I am:

My name is Crystal Quartz and I’m the crown jewel of Karangahape Road, the warrior pop princess. This will be my seventh year doing drag. I'm not a sequins girl. I'm a rhinestone girl. I like things looking super, super sparkly. But, you know, my name's Crystal, so it comes in the name. I have to be covered in crystals.

My fashion sense has been shaped by:

I think fashion is incredibly important to your drag persona. It helps with defining the character of who you are as a queen or as a performer. I think it's really important to incorporate the things that you get joy out of, within fashion, to bring personality to the character that you create.

As a kid I had a lot of Barbie dolls, a lot of Bratz dolls. I liked making costumes and sewing little dresses for them. I think that has helped define the look and feel of what Crystal is. She's very much a larger than life Bratz doll. That’s how I've always felt about her, and I have a deep love of bright colours. You very rarely see Crystal in black.

I like walking into a room and lighting it up with bright colours and rhinestones and making everything shimmer.

I’m quite picky with my style. Having ownership over it is something that is important to me. I think as a performer, you have to be able to mould yourself to fit into certain spaces and I think initially when you start doing drag, it can be quite easy to fall into what people expect you to look like as a drag queen.

But I found the elements I like from drag, like the classic old styles with big ruffles and boas, etc. That makes me happy, and I feel like I have curated an aesthetic without compromising the look and feel too much.

My relationship with fashion is:

I think my clothes and fashion choices have really helped me create a niche with certain people in the community, because I do a lot of cosplay, like dressing as Ariel from The Little Mermaid. I think it creates a connection over something that's nostalgic and that people love and being able to give it new life in a different way.

I would say the first time I put on a complete look and felt the most Crystal was when we did Miss Universe as a theme at Caluzzi and I dressed as Miss Greece. My mom made me this Grecian toga-esque dress made out of shimmery fabric. I put it on. I was wearing this big long brown wig and looking myself in the mirror and I was like, ‘I feel so beautiful and I feel like this goddess that I always wanted to be’. I’d always seen photos of the Victoria's Secret Angels. All this big flowing fabric and things blowing in the wind, and it was the first time that I put that on myself and went, ‘Oh, okay, this is it. This is what I've been wanting’.

Putting together an outfit / inspiration:

I think my aesthetic is quite dynamic. I'm quite a chameleon when it comes to drag. I have some really strong silhouettes that have stuck with over the years. I like leaning into my body because my body is something I've had to learn to love. Not naturally being the most masculine body. It's built quite feminine – wide hips, wide shoulders, and I think I've been able to learn to love my body a bit more through drag and silhouettes that show off the curves.

I design a lot of my looks, and I work with one designer in particular. And that designer is my mother who is a costume maker. She used to own a wedding dress boutique. She's done tons of costuming for shows all over New Zealand and won multiple awards for it. And I think it's such a joy to have someone that's so close to my life that I can work with to push an idea out. We constantly argue over the styling of things and what would look better but I think at the end of the day, we create some really incredible pieces. She knows my body and how to design to it. And I can give her an idea. It can be a fully designed sketch, or it can be just a rough like, oh, what if we did something like this and she'll take it and create an incredible piece, and then I will bedazzle the hell out of it.

We also take existing pieces and we add to it. For example, we’ll take three dresses, cut them up and then combine them into a whole new look. That's such a fun thing about fashion and collaborating with someone is that you can take an existing thing and completely flip it on its head, use stuff where it's not meant to be used, and I really get so much joy out of being able to do that with my mum.

I also think it's really important to take care of your [pieces], because it's so easy to just throw stuff away because it's falling apart. But you can turn it into something else. And there's a lot of maintenance to keep those together and like hair and wigs, and washing glass. I think people underestimate how much time that us queens spend sewing sequins and gluing stuff back together and replacing zips. Your average Joe probably would look at you and go, ‘oh wow, such a pretty dress’ when they don't realise that you've spent nearly a full workweek hand sewing appliqués on or gluing sequins and rhinestones to something.

When I’m not in drag:

There's an element of Crystal that still comes out in my day-to-day life. I’ll go to the clearance rack in a store and buy that one shirt that is like the craziest, wildest pattern that probably no one will wear and I’ll wear the hell out of it. I think that’s where my drag persona and me out of drag persona align a little bit. The rest of the time I dress quite grungy to be honest. I think that has come from a place of just wanting to blend in a little bit as well. There's an element of not having to be ‘on’ when you're not in drag.

Portrait by Denise Baynham, 2025.

Audio engineering by Finn Hopley.
Video by Rochelle Ivanson.

Last published January 2026.

This exhibition was created for the New Zealand Fashion Museum for Pride 2026 with support from Britomart Group, Foundation North and The Rule Foundation.