Plastic Fantastic

Amanda Lepore’s ‘Cotton Candy’ World

Written by D. Michael Taylor

While there are certainly more than two dimensions to a woman whose breasts enter a room several seconds before she does, one still can’t help but wonder if the remarkable Amanda Lepore really wants you to think she’s as superficial as she appears. Having spent a lifetime crafting her uniquely ravishing look, it would seem on the surface (as it were) that she wants people to think of her as a kind of plastic commodity – not only as a living doll, but also as a real doll made in her likeness by designer Jason Wu, who recently created Michelle Obama’s inaugural gown.

Many transsexuals go out of their way to blend in as everyday women. But Lepore seems to revel in the idea of the female form as an archetypal canvas onto which you can project your desires, your dreams, or your fears. Jetsetting around the globe, she gets paid merely to show up at parties. Recently, she helped judge the costumes at Life Ball, the massive European AIDS charity event that takes place in Vienna’s massive gothic city hall. Asked if Bill Clinton had groped her, she said no, but told noiZe that she was “hoping that Monica Lewinsky would come and give an appearance about safe oral sex—but it didn’t happen.”

A familiar figure to Manhattan trendsetting party scenesters and global hotspots far beyond the Hudson River, she’s likely to show up to an event wearing nothing except the years of plastic surgery that she flaunts like a badge of honor and a few well-placed bits of fabric that wouldn’t cover a mouse’s privates. “I always wanted to be a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Jessica Rabbit,” she told noiZe. “I’m definitely there.”

With Marilyn’s cooing charm and Jessica’s cartoonishly exaggerated features, the soft-spoken (and surprisingly well-spoken) Amanda commands the attention of everyone in the room simply by being there. But there’s more to this silicone superstar than meets the eye.

Before Paris Hilton stumbled into the phenomenon of being famous for being famous, Amanda Lepore had already learned how to market her own image. She dubbed herself the “No. 1 Transsexual in the World” at a time when she was really the only one who wanted the title. This was a time when “transsexual” came closer in the public mind to the street prostitutes doing truck drivers in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District than to a RuPaul talkshow or a reality show in which contestants vied to be “America’s next top drag queen.”

Stuck between the worlds of mainstream America and the gay subculture, the transgendered were accepted by neither group. (Despite all the p.c. talk about LGBT, there was seldom a place at the table for that “T.”) These gender warriors hid deep in Transamerica, struggling to pass as something they knew they were deep inside. Sexuality itself can lose significance when you realize that you’re the wrong gender to begin with, and many brave souls struggle their entire lives to make a complicated correction that finally allows them to feel at home in their own skin.

Amanda’s Journey: Jersey Girl to Bombshell

Amanda’s journey began in her early teens growing up in New Jersey. Designing costumes for strippers helped her make money and pay for hormones. She knew with absolute certainty that this was the path she was destined to follow. Her personal philosophy is that “it’s something that you have to do for yourself and not for anyone else. I advise people to not do it for someone else or from pressures from society. It’s like a deep feeling that you have. I thought that I was a girl until my parents told me that I wasn’t.”

Her journey continued for many years, with many struggles, until she was the proud owner of a brand new six-cylinder bombshell of a body. She eventually fled to New York City, where she worked at a salon and then as a dominatrix before discovering her natural habitat in the wilds of Limelight-era clubbing.

This was the era of the club kid, and the infamous Michael Alig ruled his brood. Alig (now serving time in jail for the murder of a fellow club kid drug dealer) took her under his wing. She joined his merry band of club kid personalities when they stood over the New York club scene in the early 1990s. Before he ended up in stir, Alig aggressively courted the city’s freaks and outcasts, and offered a decidedly surreal home to those who didn’t belong anywhere else.
“It just didn’t have any restrictions,” Amanda recalled. “In some ways it was good and in some ways it was bad. It had a bad ending. I remember going to parties and being on stage and they would serve cocaine on trays to the people wandering in. It was really crazy.” She managed to emerge from the experience wiser and unscathed and an unrepentant champion of nightlife as a healthy escape—as long as one retains self-control: “There has to be some sort of happy medium of fun and restriction. There were kids that didn’t really fit in, and that needed to be there, to get through a hard time. It just went wrong with too much drugs, and no moderation.”

Busy, Busy Girl

Since then, Lepore has kept herself very busy. A devout exercise advocate, she is well-known to the athletes who frequent trendy David Barton Gym in Chelsea. “Going to the gym is one of the best thing you can do, it makes you look good everywhere,” she purrs, somehow always managing to mix the substantive with the shallow. She continues to develop her strong relationship with David LaChapelle, who considers her his muse. LaChapelle challenges her personally and artistically. His artful photos paved the way for her to become the face of M.A.C., Heatherette, Swatch and Jawbone, a company that recently introduced a design-oriented bluetooth device whose tag line stated the obvious: “People will talk.”

In 2006, Amanda teamed up with Jason Wu, at the time a well-known doll designer, to immortalize herself in plastic (again!). “Apparently he had been doing this since he was 15 years old. I always played with Barbie dolls when I was a kid, it was one of the first things that I loved, so it was great, because we got it down really good.” Not without a few corrections, however. “The prototype that he did was more of a Barbie Doll body. I said, ‘You can’t do that, I have to have bigger breasts.’ When I did fashion shows, my body would be so much different than the models, even though I was so skinny. I thought the Barbie Doll was more like a regular model. So I said you’ve got to make the breasts and the hips bigger. And at first the face was fuller in the cheeks, so we made the nose a little smaller and the cheekbones more sculpted—and then it was a dead ringer for me.” Her meticulous eye for detail paid off; the doll has already raised over $50,000 for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA) already.

For the 2008 holiday season, she released her signature perfume, Amanda by Amanda Lepore. “Very glamourous” is she described it, “very lingering. It’s kind of like you could walk into a gym and all of a sudden people would be like, oh wow, what’s that great smell? And you know, they would know I was there before I even walked in. It has Cristal in it, and it has gardenia, and a red flower and a yellow flower to represent my hair and skin.” Adding real Cristal champagne to her scent must have seemed only natural to someone accustomed to snacking on caviar in VIP lounges with fellow sex goddess Pamela Anderson. Originally created for her personal use by a COTY Award-winning perfumer, she eventually sought financial backers to help her release the scent commercially. She found them, of course, “because,” as she put it, “I always get what I want.”

Her real passion at the moment is music. Her album “I… Amanda Lepore” is set to drop in August, and represents work that she has done for the past several years, such as “My Pussy” and the current single “Cotton Candy,” which was recently debuted to acclaim with a “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”-infused video featuring her frequent musical accomplice Cazwell. “It’s not just like “My Pussy,’” that is, something to perform at a club. But there are other songs that kids can listen to when they’re getting ready: “There’s a slow song that I think burlesque performers could do, and one really slow one called “Baby Doll”. It has a total album feel, and all the songs kind of fit together.”

The music gives her something fun and creative to do while she travels and poses around the world: “I used to go away and they would put you in first-class hotels and pay for these trips and everything and you wouldn’t do much, and it’s really like, wow, I want to do more. So the music was a great vehicle, and I’m really good at it, and love it.”

When she’s not traveling or in the recording studio she’s working on her form-fitting outfits. “I spend a lot of my days off coming up with hairdos, getting outfits made, going on errands for all that, which I really, really love. I always liked doing that, but now I’m able to afford it. Now when I fantasize of stuff to do I can make it happen.”

As far as she’s gotten, Amanda hasn’t forgotten where she came from, or what she had to deal with growing up. Traveling to a smaller college town in the States, she cherished meeting the next generation of young gender-benders, and she seemed to be as excited to meet them as they were to meet her. “There were girls turning into boys, and boys turning into girls, and they were going to college like that, and organizing the party. And there were so many of them now, and I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I really helped in some way.’ It’s great. It reminds me of when I was a kid. How I was starving for something, and how much it really means to them to have a better life and to really be who they are.”

So if you’ve seen photos of Amanda or in person and thought she was just a living doll, it turns out there’s a lot more to this doll than an amazing body, fierce hair, and an outrageous pussy. Her zen-like philosophy might very well be summed up on the new album: “If you think I’m crazy, well then I’m crazy, well then I’m crazy, but I’m doin’ it my way.” Her way hasn’t always been easy, but sometimes there’s a big pay-off for being true to yourself.

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Plastic Fantastic

Amanda Lepore’s ‘Cotton Candy’ World

Written by D. Michael Taylor

Amanda’s Journey: Jersey Girl to Bombshell

Busy, Busy Girl

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