Barbie Influenced Trixie Mattel's Style But The "Drag Race" Winner Made it Her Own
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Not many people would say Barbie, My Little Pony, and Polly Pocket are their modern-day beauty icons, but that's exactly where Trixie Mattel draws her colorful, camp inspiration.
In her career in drag, Mattel also found inspiration from real-life women and things that have shaped pop culture, feminism, and drag herstory.
To start, dolls and toys inspired the RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars winner's looks because she didn't want to look like a person. "I wanted to look like something you could pull a string on the back of," she said. However, Barbie reigns supreme for this queen as the ultimate badass icon.
"You have to think Barbie was the first female president. The first woman on the moon in 1960," the reality star shares in our Badass Questionnaire series below.
For Mattel, Barbie changed the way little girls played and changed the perception of what types of lives women could live. "Until Barbie, little girls were only encouraged to pretend to play with baby dolls. We were encouraged to be a mom," she explains.
Badass women empower badass women and Mattel also has her supreme real-life queens. "The most badass drag queen in herstory is my personal favorite. I love Lady Bunny," Mattel says. She recalled seeing Lady Bunny unapologetically curse at a child during a performance. "I mean like transcendent," she adds.
Mattel's stepdad called her Trixie whenever he thought she was too feminine. "It's this word that was like basically a slur to me is the way I can I own several homes and businesses," she explains. Mattel would later play the character of Trixie in a Rocky Horror production at the age of 18, and the two polar opposite experiences would inspire her to take on the name.
The Wisconsin native has unique talents besides creating iconic looks on Drag Race. Mattel is a recording artist who can play the guitar, autoharp, and clarinet. "When someone yells Wonderwall, I'm doing Wonderwall," she says of her favorite song to cover. Mattel is the first drag queen to grace the cover of Autoharp Quarterly. "If you Wikipedia, autoharp under notable players, it's a picture of me, which is kind of a gag," she says.
Mattel is also an entrepreneur. She created a makeup line called Trixie Cosmetics, and she is the co-owner of the oldest gay bar in Wisconsin. "It's the bar I went to at 21, and I said, 'Can I please have an alcohol, please?'" she shared. Buying the bar with the person who first served her a legal drink is a full-circle moment, and it's badass.
