Niohuru X: A Big Dick Girl’s Twisted Fashion Underworld

By Jude Jones

An anthropomorphic fox-deity parading a human-skin kabuki mask. A muscle-suit murderer hidden inside a Hello Kitty head. A bimbo alien stripper blessed with two pairs of voluptuous, Amanda Lepore-esque tits.

These are just a few of the monsters inhabiting the twisted cosmos of Chinese-born, New York-based make-up artist and fashion designer Niohuru X, recently crowned the winner of season five of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula. Her run, during which she accumulated two wins and high praise from the judges in almost every single episode, is one of the most dominant we have seen from the freak-show consortium of contestants that the Boulets bring to our screens each year, their show gaining swelling momentum as the grungier, grittier stepson to the often hyper-sanitised, hyper-glamorous drag-world zeitgeist that RuPaul has been feeding for over fifteen years now.

That isn’t to say that the glamourous has no place in the Boulet Brothers’s topsy-turvy drag underworld. Much to the contrary, it was precisely Niohuru’s ability to infuse jaw-dropping glamour into looks dripping (sometimes literally) with the show’s other two core tenets – filth and horror – that won her so much applause. Which is testament to Niohuru’s sheer artistry. Because although Dragula is increasingly becoming a staple of the queer television circuit, it still lacks the magnetic pull and cultural ubiquity of its elder stepsister, meaning it lacks its market power, too. Of course, the low-budget, ‘70s slasher punk aesthetic is – I would hazard to assume – much more the visual referent Dragula is gearing towards than World of Wonder’s gaudy Main Stage and Werk Room. However, the lesser money in the “monster drag” that Dragula spotlights also induces a hook-and-crook craftiness in its contestants. In a concept largely foreign to the Instagram-model queens of the contemporary Drag Race epoque, then, all Dragula monsters must finish all their looks on-set before adjoining it with a convincing on-stage performance, often in front of bonified horror icons like Elvira or heavy-metal android Poppy. Failure to live up to expectations results in contestants being dropped into “extermination challenges”, of which past iterations include live burials, latex suffocation, and hypodermic-needle injections.

Despite being one of the bigger – and, consequently, more lucrative –  names on the cast coming into the show, however, Niohuru entered at a surprising disadvantage. Prior to her invite, Niohuru’s star power had been as a viral creative posting horror- and mythology-inspired visual artistry combining motifs from Chinese mythology, Western fairytales, and hardcore club-kid glamour, amassing over 95k Instagram devotees in doing so. Yet, she forfeited on-stage experience in the process, her performance career limited to an off handful of underground club appearances in New York. And in a competition that deploys floorshows rather than runways, asks its contestants to embody the monstrous characters they build rather than simply drape themselves into pretty garms, failure to truly perform can swiftly become an Achilles heel. The shocking loss of Victoria Elizabeth Black, an uber-polished, Hollywood-employed prosthetics artist, to underdog comedy-queen Biqtch Puddin’ in the show’s second season serves as precedent for this Dragula trope.

And performance is where Niohuru faltered. Her first bottom placement, following four consecutive episodes on top, came in the show’s iconic rock groups challenge, in which contestants are asked to put and perform as together a heavy-rock ensemble. However, the refreshing ingenuity and near-unparalleled polish of Niohuru’s artistry made her the obvious choice to win by the end, even if her pure-aesthetics-without-the-performance-faff background made her simultaneously something of an outsider.

So, what’s next for our reigning monster? Although still without the mass-market outreach of the Drag Race monopoly, Dragula alumni have started finding new ways to carve themselves cultural niches. Season one contestant Meatball achieved brief stardom last year for their performance as disgraced ex-Congressman George Santos at Drag Race-winner Sasha Velour’s critically-acclaimed NightGowns cabaret, Biqtch Puddin’ was nominated for an Emmy in 2020 for their work on Netflix’s Eastsiders, and season three winner Landon Cider has grown to be arguably America’s most famous drag king, now featuring as a regular judge on the Canadian drag competition series Call Me Mother. With her platform, Niohuru seems gearing towards a fashion-world blossoming, investing her US$100,000 victor’s prize and post-show celebrity into her clothing brand, NUWA 1997, named for the Chinese mother goddess who is said to have created humanity and repaired the Pillar of Heaven as the universe collapsed.

Glancing the NUWA 1997 site lets us enter a bit more into Niohuru’s postlapsarian universe, too. “PU$$Y MADE IN CHINA” and “BIG DICK GIRL” are the catechisms that adorn in rhinestone her self-designed items, showcasing once more the guerrilla bimbo-politics that unspokenly undergirded her entire Dragula run. “BIG DICK GIRL” as an ethos for a woman ready to, like Nuwa, create humanity in her own radical image, to make of herself an ancient Chinese goddess for a modern, monster-filled age.

The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula is available to stream in the US on AMC+ or in the UK on the Shudder app, as well as through the Shudder channel on Amazon Prime Video.

Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the managing editor of GAY45 and is an interdisciplinary student journalist, currently completing an undergraduate degree in History & French at the University of Cambridge. His writing – covering photography, nightlife, creative work, gallery reviews, interest pieces, and political comments – have also been published by Varsity, The Cambridge Language Collective, and DISRUPTION, among others. He is in his final year of studies and is hoping to move to Paris next year to pursue a postgraduate degree in History & Philosophy of Art.

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