The cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the show’s strongest yet. We’re now six episodes in, and season 13 has already served up some clear front runners in the competition. There’s Gottmik, the series’s first-ever trans man to compete, who comes armed with a serious fashion eye. There’s Symone, the “ebony enchantress” who has slayed the runway with a miles-long durag, among other stellar looks. The cast is not here to play with their fashion choices, and the runway challenges have been mind-blowing to watch thus far. However, among all the top-tier queens is one particular underdog who’s emerged as the unexpected breakout star—hailing from the small town of Utica, Minnesota.
Utica Queen, now based in Minneapolis, is kookier and campier than all of her competitors this season. The 25-year-old is no doubt a true comedian who leans towards the theatrical and absurd (at times, the judges have critiqued that she’s almost too oddball, such as when she wore a strawberry atop her head.) “I love to be out of the box, but as high-fashion as it can get,” Utica Queen tells Vogue. “I’ve always been inspired by old-style variety shows, and women of comedy like Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. These pioneering women created little vignettes of humor and joy, and were quintessentially themselves. I created Utica Queen as my own version of that.”
Her love of drag traces back to high school, when Utica Queen first started experimenting with combining humor and style on-stage. “I was in this really cool improv troupe, called Otherwise Actors,” Utica Queen says. “At the end of every show, we did a scene where the whole cast would swap genders, and we would just run around on stage and have a little Scooby Doo-inspired fight scene. I put on a wig and I was like, ‘Woah, something about this feels right.’” She quickly realized that drag can be a powerful tool to convey a bigger story or idea beyond just the aesthetics. “I realized that drag is about becoming the best version of yourself, and you’re sharing that with the world,” she says. “Through and through, I am a storyteller: My work on stage and with fashion always tells a story. It needs to take people’s time when they look at it.”
On Drag Race, Utica Queen’s runway looks have been a clear example of her using fashion as art. She recently went viral for one of the ensembles she made for episode five, where she created a dramatic hooded gown made entirely out of sleeping bags. The challenge was to use bags as a material to make a garment (many others used traditional handbags). “I’m from the Midwest, so I’m always cold,” she says of the design idea, also citing the Moncler x Pierpaolo Piccioli collaboration as a major inspiration, too. “With that piece, the story came right at the beginning of the creation. I wanted to be a childlike creature emerging from the woods, in grandiose sleeping bag couture. It took me six or seven hours to make,” she says of it. Many fans felt she was robbed of the win for that challenge.
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