It’s not often that I’ve had to suffer for beauty, or to pull off the kind of extreme looks that I sometimes embrace—but as an undergrad on the dance floor in Chicago, I did wear size 26 raw denim that I’d slept in for a week so they would hug and squeeze every nuance of my hips as I swayed them. Later, though, when I worked at Barneys in LA, many of the men I attempted to sell this process-dependent denim to found even the thought of wearing jeans two sizes too small for days (or even weeks) before they gave way to be abhorrent, that extreme labor for aesthetics akin to torture. Imagine, then, having the patience—or is it the endurance, the fortitude, or, maybe, the sheer swing-for-the-fences attitude—to pull off the kinds of wild nails, or lashes, or even lips with the gravitational force seen on these pages? Having grown up in a land of women—my mother, sister, grandmother moving around me like glamazons—I feel the idea that one must labor to be beautiful is simply a fact of beauty: When something has the power to make you otherworldly, a minor deity, that is something worth working to attain.
All of this is what led me, in the months leading up to my first Tony Awards, in 2021, to a fitting in Paris across from the Place Vendôme in the famed Schiaparelli atelier, with creative director Daniel Roseberry helping me into an inverted corset that would make my waist even smaller than those size 26 A.P.C.s. I did not ask how to deal with pants that zip in the back, or with platform heels that gave me Babadook proportions. This was a garment I was meant to wear on one of the most important nights of my life: I wanted to be beautiful, and beauty required labor.
And so, for almost six hours I suffered for beauty—for fashion. My hair was braided back (by my mother, no less), my cuticles torn from the nails in my hands and feet, and a heavy gold mask—made from a mold of my face that Daniel created after allowing a thick pink goo to copy the topography of my mouth—hung from my ears. Then came the corset, which two young stylists pulled ever tighter against my frame till the breath left my body and I exhaled a smile as I saw myself in the mirror: beautiful, because I’d earned it. The transformation (and the process behind it all) was a kind of embodiment of the power of artifice, whether played out in braids and masks or in the sweep of lengthy lashes or almost ludicrously long nails.
The things you don’t learn from your mother, your sister, or your grandmother when you idolize their laboring for beauty, though, are the indignities and sacrifices that go along with that labor. More specifically: None of the women in my life—and my mother was in the room with me as I dressed—told me that in the six hours of prep leading up to being tied into an inverted corset, I should either drink less or ask how one gracefully manages a restroom break, because halfway through the Tony Awards I found myself both constrained and exploding. It was, of course, a situation that many a corseted person has had to navigate: The tortuous transition from a minor deity of beauty into a human, who then navigates the graceful labor of reviving the deity again.
In this story: hair, Jawara; makeup, Yadim. Manicurist: Lola Rudelou; produced by Prodn at Art + Commerce; set design, Heath Mattioli.