The zine that started it all!
Upon moving to Brooklyn, NY, in 2013—four years before she appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race—Sasha Velour and her partner Johnny self-published the first issue of the magazine now called “Velour” as a stapled zine, with a print run of only 50 copies. They called it “VYM,” and it sold out in one day. After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2014, the magazine was printed in larger format and distributed to local and queer bookshops all over the country. A small NY artist grant funded the printing of the second issue, and Sasha’s income from filming RuPaul’s Drag Race went to the third.
Now, all three volumes of her critically-acclaimed magazine, Velour: The Drag Magazine (House of Velour, 2015-2017) have been collected as a hardcover coffee table book, Velour: The Drag Magazine [Collector’s Edition].
At 296 pages, entirely ad-free, Velour: The Drag Magazine [Collector’s Edition] is as much an art book as it is a magazine. It is designed from cover to cover by Velour herself, in her unique style, and features illustrations, collages, fashion editorials, poems, interviews, and essays by over 75 queer artists and drag performers from around the world. Since its inception, the magazine has been dedicated to showcasing the work of drag queens and drag kings, queer, trans, AFAB (assigned female at birth), and non-binary drag artists from all backgrounds.
This collection stands as a celebration of every drag artist who dares to create work that pushes boundaries in both queer and mainstream culture. Velour says the pieces collected in this coffee table book are as varied and valid as the drag artists they depict. “There is ‘no right way’ to do, or even define drag,” she insists, “We seek to celebrate it all.”
