The youth of today yearn for the house party, and at Downtown’s 99 Warehouse, that’s exactly what they get.
My recent night inside one of Los Angeles’ wildest kink parties was elaborate, artsy, dirty, chaotic, confusing, and strangely wholesome. The parties, thrown by a self-described “movie character” named Lydia, feel like immersive fever dreams stitched together from performance art, underground club culture, and a complete rejection of shame.
Warehouse 99 sits deep in the Fashion District, tucked inside an unmarked warehouse where, if you stay late enough, you'll start to hear the distant cawing of Lydia's pet rooster.
It’s part-kink party venue, part-animal shelter event space, and part-art gallery. And on the particular night I checked it out, it had been transformed into a Michelin-themed sex jam.
The crowd inside could have doubled for the one in the line for one of Estrano’s street pasta popups, a collective of latex freaks and off-duty line cooks, along with some of the most stunning women you've ever laid eyes on standing next to the most aggressively unremarkable men in plain tees and golf caps.
Something felt utopian about it. For a brief, disorienting moment, it was a secret third space where the usual rules of who belongs where simply didn't apply — and you couldn't help but think that if the rest of the world operated even a little more like this room did, we might actually have a chance at world peace.
Lydia entered the scene in 2020, searching for a way to make money while staying indoors due to her asthma. After spending time modeling and getting to know other girls in the industry, she found her niche managing OnlyFans accounts.
“It worked out perfectly,” she tells L.A. TACO. “They would just do the photos, and I would be their personalities. I was [portraying] a blonde white woman from Colorado, messaging all these boys. And they thought I was someone else. It was safer for them because they didn’t want their account to be attached to their personalities, so I would be their personality for them.”
After years of account management, Lydia evolved into something else entirely: an architect of underground L.A. parties.
In the courtyard of the warehouse there are cages of ducks sleeping. When Lydia isn’t throwing parties, she is an animal advocate.
“People come to me a lot for animal stuff,” she says. “When the fires started we housed the non-profit K9 Global Rescue. They needed a space to set up base in L.A. when they were assisting with the fire. They were a group of primarily ex-military guys who go to different war zones or natural disasters to rescue animals, so we helped them out by letting them keep some of the animals here.”
“It was really nice because so many of the people who would come to the warehouse parties were also coming here to volunteer,” she adds.
Every 99 Warehouse event revolves around a theme, usually anchored by some kind of performance art spectacle. The night I attended, line cooks from one of L.A.’s most notoriously controversial pop-ups (and one of the world’s most famous restaurants) — you can probably figure out which one — worked the floor serving chicken skewers glazed in a neon-green sauce that glowed under blacklight, alongside blueberry truffle toast topped with yellow flower petals and free popcorn.
The chefs ended up inside Lydia’s orbit through a friend of a friend, who they met while breaking into Downtown’s graffiti towers. From there, the relationship snowballed naturally into parties, collaborations, and late-night performance experiments. Sometimes they involve food, sometimes not.
The chefs were drawn to the environment because, as much as they loved cooking, they were equally passionate about DJing, and 99 Warehouse gave them a place to combine both worlds.
Later in the night, the chefs staged a performance piece in tribute to the Chicago restaurant Alinea, set to the theme song from Netflix’s “Chef’s Table.” A go-go dancer named Paige became both centerpiece and canvas as they layered sauces, garnishes, and small bites across her body as though preparing a dish for service, recreating one of the two Michelin star restaurant’s famous desserts.
It was gimmicky, campy, and funny, the kind of performance that perfectly captured the energy of the night: absurd, theatrical, a little gross, and somehow very inciting.
Models and performers recalled nights at Warehouse 99 with synchronized swimming routines, mermaid performances, clown duets, mock surgeries, wrestling matches, and elaborate fetish theater that blurred the line between absurdity and artistry.
“Just last night we had a clown wrestling match to celebrate our friends who graduated from clown school,” Lydia says. “Every night is a little something different.”
Paige, a professional synchronized swimmer, go-go dancer, and model, described one of her favorite performances, dressed as a mermaid in a costume she bedazzled with her mother, and performing while tucked into a corner of the warehouse in an above-ground pool. One of her favorite recurring acts involves a synchronized clown routine she performs while dressed in matching clown outfits with another swimmer.
“My goal is to hold my breath for 3-4 minutes,” she said about her underwater performances. “I wanna get weird with it.”
“One of the wackiest events I've seen here was when we celebrated the end of ‘No-Nut-November’ and one of my friends would dress as a squirrel and she utilized nuts in the performance and put them in ‘some places’ and would give them as gifts to the party goers watching the performance,” Paige says.
I also spoke with Violet, a veteran of the 99 Warehouse scene and a familiar face from our Diners, Dommes and Dives piece. Her performances have included an Easter-themed wrestling match where a plastic Easter egg hidden inside a condom inside her vagina was theatrically removed and distributed to audience members as prizes.
For a Halloween event, she had the backs of her legs pierced and laced together by a mock doctor in front of a crowd.
For first-timers, walking into a room like this can feel thrilling and overwhelming. It's exactly the kind of entry point Sir Kaleb Ignited thinks about a lot. He and his partner Sado Cyrus co-own Qplayspace, an anti-fascist, QTBIPOC-centered kink event based in L.A.
“The BDSM scene is a sensitive environment, it’s not just whips and cuffs,” Sir Kaleb Ignited says. ”It’s intimacy and vulnerability on display.”
Despite some shock value, the atmosphere at 99 Warehouse feels remarkably free of judgment. People are encouraged to fully inhabit whatever version of themselves they want to bring into the room.
One regular known simply as “Piggy” attends dressed as a pig, asking women if he can lick their shoes or let them write on his body. The advice he’d offer a newcomer entering the scene is surprisingly simple:
“Just have fun.”
Not bad advice coming from a man in a pig costume covered with at least four dancers' names on him.
The later it got, the more the warehouse filled, more bodies, more noise, more of whatever category this night refused to fit into.
From somewhere in the back, Lydia's rooster was already making its morning wake-up call. Some things, it turns out, are perfectly normal.To stay in the know about future events happening at 99 Warehouse, follow Lydia on Instagram.
