“I’ve got a lot to lose, I’ll tell you that,” Aquaria says matter-of-factly.
The 22-year-old New York City-based drag queen is getting ready for a gig in Providence, Rhode Island; in roughly a week, she’ll make her debut on the tenth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I’m curious to know if she ever felt an advantage on the show due to her substantial Instagram following, which marked her as an early frontrunner.
“My experience was just as intense as anyone else’s,” she responds. “But in a different way.”
Most queens go on Drag Race with nothing to lose and everything to gain; even for contestants who are eliminated early, an appearance means unparalleled exposure to drag fans worldwide. Some queens are able to parlay their stint on the show into superstardom — Drag Race contestants have starred in feature films, two have their own cable TV show, and many have made millions and gained huge fanbases. But Aquaria was the rare queen who was well on her way to superstardom no matter what.
It’s a conviction she holds at her core; it is, after all, how she introduces herself in the tenth season premiere: “My name is Aquaria and I’m a superstar,” she said, lifting her chin with confidence. If it comes off as cocky, it may be forgiven only because she actually has the chops to back it up.
Even before Drag Race, Aquaria had established herself as a major force in drag. Before the tenth season cast was announced, Aquaria was one of only two contestants to have a six-digit Instagram following; the other, Eureka O’Hara, had already appeared on Drag Race once before. Having become a fixture in the New York City club scene, Aquaria had already booked gigs overseas, secured magazine covers (and Vogue Italia spreads), and made fans out of fashion industry heavyweights like Jeremy Scott and Nicola Formichetti. The New York party magnate Ladyfag referred to her as “one of the kindest and hardest working girls in NYC," while Moschino designer Jeremy Scott wanted to know if we can “just hurry up and give her the crown already.” So when it came time for her Drag Race debut, the pressure was on.
“All eyes were on me,” she recalls. “Because I am...you know, that girl.”
Behind “that girl” is a decidedly more chill (but no less self-assured) boy named Giovanni Palandrani. Before moving to New York, he grew up in West Chester, a suburban town outside Philadelphia. He was raised by liberal, comfortably middle class parents who were always supportive of his hobbies — like dance, in which he trained professionally for four years, and theater.
But while he trained in performance, Palandrani became fixated by YouTube makeup tutorials from internet celebrities like Gigi Gorgeous, and before long, he was raiding his own bathroom cabinets to find spare products. He spent free time in high school experimenting with his own looks, taking pictures of them, and editing them using Photoshop. “I was very well-versed in computer shit,” Aquaria, who’s known for her fresh and exciting makeup stylings, explains. “Through trial and error, I just kind of taught myself.” That skill would later become integral in her rise on social media, where her pictures all have a noticeably glossy (and undeniably compelling) finish. But this isn’t to discredit her actual skill as a makeup artist. As America has quickly learned, she looks just as pristine live on the Drag Race runway, where no Photoshop can save you.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Aquaria for close to two years now. We met during summer 2016, when she was a mainstay at many of the parties I frequented. By that time, her name was already headlining events across the city. Though she was still under 21, New York clubs are all but willing to sacrifice legal liability to nurture promising talent, and the issue was basically moot.
Her age, however, did impact other aspects of her career — namely, her eligibility to compete on Drag Race. Having grown up watching the show, Aquaria always knew she would audition. But no queen under the age of 21 has ever been cast, and she wanted to wait until she was properly legal to apply. (Though the minimum age to apply for the show is 18, it’s understood by many that producers are unlikely to accept a candidate until they turn 21.) By the time she did formally audition last summer, she was cast on her first try — an impressive feat for a show where thousands of queens vie for 14 slots each season.
Then there’s Sharon Needles, Aquaria’s “drag mentor” (not “drag mother,” as she’s quick to clarify) and one of the queen’s earliest cheerleaders. “For a very, very young drag queen, she has made quite the impression on the world,” Needles, who won Drag Race season four, said in a video for i-D last year. “I’ve never forgotten the first day I was announced to be on season four of Drag Race,” Sharon continued. “It was instant applause, and the first one I noticed who changed their profile picture, their background, all their social media towards Sharon Needles was this very young boy named Giovanni — this one. And so I always said, I’ll remember you as my number one fan, and I’ll always keep an eye on you. And I always did.”
Sharon “would have me over to her hotel room while she was getting in drag,” Aquaria says, since the then 16-year-old was too young to see her perform at Philadelphia clubs. Once she was older, Aquaria would pretend to be Sharon’s assistant and sneak into her gigs. “Through helping Sharon do her shows, I learned kind of secondhand how to do drag,” she says. And given Sharon’s cult status among drag fans, her influence would make Aquaria’s rise seem like kismet.
In fact, perhaps the only surprising part of Aquaria’s story is that she ever even considered a different path. Before she became an internet sensation, Aquaria was a womenswear design student at Fashion Institute of Technology. Of course, she still dabbled in drag at the time, but only so much as her school schedule would allow. It wasn’t until the summer after her freshman year that she considered pursuing her passion full-time.
During that summer, she worked as an overnight host at 24-hour Chelsea hotspot Cafeteria — famously known to tourists as “that place where the Sex and the City girls brunch” — and found herself rubbing shoulders with the city’s who’s who, like author and nightlife legend Amanda Lepore. She returned to her sophomore year to find that she “did not relate” to the other students, and that her teachers “didn’t seem to get me” — so she made a “dramatic choice” and dropped out. She took the money she had been saving over the summer, found an apartment, and began to build a new, more purposeful life for herself in the city.
Just two episodes into this season of Drag Race, she has solidified herself as a queen to watch. “It’s future-forward drag — she’s very exciting,” RuPaul said on last week’s episode, while Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi predicted she would be a “force to be reckoned with.”
As much outside-the-box club kid as it is high fashion, Aquaria’s style of drag stands in stark contrast to the gown-focused pageantry of the old guard. She traces her style influence back to Westgay, the once-popular, now-defunct weekly Frankie Sharp party. “It was clubby, but people could still turn out looks,” she says — a place where she first felt free to “live my full fantasy.”
“Back then, me and my friends were more really going as fans. We were like, ‘Oh, I wonder if I can talk to Susanne,”’ she remembers, referring to Susanne Bartsch, the party host best known for producing raucous monthly events at the Copacabana in the late 1980s. “Maybe she’ll like my look and give me a drink ticket.”
It’s hard to believe that she’s reflecting on a time only a few years ago, especially since Aquaria is now a regular fixture at “Bartschland” events. Last June, she even accompanied Bartsch to Vienna to perform in her room at the glamorous annual Life Ball, where she walked the red carpet wearing a Nicola Formichetti gown.
Aquaria wore his designs again this February, when she walked the runway for his NICOPANDA show during London Fashion Week. Sure, it was her “first real on-the-runway fashion show experience,” but she describes it all like it’s just business as usual. And maybe that’s because it is. Though she walked the runway just like the other models, Aquaria was the only one to conceptualize and style her own look (“a tired, hungover, party lady”) and do her own makeup. “I love working with other designers and making their visions come to life,” she tells me. “Especially in ways they weren’t intending initially.”
Despite appearances, everything isn’t all glitz and glamour in Aquaria’s world. The increased exposure that her Drag Race appearance has brought — to wit, over 160,000 new Instagram followers since the cast was announced — has also brought increased scrutiny, and its fair share of haters on Reddit and Twitter.
Rumors have churned among the fervent Drag Race fan community that an upcoming Aquaria look this season includes a wig fashioned to look like box braids, bringing accusations of cultural appropriation. Aquaria’s response was tactful, and while she didn’t outright deny them, she gets a little uneasy — even slightly defensive — when I ask her about becoming a target. “People shouldn’t judge someone on something they aren’t even sure happened just because someone with an anonymous username and no picture or information on their page said it,” she declares. “Try not to guesstimate and Nancy Drew everything and just enjoy the show.” She sounds a bit exasperated, but she still manages to get a joke out by the end: “I think everyone should just tune in on Thursday, March 22nd at 8:00pm if you really want to find out!”
Then there’s Miz Cracker, who has also been steadily rising within the New York drag scene for years — and whom Drag Race producers wasted no time establishing as Aquaria’s rival. After a dramatic story arc in the season premiere in which Aquaria accuses Cracker of copying her makeup, Cracker's Instagram following surged. She’s gained the most followers thus far this season (over 260,000), and Aquaria’s ability to handle the rivalry with grace (or not) will likely loom over her post-Drag Race reputation for years to come.
But Aquaria is well-aware of the fact that haters will be a constant nuisance in her life. Besides, the rumors and haters seem to be doing little to stifle her own growth. It’s clear that being on the show is already paying off — and at the very least, it’s a “surefire way to get your name into the living rooms of tons of Americans,” she says.
But Aquaria likely would have ended up on the American pop cultural radar regardless — if not on TV, arguing with other queens for the amusement of vodka soda-swirling queer people in gay bars the world over, then someplace just as big. Which begs the question: What if she didn’t need Drag Race at all?
“If I had never made it to Drag Race, I would still totally be doing what I do because I love what I do,” Aquaria tells me. But with the opportunity “pretty much staring me in the face,” she took it and ran, even if it meant going on a show that notoriously puts queens in predicaments they can’t always emerge from unscathed.
Her strategy? “I always convince myself of my confidence. It’s always, oh, I’m gonna win this one,” she says, even if it was outside her comfort zone. If she believed that Aquaria could do it at that moment, then Aquaria could. I don’t know. That sounds like a superstar to me.
Michael Cuby is the editor-at-large for them. His work has appeared in PAPER, Teen Vogue, VICE, and Flavorwire.
