One thing about RuPaul’s Drag Race is that there will be discourse. With such a massively popular show, it’s a bit inevitable that almost every action (or inaction) by RuPaul and the show’s producers cause conversation. Last week, Marcia Marcia Marcia complained about the show no longer requiring queens to sing for the Rusical (amongst other grievances.) The fandom rose up and cried foul pretty much unanimously when the show was shortened to hour-long episodes and the series later uploaded them at their full length.
Well, there’s a chance season 16 is also an answer to a long running complaint.
For this week’s mini-challenge, RuPaul has the girls do “spit takes.” Yes, that is just like it sounds: RuPaul will give them a comedic line or two as they drink water, and the contestants are expected to spit the water while laughing. Which … I guess this would be a very good skill to have if you want a cameo in someone’s screwball comedy. But, for the maxi-challenge we are back to the Singer sewing machines.
It has been at least a decade since RuPaul’s Drag Race hosted three design challenges in one season — for the purposes of this count, makeover challenges are not design challenges. But for the past five (at least) viewers have complained: spending your family’s money isn’t a talent. People have begged the show to return to its Project Runway-inspired origins so the queens are forced to show us not only what they are made of but what they can literally make. And now, the show seems to be doing just that.
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It’s quite perfectly timed, when you think about it. In a moment where, as a direct result of Drag Race, drag queens really do not have to make their own garments, the show reasserts the fact that they could if they wanted to. That, while queens like Miss Fame, Aquaria, and Keiona Revlon sit front row at shows (Keiona is at Paris Fashion Week literally right now) and La Grande Dame is walking in shows, drag performers are still some of the most creative and capable beings out there. And what a cast to show it off.
The theme is See You Next Wednesday, where contestants create a Neo-Goth look using black, white, and gray fabric that has been supplied in the werkroom. Sapphira Cristál turns out a gown that is classic, but beautiful, buoyed mostly by her performance of disinterest on the runway. She’s so adept at her work, in fact, that she has enough time to double-up, putting in some serious work on Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige’s look — we are coming back to that later. In another season, Sapphira would have probably made for one of the top three looks on the runway. But this is a season of true designers.
Nymphia Wind, Dawn, and Q all had something to prove for the challenge: Nymphia and Q both have one design win while Dawn has none. And prove things they did. Nymphia’s perfectly draped, skintight, veiled creation was second to none in my humble opinion. While on another queen I might complain about the lack of movement (Nymphia had to shuffle down the runway) there was something about it that reminded me of geishas, or the Japanese women in the new FX series Shogun.
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Dawn, in a feat of engineering, swings hard for the top focusing on the impossibly small waist that is central to her silhouette and building a floating hoopskirt-cum-chandelier of sorts via fishing line. Q went the biggest, turning out a gown with a massive billowing train that gives it the effect of a cape. She’s rewarded with the win.
In the bottom is Mhi’ya with a simple enough liquidy dress featuring a sheer, shimmering back alongside Plasma wearing … yeah … whatever that is. In the lip sync, even though she removes her wig (without revealing another one) Mhi’ya easily sweeps the floor with our theater queen. But, at least she goes home with two wins.
And a lip sync assassin has been minted.
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