by Like so many strange children in front of her and so many since then Violet Chachki noticed the strain of gender -specific indoctrination young. Chachki leaned to the drag, said Chachki, “Escapism, yes, but also therapy”. She attended a Catholic primary school in Atlanta, Georgia, where “everything was really uniform”. “Even if I wear the uniform of a boy, I still found out somehow. You would look at me and say that this person is not the same as the rest of these other boys in exactly the same outfit.”
A curious, bright child with an early ambition, none of it made her sense. “As a child, I didn’t have to go that messages from” boys “,” boys don’t talk so “,” only girls do that “. Really, it was about channeling all my anger and frustration.”
She started asking difficult questions young. “What is male clothing? What is female? And why are they gender -specific?” The system smashed. “Everything culminated in the fact that I found the art of the drag and really did as a punk thing. It was a rebellion.”
Chachki was the seventh that some could finally argue, winner of Rupauls Drag Race, the multi-vitarian television franchise, which brought the conversation to dissolve the gender-specific binary right to the family tea table. “She really crawled so that we could go,” says Chachki from Ru.
In a episode of steel, hardened glamor looks, Chachki used the show to use the anarchic spirit of her early heroes, Divlich, Leigh Bowery and the New York Club Kids, from the first time the program was developed. Her reward was a lucrative career – a decade at Drag’s top table.
Chachki was the first drag queen to take part in the Met Gala, and went unhealy with Sam Smith and Kim Petras in the Grammys. The feted Parisian artists Pierre et Gilles constructed iconic works of art from her. She played on a Burlesque tour with Dita von Teese, carried out campaigns for Prada and Jean Paul Gaultier and went for Moschino in the Milan Fashion Week. The list continues …
But Chachki didn’t forget her roots. In London, for a burlesque residency in the fabulous Mayfair-Sea fruits joint in jazz age, the Maine, she intends to catch the Leigh Bowery exhibition in Tate Modern. “I really have to,” she says.
In 1992, Chachki became Paul Jason Dardo as a 17-year-old as a 17-year-old as La Power Twin Mary Kate Olsen for a Halloween party. “And that’s it.” Her friend at the time went as Victoria Beckham. “When she made the bob and the big sunglasses. The leather leggings. Very fashionable Victoria Beckham. Mary Kate with the Big Starbucks Cup. Fun Times. We became addicted.”
We are in a secret party vestor behind the mirrored toilet wall of the Maine. Here you can take executive drag – far from Chachki’s beginnings in the gay bars of Atlanta. She says the local queens have trained them early. “You would only read me: ‘Dicks failure, pantyhose are torn, the foundation is the wrong color, hair lines too far behind.” She understood why. “This was about the awe that they had for the art form.”
The current audience will mainly include technical brothers, money gay with flawless facial fillers and their respective, Bejeweligen Plus plus. Chachki sometimes has to remember how far she and drag have come in 10 years.
I think it’s about trans-nesses about body dysmorphia
The Chachki figure was early after mood reasons. “Bettie Page was there forever. Dita von Teese. I loved Ladytron, this British band. Later she was friends with the Dee-Lite frontwoman, a strange icon in style, or after a short spell in New York. “It didn’t work for me. I just couldn’t cut it. I had just won Drag Race, I just had my heart in Atlanta, so I somehow ran away.” The nightlife was too tempting in NYC in many ways. “You can get lost,” she laughs. “Every time I go to New York, I go like a crackhead around Times Square at 8 a.m. She is now happy in La.
She describes the formation of her air resistance with the purpose of an Oscar-mated actress. “It’s not just about putting on the make-up. It is really about creating a drawing of yourself that you have in your head in your face.” She worked with some of the best visagists in the world, “but it has something very special about drag, and I always do it myself.”
Personally, she looks in full stress, but wichlos, like the leadership of a lost Bob Fosse picture. She is disarming the young boy George (“I understand a lot. I’ll take it. He was so beautiful”). But Chachki is in acute humility. It can be as good as wild.
Chachki’s mother, now one of her biggest supporters, was freaked out when she found for the first time that her son escaped out of the window in the bedroom for an evening in full drag. “My mother was just afraid that I would jump or be attacked or whatever, like mothers.”
The children at school thought they had found an easy destination in Chachki. “Atlanta is a very polarizing place. A huge mecca in the south for a lot of culture, for queer people, for so much hip-hop.” She mentions local queeros, the B-52, Rems Michael Stipe. “Then drive out of the middle for 30, 40 minutes and it gets really dangerous, directly into the Bible belt.”
What she surrounded with the children at school makes Chachki the perfect emblem of Pride 2025, which is organized in the iconoclastic opposition to a bleak war of culture. For example, she does not make “tyrann” as a verb. “I don’t like this word,” she says and pulls an “EW” Fand. “I always played out something special. I don’t know who you are, but you know who I am. I always felt so strange, I don’t want to call it celebrity, but a kind of peculiarity.” Self -confidence, persistence and fearlessness are what the theatrical illusion of serious pulling both real and sensible.
See also: Your guide to pride in 2025, from parade to the parties and more
How long will Chachki will maintain your drag personality is now the question. On her birthday, two weeks ago, she wished her Instagram Main Feed happy birthday “for both”, together with pictures of herself as a chachki and Paul. “I went through a time early on when I thought I was potentially trans,” she explains. “I enjoyed being so much in drag and being so much so much that I really went deep into the escapism.”
She discussed it with the important people in her life. “Everyone around me is really supportive,” she says. “I really had to make a decision.” In the end, the decision made itself. “For me, I believe that trans-ness goes through body dysmorphia, and I really don’t. I love my body. So it’s not about being caught in a wrong body. It is about getting into a box in a society in a society in a society.”
On this metaphysical prosperity, Chachki has to give its flawless, lucrative and final act 1 person to finish the finishing touches. “I’ve always been proud, you know,” she says, leaning in.
What is proud if not? “It is really now for me to be proud of the people who came before us. All people who had to fight to bring us to this point.”
As someone said to me about transgender rights, according to the recent judgments of the Supreme Court, we have often been fabulous outside of the law, and we will also be fabulous again. “That’s how I feel like this,” chachki nods while we offer each other the traditional, beautiful farewell to the season. Happy pride.
Main picture -loan: Albert Sanchez
