Yahoo Movies From Runway to Red Carpet to RuPaul’s Drag Race : How Trinity The Tuck Paid Homage to Sarah Paulson’s Prada Look
If you thought Sarah Paulson’s red carpet turn at the Ocean’s 8 premiere was going to be the last we saw of Prada’s acid green paillette dress—think again! In a just-released clip of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars 4, Trinity The Tuck makes her entrance in a stunning homage to Paulson and Prada. Arriving in a busy bag labeled “toxic waste,” Trinity unzips herself, revealing her neon green look to a quite frankly stunned Monique Heart. “I’m made of plastic, [so] I might as well wear plastic!” Trinity cheers. As if that wasn’t a gag enough, she then reveals the look is entirely made of zip ties.
Reached over the phone this afternoon, the All-Stars 4 queen explained her inspiration for the unmissable outfit. “When I saw the original Prada dress on Sarah Paulson, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is drag!’” Trinity told Vogue. “I loved it. It’s so loud and creative. I was like, ‘I have to have this.’ But obviously, girl, I’m on a drag queen budget, so I needed to find someone who could do something that’s inspired by it.”
Luckily, Trinity knows New York–based designer Casey Caldwell, who is famous for his zip tie creations, and asked him to whip something up inspired by Paulson’s Prada. Well, maybe whip up is the wrong phrase. According to Trinity, Caldwell had four people and his mother working on this dress, which required thousands of zip ties of differing weights and lengths.
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For her entrance look, Trinity paired the ensemble with a choker and fiberglass earrings, making a bracelet from leftover zip tie material just before walking into the workroom herself. As for the orange wig, that was a purely drag choice. “Obviously, this dress is designed after fashion. I feel like drag and fashion go hand in hand—they inspire each other a lot—and I just wanted to be a drag queen. A lot of Drag Race contestants nowadays want to focus on being pure fashion, off the runway,” Trinity said. “I am old-school drag. I want to be costumey. I want to be in your face. When I was thinking what I could do with the dress to make it more absurd and eye-catching, it was like: Duh, let’s go to the opposite end of the color wheel and do bright neon orange hair.”
After posting her entrance on Instagram, Trinity notes the look has been divisive. “Looking through the comments, it’s split down the middle—people either love it, love it, love it, or they hate it, hate it, hate it. Either way, it’s making people think. That’s what fashion is supposed to be; fashion is supposed to be polarizing,” she said.
Firmly in camp “love it” is Paulson’s stylist, Karla Welch, who was honored by the homage. “I don’t think there could possibly be a better homage to Ms. Prada and Sarah than Trinity’s re-creation of what is probably my favorite dress of all time,” Welch wrote Vogue in an email this morning. “Her creation with zip ties is epic, and the execution looks flawless. To me, this is the joy of fashion! What an honor!”
As Paulson herself told Vogue earlier this year, “[The dress] made me a tiny bit nervous, because, you know, I could just see the Internet memes. But I just think it’s so beautiful, so daring, and so fun. Sometimes we have to remember that fashion is here for a little bit of escapist fun, and there’s nothing wrong with fun when making any kind of wardrobe choice.”
Forget the memes, Sarah, you’ve been immortalized on Drag Race! See the rest of Trinity’s looks when RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars 4 premieres on VH1 this Friday, December 14.
