The fourth season of the wonderful RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered last night on Logo; the show’s thirteen new drag-queen contestants had to survive the “Rupocalypse,” the series’ first elimination. This Rupocalypse involved a challenging photo session with perennial reality-TV “star” Mike Ruiz, in which the queens had to pose on a spinning platform while being hosed down with “toxic waste” (read: neon-colored paint) by two near-naked male models. This might not seem like textbook McQueen, but the queens’ slow, off-kilter spin cycles in voluminous white dresses seemed very reminiscent of the iconic spring 1999 McQueen show’s finale, with model Shalom Harlow getting graffitied by two menacing robots. The challenge was in keeping with drag queens’ reputation for reappropriating fashion imagery in the best possible way, and not only because a good queen never misses the opportunity to make a phallic joke about hoses.
Watch a video of paint-covered queens falling all over themselves ahead.
