A Tale of Two 'Real Housewives' at Pride 2026

This is So Chic, Very Chic, PAPER’s examination of Bravo’s sprawling cohort of fashion obsessives. From haute couture to TJ Maxx, they’ve literally worn it all. We've just got two questions. Is it so chic? Is it very chic?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was an age of debauchery and hangovers, it was the epoch of hope and of nihilism — in short, it was Pride Month.

This is Taylor Lomax, filling in for Joan while she infiltrates the Pentagon (The Vanderpump Hotel) and scurries about various Pride events. In her place, I would like to tell you a story.

This story takes place in a faraway land called West Hollywood, where bachelorette girls and gogo boys dance hand in hand. Where little gay boys throw up in the bushes in broad daylight, where Kathy Hilton is not the Pride Parade Grand Marshal. It is a story about two women — distant family members, if you will, circling one another, each balancing the other so as not to disturb the equilibrium of the kingdom they both hold dominion over.

The first, the Songstress, hails from New York. She is all glitz and glamour, characterized chiefly by a relentless sense of composure. She speaks of memory and love affairs, white parties and jewels, love gained and love lost. And she does so from a safe distance, always warm but unmistakably regal. She possesses such power from a bygone era, and her reign spans three separate decades, each year a new layer of armor and wisdom, lending to her an arsenal of jokes, which she always tells first, to beat you to the punch.

Speaking to her, you at once know everything about her and nothing at all. Let’s call her Luann.

The Emcee, on the other hand, has only just begun. She hails from Rhode Island and prefers to carry moon shoes over stilettos. She speaks of plastic surgery and Ozempic, summers and rainbows, alliances and slam pigs. Her preferred mode is immediacy, bubbly and direct. She, too, has a love for beating you to the punch, but her self-deprecation comes from a self-admitted uncertainty and an endearing vulnerability. By her own admission, she is still finding her place in the kingdom, armed now with a year of wisdom and footing found. We will call her Rosie.

This bit is starting to wear on me. Life is too short! The OUTLOUD Music Festival at WeHo Pride saw marquee performances from Bravo divas Countess Luann and Rosie DiMare, representing both the network’s storied lore and where reality television is headed. I had the chance to sit down with both ladies, an endeavor that spanned multiple hours of performances, hugs, kisses, run-ins, and namedrops.

Shall we go for it?

Countess Luann

When I meet the Countess, she’s glowing — both from the sheer abundance of rhinestones, which adorn her floral mini dress and cat-eye sunglasses, alongside the godlike aura Housewives assume at Pride events. This, she tells me, is not her performance look but rather her après-ski one. She’s surrounded, naturally, by an entourage of gay guys, including her manager, who’s sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with her infamous mugshot.

“God, it’s hard to believe after all this time, here I am, right? Twenty years later, and busier than ever,” she remarks right after we sit down. On top of her cabaret shows — she’s coming off an Australian tour and just announced her new show “The Love Tour” — De Lesseps is also repping RHONY for the Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th installment and reuniting with (some of) her OG castmates for E!’s The Golden Life. She says packing for Girls Trip was the hardest of any of her Bravo endeavors.

“We had at least twelve different theme parties. You have the neon party, you have the white party, the lingerie parties.” She recalls being intimidated by her castmates fashion-wise, citing them as some of the “best-dressed across the franchise;” she specifically names Kyle Richards and Lisa Barlow as fashion-forward, which I guess makes sense if you are comparing them to Vicki Gunvalson and Gizelle Bryant. The way she talks about the show is unwaveringly cordial (lots of “the fans are going to love it,” talks of “celebration” and drama she assures me is “not dark”) befitting a show dedicated to commemorating its own legacy.

As for The Golden Life, it is the show Bethenny Frankel infamously declined via one of her scary, food forward front-facing camera videos. She was making what appeared to be a coffee float. Brushing past the specter of her old coworker, “Some things just never change,” offers the Countess, “Ramona thinks she’s the queen of Palm Beach.” De Lesseps soon launches into a solid impression — “You can’t wear black, Luann, you can’t wear black!” As for the other ladies, Sonja’s “still a three panty kind of girl” and Dorinda’s “clipping away.” No mention of Kelly. She hasn’t watched Rhode Island (“I’ve been making my own television!”) but teases that the RHORI girls “kind of show up” on a Golden Life trip, whatever that means. “You see, I’m giving you a scoop.”

Onstage, she’s decked in opulent gold and silver jewels, fringe lining the bottom of another flirtatious mini. It makes sense that she mentions loving Taylor Swift in our conversation. Clearly, someone knows the life of a showgirl. Her show is as winky and campy as one would expect, employing a collage of mugshots like her own that span the Housewives franchise, with mentions of Herman Munster shoes and not being uncool. When she covers Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” it’s with the world-weary self-reflection that can only come from a woman who’s watched herself on television since the Bush administration.

I’m waiting in line at a bar later when I hear my name — it’s her manager, standing with Luann, back in the floral look (she did say it was her après-ski look). I tell him he’s batshit crazy for letting her mingle among the masses like this — we’re in VIP, but so is half this festival — but she seems to be enjoying holding court. That same glow from earlier, both the rhinestones and the aura, is on full display; someone I assume to be an off-duty dancer comes up to me: “Is your friend famous? She seems famous.”

I tell him he doesn’t even know the half of it.

Rosie DiMare

I meet Rosie after her DJ set, which opened with “Runway” and hit a variety of crowd-pleasers from the likes of Britney and Katy. She’s in her trailer, mid-ki with a publicist and a RHORI producer; the three of them are shooting the shit about under-eye plastic surgery (something one of her castmates should explore) and Ozempic (something a different castmate should stop exploring). Having just spoken to the Countess, I’m immediately struck by how down-to-earth Rosie is, open, bubbly and real, in a way that’s only recently started to come across on the show.

She describes her look as “Punky Brewster, but gay,” which she later amends to “Slutty Brewster.” It’s an iridescent rainbow bikini with a bright off-the-shoulder cascade of rainbow dots atop it; she’s also got brightly-colored strands of hair woven into her twin braids to complete the Wigstock raver girl effect. (In other words, perfect for a pride DJ set on a Sunday afternoon.) She later admits she does not remember Punky Brewster, the show, but I don’t either as it’s older than both of us, and I know we both understand the parlance as shorthand for loud colors and an air of rebellion. Whatever the reference is, at least it’s not that pink bow with the body jewelry.

“First couple weeks, I was like why the fuck did I do this?” Rosie admits of the beginning of the season. And then came her feud with Kelsey Swanson, during which the term “slam pig” hit the world stage in a big way. That term is apparently “very 2012 New England,” she tells me, before calling herself, me and everyone within earshot a “slam pig,” as well as Kelsey. It’s hard not to feel a sense of kinship with her, in this disarmingly tangible sort of way where what you see really is what you get. If the Countess represents old-school Housewifery (and reality stardom at large), Rosie clearly exemplifies what it looks like now, in the age of the Internet, with stars who’ve watched the medium from its inception.

“I kind of get the game now,” she says when reflecting on her first season. “I wanna start building relationships with people who maybe had an alliance before.” She’s coy about her return — “honestly, you know what you can put in there? I don’t know if I wanna come back” — but also talks openly about how she wants to change her approach going into next season. “I’m not gonna be taking shit anymore,” she says, with enough righteous vitriol that somewhere back in Rhode Island the scissors fall out of Kelsey’s hand.

While DJing has become a common Housewives sidequest (I don’t need to name names), Rosie’s insistent that she’s true to this, not new to this. “I’ve been DJing since 2010!” Rich, her husband, the Frank Sinatra cover artist, not impersonator, taught her during her intern days at the radio station where they met. “If you wanted to do Street Team or any of the fun events, you had to be a DJ. I think it was to weed out losers,” she says. It wasn’t a path that she saw for herself, so she pivoted to the news anchor role we’ve seen heavily featured on the show. “And I was like, I get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, deal with stupid bosses, always report bad news, and I have to wear serious clothes and be so professional.” So when her medical leave hit, embracing DJing was a no brainer, and now she DJs gay weddings. The publicist, either a lesbian or bi woman but regardless hot and engaged to another woman, interjects: “DJ my wedding!”

Rich (who I love once I overcome the initial uncanniness of seeing a Househusband in the flesh, which, insider secret, is weirder than seeing a Wife) backs up his wife when she says she only gets booked for gay weddings: “she DJ’d Fenway Park!” This man is his wife’s biggest hypeman; this, as we know, is the ideal mode for a Househusband (he and Jo-Ellen’s Gary are thought leaders in this arena).

Elsewhere, I ask her if her close friend/main ally Ashley Iaconetti knows what show she’s on now, heading into season 2, which Rosie immediately shuts down: “she really is living a Disney fairy tale.” She asks me to make sure I state on the record that she was right about Liz being scary, way back in Episode 4. It’s the same need for vindication we’ve seen countless times before in Housewives, most canonically in my mind from the great Kenya Moore; if she continues on this trajectory, I’m convinced she could turn into a breakout star of Housewives’ next era, the one following all the fanfare Lu embodied vis-a-vis Girls Trip.

“I may be early,” Rosie says, “but I’m never wrong.”

Spoken like a true Housewife.

Polaroids by Taylor Lomax

Photograph of Luann De Lesseps by Steven James