Meet Ave, the drag artist donning Hollywood glamour with a side of insanity
This is A HOT MINUTE WITH, a quick-fire interview series championing all the rising talent catapulting into fashion, art and music’s fickle stratosphere. From pinch-me moments to bad dates and even worse chat-up lines, think of it as an overindulgent conversation – like the ones you have in sticky club toilets at 4.A.M. Except these guests don’t regret the overshare…
Courtesy of @girljoys_
NAME AVE
AGE 22
HOMETOWN America’s heartland
DESCRIBE YOURSELF IN 3 WORDS Fat, stunning, ridiculous.
Snot, stubble and tears aren’t the average finishing touches of a daily make-up routine, but for drag artist Ave, you’d be lucky to catch her without them. Hailing from America’s heartland, the 22-year-old’s make-up journey began, like many of us, with a secretive swipe of her mother’s collection (namely a MAC Ruby Woo lippy), before evolving into a vessel to explore her gender identity. Her signature drag traverses every notable reference of the last century – tracking through Jean Cocteau’s hallucinatory art of the ‘30s; to 1950s old Hollywood glamour; ‘70s psychedelia; a quick pit-stop at the 1980s heavy metal bands, before landing in the present day with an added flourish of facial hair – so it’s no surprise her artistry has garnered an avid Instagram following. “Being a trans person in a society where my body feels like a commodity, I’m able to express all these inner workings of my gender dysphoria through a pound of face paint and a fake moustache.”
As well as housing some bloody great content – think TRIXIE MATTEL meets Poirot, with a side of sleaze – Ave’s platform is forging the path to a more inclusive beauty industry, one absurd look at a time. Her latest endeavour DOLLVISION – a series of nude self-portraits akin to those vixen-splashed Playboy covers of the ‘70s – is a love letter to her own body, championing trans-visibility in the mainstream media. “The [beauty] industry can do more,” she says. “More trans people. More BIPOC. More fat people. I want more!”
While Ave overhauls the beauty narrative, I caught up with the mid-western belle in a transatlantic conversation on her Moderna vaccine fantasies; sickest obsessions and the $2 Elf palette she just can’t live without…
Ella Aldersey-Williams: What do you hope to represent with your platform?
Ave Davis: That the fat trans body is divine.
EAW: Favourite make-up look you’ve ever created?
AD: Any of them including snot, tears, and stubble. I love painting myself blue and wrapping myself in bandages, it feels like the goal for my art in its truest form. To make the viewer uncomfortable in a way, to radiate glamour with a soft touch of the absolutely insane.
EAW: Name your make-up idol, dead or alive.
AD: Do I have to say one? There’s so many. Divine, Pat McGrath, Twiggy, Petra Von Kant, Sasha Velour, Nina Hagen, Grace Jones, the Cockettes.
EAW: You’re trapped on a desert island and can only have one piece of make-up with you. What is it?
AD: Neon blue eyeshadow, for a little trashy colour in my life.
EAW: Name the first make-up product you ever bought.
AD: Oh god, it was this horrendous $2 palette from ELF filled with the dustiest and ugliest purple eyeshadows. I used it every day, putting it on in the bathroom at school and wiping it off before I got home so my parents wouldn’t see. I still have it too, it means an oddly large amount to me. We all start somewhere!
EAW: You’re hosting a dinner party… who are your top three guests, and what are you cooking them?
AD: John Waters, Marianne Williamson, Miss Piggy. I am absolutely not cooking for them; I can barely cook for myself. It’s BYOD, bring your own dish. I bet Marianne can whip up something sickening in the kitchen.
EAW: What beauty products can’t you leave the house without?
AD: Brow gel always and forever: I have big, bushy, feminine, cisgender brows that I gotta tame a little bit.
EAW: What’s your weirdest guilty pleasure?
AD: I have an absolute sick obsession with trash, bottom of the barrel reality television. Nothing is more exciting to me. I love the mess, the drama, the madness, the chaos, and the confusion of it all.
EAW: Favourite fashion era?
AD: I wish I could choose between the absurd psychedelia of the ‘60s and the laid-back hippie chic of the ‘70s, but I can’t! As a lover of busy prints, clashing colours and headscarves, I just can’t get enough of those decades.
EAW: Best thing money can’t buy?
AD: For my current financial situation? Facial feminisation surgery.
EAW: Best thing money can buy?
AD: For my future financial situation? Facial feminisation surgery.
EAW: What’s the last film you watched?
AD: A really fun, horribly unromantic comedy called A New Leaf by Elaine May. It’s an absolute delight, drenched in satire on trust fund babies and love in the 1970’s. And directed by one of the funniest women alive! What's not to love?
EAW: What advice would you give to your younger self?
AD: Relax. You’re gonna find a way to make it work. You’ll find out one day that no one fucking cares what you look like in public. Go easy on yourself, eat, listen to your friends’ opinions on your boyfriends, get excited. You’re going to begin to feel like yourself for the first time around 22, which seems far off. But you’ll get there, and you’re gonna look like a gorgeous girl doin’ it.
EAW: Describe your post-pandemic fantasy.
AD: Getting pricked with that sweet, sweet nectar that I call the Moderna vaccine, visiting ALL my drag friends across the country (Chicago, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles), moving away from the dusty Midwest and finally forging my own path in the world.