Why the drag looks in ‘The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ are still iconic, 30 years on

Three decades after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, costumes from the iconic movie continue to inspire.

Sydney, 1994. A dimly-lit bar, wrapped in tinsel curtains and the fragmented, twirling light from a disco ball. Tick Belrose (played by Hugo Weaving) is on stage lip syncing as his drag persona Mitzi Del Bra; clad in a silver sequin dress with matching gloves and a bouffant blonde wig. This is the opening scene from “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, which first screened at Cannes Film Festival 30 years ago this month. “I made that dress for myself,” Tim Chappel, one of the movie’s costume designers, told CNN. “The weekend before, I’d gone to the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant as Miss Silicon Valley, because (the dress) had joke plastic boobs inside. Stephan (Elliott, the film’s writer and director) was really on my case because I wanted to do lots of obscure stuff (to costume the film ), and he wanted (the principal characters in drag)  to look like ladies. So I said we can make him look like a lady and take the piss at the same time, because the boobs are clearly from a party shop. And I’d already made it, so it was cheap!” In the film, Tick scoops up his freshly widowed friend Bernadette Bassenger (played by Terence Stamp) and flamboyant, fellow drag queen Adam Whitley/ Felicia Jollygoodfellow (actor Guy Pearce) and goes west — both musically and literally — for a road trip across the Outback in their affectionately-christened bus: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. “We were just having a laugh!” Chappel said, recalling the film’s production. Sydney 30 years ago was at a unique point in time and culture; not yet tethered to the rest of the world via the internet, the somewhat isolated drag scene was able to cultivate its own sprawling visual language for storytelling and sexual politics, beyond the more recognizable female impersonation that Elliott might have initially pushed for. “It was my first opportunity to really express myself as a designer, and I wasn’t going to let anybody stand in my way,” Chappel said. “I just really wanted to make (the film’s wardrobe) unique and interesting.”