After donning a tuxedo dress to this year’s Oscars and arriving on a golden palanquin for the camp Met Gala, there was no way Billy Porter wasn’t going to reinvent his fashion history with his Tony Awards look. Fittingly, the Pose star upcycled the curtain from Broadway’s Kinky Boots for his outfit, the very same curtain from behind which Porter emerged for roughly 1,150 shows. According to a New York Times profile dropped ahead of Sunday night’s awards, handbag company Scenery Bags purchased the red velvet curtain after Kinky Boots closed in April 2018 and contacted Porter to see if the show’s Tony Award–winning star might want it fashioned into a bag. Instead, design duo Celestino Couture retrofitted the curtain into an Elizabethan-inspired red-and-pink tuxedo top, tulle skirt, and matching cigarette pant decorated with handcrafted flowers and an embroidered uterus as a nod to “empowering women’s reproductive rights.â€
“I want to flip the question of what it means to be a man,†Porter told the Times. “This question of masculinity, this sort of microscope of heteronormative masculinity that we are very often held up to, especially as leading men, needs to be shattered.†Concluded the actor, “You know, it’s toxic and I’m over it and I’ve lived it and I’m not doing it anymore.â€
