Delaney Finn, who stands 6 feet 3 inches tall, walked into the Warwick Allerton Hotel's 23rd floor last Saturday and experienced something she says had never happened to her at a party before: she was not the tallest woman in the room. The 24-year-old was one of hundreds of tall men and women who packed the ballroom for Chicago's second annual Tall Ball, a free event built entirely around the idea that being extra-tall deserves its own night out.
Finn told Block Club Chicago that she'd struggled for years to find clothes that fit, saying stores simply stocked fewer options suited to her height. She got the ticket to the Tall Ball as a gift from her boyfriend, who is 6 feet 1 inch tall and, according to Finn, has always encouraged her to live her full height and be herself. She described the night itself as energetic, passionate, and exciting, and said the gathering let her embrace her height while surrounded by others doing the same.
The event, held on Saturday, August 29, is the work of Tyler Bergantino, who founded the broader Tall Tour after interviewing tall people on social media. Per the same Block Club Chicago account, Bergantino keeps every Tall Tour stop free of charge, a policy rooted in his own childhood memory of being turned away from a bouncy house because of his height, according to The DePaulia. What started as viral street interviews has since grown into a touring event series that has stopped in Orlando, San Diego, Los Angeles, Scottsdale, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston across 2026, as Bergantino has documented on his Facebook page.
A Queen, a King, and a Reunion of Regulars
The night's biggest moment came when Nancy Mulkey, the reigning Tall Queen from the Tall Tour's Dallas stop, crowned Eve Magill as the Chicago ball's new Tall Queen. Mulkey, who is 6 feet 10 inches tall and 28 years old, attended alongside Magill, a 24-year-old who stands 6 feet 7 inches. Magill said the two navigate the world together, a friendship built in part on shared experience. Bergantino separately announced Tavarius Vinson as the ball's Tall King.
Mulkey brought more than ceremonial duties to the room. She played elite college basketball at Oklahoma, Rice, and Washington, leading her conference in blocked shots during her college career, and signed a WNBA training camp contract with the Las Vegas Aces in April 2022, according to a Las Vegas Aces announcement. She also appeared as a cast member of TLC's My Giant Life at age 15. Earlier this month, Mulkey used her Instagram account, which has 214,000 followers, to push back on strangers who ask tall women how tall their parents are, telling followers the question often spirals into people probing her full family medical history, as reported by The Mirror US.
Not everyone came with a plus-one. Jaylen Johnson, a 28-year-old content creator who is 6 feet 8 inches tall, attended alone, as did Christine Alexis, a 33-year-old who stands 6 feet 3 inches. Alexis said a group of women welcomed her the moment she arrived and she immediately felt loved, adding that the event let her see people eye-to-eye for once. Johnson, who plays basketball and says he demonstrates that big men can handle guard work on the court, said the Tall Ball simply made him feel normal.
Dressed for a Room Built to Their Scale
Guests wore extended evening gowns and slacks with 45-inch inseams, sizing that ordinary retailers rarely stock. DJ B Real, who is 6 feet 9 inches tall, worked the turntables for the crowd. This was Chicago's second time hosting the gathering; the inaugural Chicago Tall Ball took place at the same hotel on October 19, 2025, when 6-foot-7 attendee Dana Wennerberg was crowned the city's tallest woman among participants ranging from 4-foot-11 to 7 feet, per the DePaulia's earlier reporting.
The venue itself carries its own outsized history. The Warwick Allerton is a 25-story Magnificent Mile skyscraper completed in 1924 and designated a Chicago Landmark in 1998, according to a summary on Wikipedia. Its 23rd floor once housed the Tip Top Tap, a celebrity cocktail lounge in the 1940s and 1950s whose neon sign still hangs on the building, and the space later served as a radio broadcast studio before becoming the ballroom used for events like this one, according to PartySlate.
Decades of Tall Community Before the Viral Era
Tall social clubs in North America predate Instagram by nearly a century. Artist Kae Sumner Einfeldt, who stood 6 feet 2 inches, founded the California Tip Toppers Club in Los Angeles in May 1938, a movement that eventually produced Tall Clubs International and regional affiliates including the Paramount Tall Club of Chicago, according to the Tall Clubs International Foundation. Early clubs set minimum height requirements of 5 feet 10 inches for women and 6 feet 2 inches for men.
Those clubs did more than socialize. Historical tall organizations acted as consumer advocacy groups, pressing manufacturers to introduce 7-foot king-size mattresses, size-10 women's footwear, and longer clothing inseams, according to a 1996 Los Angeles Times report. That advocacy echoes directly in what Finn described about her own shopping struggles, and in the extended gowns and 45-inch inseams attendees wore at last Saturday's ball.
By national standards, the Tall Ball crowd towers well above average. CDC survey data from 2021 to 2023 puts the average U.S. adult woman at 63.5 inches and the average adult man at 68.9 inches, according to HealthcareOnTime's summary of the figures. Against that backdrop, a room full of guests between 6 feet 3 inches and 6 feet 10 inches represents a rare gathering where the usual scale gets flipped.
Tall Tour isn't slowing down. The series, which Bergantino describes as a nationwide community of tall and extra-tall people convening in major cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, is scheduled to make its next stop in New York City on September 12, 2026.
