Lance Victor Moore

Lance Victor Moore

We unmask the man behind the great bespoke mask creations worn by A-list celebrities

BY MICHAEL DAKS

When I first spoke to Lance Victor Moore, he was at the airport in LA having just finished a music video with a (non-disclosed) major A-List star and was waiting for his flight home to San Francisco. Much has changed for him since Lady Gaga first wore two of his masks at the VMA’s in August 2020. “As a new artist it comes in waves. There are times when I can’t keep up and other times when I think, ‘Oh, was that it?’”

Moore was born in Central Islip on Long Island, New York. His father is the Christian artist Danny Hahlbohm, best known for his religious painting Footprints in the Sand, an interpretation of the poem by Mary Stevenson written in 1939. Moore’s mother Danise also wrote many poems that went with her husband’s paintings, the most famous being “Welcome Home”.

As a child he attended Jimmy Swaggart’s church and also Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s, where his father often spoke about his gift from God. “It was hard to be around that as a young queer kid. I was very out. I don’t remember a time when I officially came out to my family, I was just never really in.”

Nobody ever tried to ‘shake the devil out of him,’ but it must have been a difficult time growing up in an evangelical Christian family and within that fervent religious framework. Moore ran away from home at age sixteen and moved to New York where he eventually studied restorative painting at Cooper Union.

But, essentially, he became one of the club kids. That whole scene fell apart when Michael Alig and Robert “Freeze” Riggs were convicted of killing fellow club kid Andre “Angel” Melendez over a drug debt. After this, Moore decided it was probably time to change his lifestyle.

In 1999, just before the millennium, he moved to San Francisco. “This was the time for me to get clean and sober, so I thought ‘where is the best place to not be influenced by drugs and alcohol? San Francisco!’”

His first foray into the world of masks had happened very early on in his life, inspired by the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman costume in Batman Returns (1992). He went around collecting materials and made himself his own version of the Catwoman suit. It came out so well that a photographer asked if he could photograph him in it.

His parents however, saw the resulting images and freaked out! “That was technically the first mask I ever made. I had got myself a copy of Madonna’s book SEX, which had a metal cover and I chopped it up and made metal claws and the inserts to the ears of my costume.”

However, he did not begin making masks professionally until about five years ago. He was working in San Francisco at a fabric store called BRITEX with his friend Emily Payne, who was asked to be on Project Runway and later Project Runway All Stars.

“She was having a fashion show in New York in 2016 and she knew that I had been making wearable art pieces for some of my friends here in the city, drag queens and creative types. She was doing a gender neutral collection and wanted a way to fashionably obscure everyone’s faces.”

Read more at https://issuu.com/rareluxuryliving/docs/troora_san_francisco_2021_pages/300