How Drag Queens Broke Through the Beauty Barrier

“To win this competition, you’re gonna need to be more enterprising than Donald Trump, to give bigger than Oprah and to be hotter than Tyra [Banks] wearing a fat suit in July.” Such was the criteria, as stated by RuPaul a decade ago, for the first contestants of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a competition-style show in which select drag queens compete for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. Since its premiere on the Logo network in February 2009, the show has become a cultural touchpoint within the drag community — and beyond. Its latest season, season 11, averaged 926,000 viewers an episode, according to data from Nielsen. In October, it will launch a U.K. version. “Drag Race” has given rise to and put the spotlight on the world’s top drag queens, displaying their close relationship to the beauty world in the process. Its global growth runs parallel to an Internet phenomenon that is increasingly taking cues from and celebrating LGBTQ culture. This summer alone, the “And I Oop” meme from former “Drag Race” contestant Jasmine Masters went viral on social media, and Eugene Lee Yang’s “I’m Gay” video became one of the top-viewed coming out videos of all time on YouTube, raising

Follow WWD on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Read More...

from WWDWWD https://ift.tt/2HuDDiG