South Africa’s extravagant matric balls are the ‘Met Gala’ of high school dances

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Before South African high school students complete their final exams, they first walk the red carpet, pulling out all the stops for their celebratory matriculation, or ‘matric,’ balls. The dances may look different from school to school, but they have earned a reputation as mini Met Galas – from Bridgerton-themed dress codes with expensive gowns to grand entrances in classic cars to crowds of onlookers, all to make the biggest first impression for their big night out.

For five years, the South African photographer Alice Mann documented these lavish rites of passages; her portraits now in a new book called “The Night is Young,” published by IDEA. In her imagery, all-white banquet rooms are calm before the storm, students in tiaras and shimmering suits pose in front of fairy lights, and dance floors light up with the whirlwind energy of the night.

“They’re these massive events. You look forward to it from when you’re in grade eight,” Mann explained in a video call from London, where she splits her time. “There’s a huge sense of anticipation.”

Matric balls’ closest kin are American proms, which have become more synonymous with the grand high school dance thanks to Hollywood. Both events have been transformed by their visibility on social media — it’s not unusual these days for South African high schoolers to have a personal photographer follow them for the night, Mann said — but she explained that matric balls have always been larger-than-life. At her own ball in the late 2000s, the theme was Greece and she wore a shimmering gold gown; her high school boyfriend, in a rebellious move, wore skinny jeans. They still have the “awkward” photos, she recalled, and they are still together today.

Now, as a photographer, she observes as students try on new versions of themselves for the night. “They look very grown up, but there’s a lot of naivety,” she said. “You can’t walk in your heels, and you’re overwhelmed by hundreds of people.”

Like with any codified celebration, matric balls do have strong socioeconomic undercurrents — families who can easily afford designer gowns versus those who borrowed or hand-sewed their own looks. Some can’t afford to attend at all; others save for months for the head-to-toe outfits and pre-party home celebrations, the photographer explained. Sometimes, she added, families with less tend to do more because the night is an important symbol of success.

“They might be the first in their family to be there; it’s not easy for everybody,” she said. “It’s not a given that you will graduate matric, or that you’ll even get to matric.”

Mann worked with different schools to represent a range of students and backgrounds, though she primarily photographed in her home city of Cape Town. South Africa is still deeply divided by race and class, and she began the project after a different body of work that followed a single student’s life leading up to matric in one of the most dangerous townships in the coastal city. Across her practice, Mann has focused on youth culture in South Africa, including how dress helps form one’s identity. She rose to prominence in the late 2010s for her series “Drummies,” about the country’s young female bands of drum majorettes, which she published as a book in 2021.

“You perform an identity depending on what you’re wearing. I think that’s something we can all empathize with — stepping into a character when you are wearing something,” she said. “There’s a lot going on (at matric balls) in terms of the outfits and the way that attendees are presenting themselves, and it was a very rich kind of environment to explore that.”

The idea of performance and scene-setting flow throughout the body of work. The cover of “The Night is Young” features a portrait of a young woman in a gold gown striking a Renaissance-like pose on a matching chaise lounge, a panel of rose blooms with LED lighting mounted behind her on a peach wall. An electrical cord trails from the panel to a socket, revealing the construction of the setting. Other images similarly mix the romantic and the mundane, with glamorous students in front of kitschy backdrops of misty woodlands or positioned between towering candelabras.

Since Mann was stationed inside the schools, she didn’t catch the students’ dramatic arrivals, though she later heard if someone rolled up with a motorbike gang, or horse and carriage.

In one portrait, a student in an off-the-shoulder green gown strikes a pose in front of the empty red carpet behind her; she was the first to arrive and had the whole space to herself. Mann was also pleased to find that it wasn’t just the female students going all out with their style; the young men she photographed embraced vibrant and textured suiting, jewelry, gilded canes and vibrant color-coordinated hair.

The energy of the matric balls was infectious for Mann, and she left each event feeling hopeful as she watched the next generation celebrate how far they’ve come, and look toward the future.

“There’s a lot of bad news. And I think whenever I would go and spend time working on this project, I’d leave feeling a little bit reassured, just seeing how mature and eloquent and empathetic and aware young people are,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I was that level of human when I was 17 or 18. They’re so clued in to the world.”

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