions. You can express yourself the way you would if there were no boundaries to adjust to socially. So that’s a beautiful thing. That’s what I love about it. A lot of people that come love that aspect a lot, and the relationships with people because of that parallel the experience of a big women’s bathroom. That feels very refreshing. In the space that we have, we become so aware of the things that we usually do and the walls we keep up. With Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, in one way or another, you’re able to let most of them fly a little and be more comfortable, which can feel almost unusual, but also very freeing. 

Nice! The name itself is bold – how does it reflect your vision, and what message are you sending to your audience? What does ‘pretty’ mean to you?

Lara Jade: The name comes from a 2Chainz album – Pretty Girls Like Trap Music. I had a playlist inspired by that name where I just dropped songs that I thought fit that description. It was the kind of music that I put on in the car, blasted on full volume, and almost blew out my speakers. So, when we had the idea it was obvious to me – this name was what I associated with the type of music and what I envisioned for this party. I think it also contradicts the traditional expectations of what a pretty, polished girl listens to: Taylor Swift, something poppy, or less explicit and a little less heavy than trap, for example. It’s a nice play on the fact that you can be pretty and polished and listen to whatever you want. Most of the essence of “pretty” lies in your confidence and the way you express yourself.

It really fits in together well – also reclaiming genes that are traditionally so male-dominant. How do you see party culture as a way of amplifying voices that are underrepresented or reflecting on broader culture or societal dynamics?

Lara Jade: I noticed that nightlife in general is a very good starting point for a lot of creatives. Not only for musicians but also for example, photographers – they start out doing nightlife photography or event photography and grow on to other things. I think the informal structure of nightlife makes it a very accessible space to start, but additionally, everybody can come together at night and therefore communities have another moment to get together where the setting is different than, for example, a cafe. Nightlife can shed a different light on the social interactions you can have with your friends or with other people. 

Within that, I want to talk about Our Space To Be – I’m curious, how is your ethos visible in projects like It’s Our Space To Be?

Lara Jade: The campaign for us has two meanings. You have the literal sense of space, of course, which is: this is the space where we can be who we are, do what we do, and express ourselves how we want to. And I think our organisation, our platform, is an embodiment of that, we created the space in which we can express ourselves and be who we want to be. But I also think that the “to be” part of it has a double meaning in the sense that in the future, it will be our space to be. We are working towards that new status quo where there is always room and space for us. 

And what has the process of working on this campaign been like for you? 

Lara Jade: I think we’re blessed to have worked with such a big organisation. We have worked with co-organisations like grassroots initiatives or other commercial parties before, but this is by far the biggest collaboration we’ve had. So that is celebratory, but also high pressure for us because we’re a small organisation and mostly self-taught. We’ve also learned quite a lot, but I think it’s mostly just a unique experience to be able to work with a big brand like Zalando that is willing to amplify our message and extend it to be bigger and better. 

Elise: Yeah. And to add to that, it’s also so crazy to see all these meetings and pitches about an idea like Lara had four years ago. She pitched it in her car because it was still COVID and it was this idea and this concept that she was so passionate about and was talking so much about. We’ve been working on this for a long time, but just to see all these big people talk about really believing in this message and how important it is and that everybody feels so compelled to bring this message to the audience is so special to witness and to see happening in front of your eyes. So many women from different paths, or women plus, understand the importance of this message, which means a lot and says a lot about what needs to be done.

Elise: Yeah, I agree. I also think we live very stressed-out lives and nightlife is there to decompress. I think that’s sometimes underestimated. It’s a very big part of people growing up, having social interactions, knowing social cues and social boundaries, but also building friendships. I think that’s very important for decompressing, and having some entertainment, and it’s incredibly significant for those spaces to be inclusive and have different communities come together. But we don’t want to replace normal club nights. We want to be an additional factor to that – we actually don’t want to have to exist. We want to go to the standard trap parties and not feel the need to have a space that’s only for women. 

Lara Jade: Having to separate ourselves to feel safe instead of just being able to feel that way in normal spaces. 

Elise:  Yeah, so we separate ourselves, but at the same time, we would love for that not to be needed for us to have self-expression in nightlife. I hope we grow towards that in a couple of years.

It’s a long process! And already bringing awareness to it and starting a conversation is a big step, even if it’s not the final goal. 

Elise: I feel like we focus on the celebration of women because this topic is very heavy and harassment is a very serious topic, and we don’t want to make it about men. We want to celebrate the unity of women and not solely focus on schooling other genders that are the cause of the issue. 

Lara Jade: Getting women together in a hip-hop space is very meaningful since usually, those are underrepresented groups in that scene, whether it will be about the artists or just the audience in general. Getting those like-minded people together where they’re a minority in the group can be very meaningful in general. 

The event itself also is filled with such a beautiful lineup of other women and women plus creatives. What does it mean to you personally to be a part of such a big celebration and a literal space? 

Lara Jade: From the get-go, we always create from within. Of course, we had the idea, but also the fact that we would love to be in a space like that. So if it wasn’t there already, we got to create it. Therefore, I think we also always really enjoy being within these spaces because we are, in a sense, the target audience. I think that being surrounded by peers, by girls with the same interests, the same style, the same music taste, and happy to be there, always makes it enjoyable being at our own events as well.

To talk more about the curation and the general creative process behind the event, what attracts you to certain sounds or collaborators and how do you keep the energy fresh every time while still staying true to the genres that you like and to your vision? 

Lara Jade:  We didn’t always have the best strategy for collaborations from the beginning because as a new organisation we just wanted to do as much as possible and make kilometers, as we say in Dutch. Over the years, we’ve started to be a little more protective over Pretty Girls Like Trap Music.I think generally, aesthetically, what you see has to fit within the room of a girl, or young adult woman who’s in the Y2K aesthetic, and if it doesn’t fit within that idea, it’s probably not a fit. If it doesn’t contain either something hip-hop-related or music-related, women-related, or safety, it’s probably not Pretty Girls Like Trap Music. We try to protect our identity. 

Elise:  Musically, we are looking into how to keep it interesting and how to grow over time with our audience that like all these different paths – Afro sound to R&B, trap, but also classic hip-hop. We build an evening where you can sing along to your favourite R&B song of the 90s, but also hear those classic trap hip-hop songs and also have this moment to shake some ass, if I may say. We try to curate an evening that feels complete and doesn’t fall flat, and we do that with amazing DJs who understand how to build an evening. I feel like that’s also a big part of why people come back.

Lara Jade:  We started a roster for our Pretty Girls Like Trap Music sound system, so other events can also book the Pretty Girls Like Trap Music sound at their need. We’re building a strong roster of DJs that we know fit that description and are really good at executing and putting that experience out there. And for collaborators, like now for Zalando, but also perhaps a few more artists or something – generally we always keep track of what’s happening in the scene and who’s doing cool stuff.

How do you see the collective evolving in the next few years? Obviously like you’ve said before it would ideally disappear, but are there any new projects or ambitions on the horizon?

Lara Jade: We’re not greedy on goals, we always just go with the flow. Now, our main focus is the foundation we are starting, a non-profit, so that we can expand our activities and our universe to provide more for the girls within our community. Parties are just one medium to do something and send a message, but we would love to educate more, do more research, and provide more meaning based on what they need as well.

The biggest win for us all would be to have a healthy work environment and healthy company from Pretty Girls Like Trap Music that we could work full time at. We started as a community initiative and always put ourselves last but that isn’t very sustainable long-term. Therefore, both for ourselves and the bigger well-being and purpose of the community, it is important that we can create a healthy company from it. 

Finally, what can we expect from the Our Space To Be event on the 8th of March?

Lara Jade: We have two very exciting events! A day program at Pre-reserved, a bit more serious but mainly centered around community and forming bonds. It’s like the saying: if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together. We lean on each other to stick it out, we need each other within these male-dominated fields. So, we wanted to focus on a good time as well to let people bond and socialise! The evening is a usual Pretty Girls Like Trap Music club night at Bitterzoet – an established and trusted location for us where we’ve had several parties, and we really enjoy the vibe. This time is more elevated though: we have some cool DJs from the UK, France, and Germany coming over and also our own Pretty Girls Like Trap Music acts that never miss and establish our sound. 

If you guys had to pick one part of the event you’re most looking forward to, what would it be?

Elise: I want to say everything, but I think I will choose the BIA Workshop on football and community because it is the furthest to what I am doing right now. When I discovered BIA I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of – such cool and nice women that put so much thought and effort into the things they organise. So I’m excited to get into this world of football!

Lara Jade:I’m most excited for the last few hours of the club night, when the whole call sheet is there we can finally relax and shake ass ourselves. It’s probably during the final sets where we will get to let loose and enjoy it. 

Your asses also need shaking after all this work! Thank you so much for this lovely conversation!