She’s known as the muse to David LaChapelle, but who really is Amanda Lepore? Here are some pointers to really get to know this New York art icon.
Image by Marco Cerrone
- Lepore was born in Cedar Grove, New Jersey
- She is a Sagittarius
- She lives in a hotel in the Lower East Side
- She travels so much that she ran out of pages in her passport and had to get a new one
- She has had numerous plastic surgery procedures, including some in Mexico
- She told GayStar Travel how she wants to be called: “I like transsexual, it sounds more dirty. I don’t like “transgender”. It got so politically correct. I like transsexual – it sounds like a 1950s scandal magazine…’”
Image by JosefJasso
- She has collaborated on campaigns with MAC cosmetics /She started out as a seamstress for strippers
- She moved to New York in the late 1980s and made an appearance on the Joan Rivers Show, where she said she was thrown out of Disneyland because it was a family place
- “I’m the ideal woman and I’ve never been rejected” she told Rivers
- She met LaChapelle in 1998 at a gay club and their creative collaboration took off
Want to learn more about Amanda Lepore? Order her book Doll Parts, a memoir that traces her “fashionatrix” life in New York nightlife over the past 30 years.
As Amanda writes about the book: “Paving the way for today’s ‘trans revolution’ Lepore is one of the world’s most famous transsexuals who has worked with some the most renowned photographers and creatives in the world. She continues to exhibit strength and confidence with issues of gender identity and what it means to be a woman.
Image by JosefJasso
All with a sense of divine certainty, humor and charm. Lepore has spent years becoming the woman she’s always wanted to be, and in “Doll Parts” her effervescent and revealing memoir, she takes off the makeup, peels back the silicone, and reveals to the world the woman she really is—her heartbreak, her desires, her endurance and of course, her beauty secrets!”
What are you waiting for? Get it here!
Text by Nadja Sayej
