Sometimes you can tell the quality of a party by the ratio of those presenting as the gender assigned at birth to those who are not. The after-party for Like One Of Your French Girls, a new book of drag queen photography by the artist Jeremy Kost, held in the lobby of the New York Edition hotel on 25 May, was a great one, hitting around 1:1. Among the luminaries on hand were Trixie Mattel, Amanda Lepore and Susanne Bartsch, to say nothing of Rosario Dawson, but while the party was vibrant the book is actually somewhat archival. “I literally hadn’t made anything other than images of male nudes from November 2012 through spring of 2016!” Kost said, but then returned to some Polaroids from a show at Conner Contemporary in 2010 and liked how painting on them meshed with their fading colours. “A lot of the characters in the Polaroids in the book were shot in advance of RuPaul’s DragRace fame,” Kost added. “I thought they were brilliant artists and that together we could make something that could really have a point of view before likes and followers were a thing.”
