You Can’t Spell Her Name Without “Icon”: Nini Coco Takes on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Denver-based drag queen Nini Coco has technically been experimenting with drag since she was a little kid growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. “I had been crossdressing since I was a toddler, wearing my mom’s heels. There’s so many photos of me just clomping around in some wedges in, you know, North Texas. I’ve been a little gay boy since I was a baby,” says the queen, who is currently competing on the eighteenth season of the uber-popular MTV reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Coco’s name actually came from her out-of-drag name, Nico, but it also lends itself to an incredible catchphrase: You can’t spell her name without “icon.” “The anagram of it all just came to be,” she reveals. “But the asterisk is, nobody can label themselves an icon. So it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek. I’m not actually calling myself an icon, but I’m leaning into the bit. I’m manifesting.”

Westword sat down with Coco for a more in-depth look at the makings of an icon. 

As with many drag performers of her generation, RuPaul’s Drag Race was Coco’s first taste of the art of drag. “I was introduced to drag through Drag Race. My friends in college showed it to me, and I remember being so confused, like ‘What the fuck is going on? I don’t understand any of the references. I don’t get what is happening.’ But it was so interesting to me, so I just started learning more about it,” Coco recalls.

Through Drag Race, she broadened her knowledge of queer pop culture and history, while also getting back in touch with her feminine side: “I was learning about pop culture through the lens of the show, and it was just this way for me to reconnect to my femininity in a way that I had turned off for a long time. Drag allowed me to reignite all those things, and channel every artistic self that I’ve been over the years into one thing. It’s just the [idea of], I can be anything through drag, I can make anything through drag, and I can build community endlessly through drag,” she says.

After discovering Drag Race, Coco started playing around with drag, but didn’t establish a persona or start performing until years later. “I started doing drag as a senior in college. I raided my roommate’s closet, thrifted some dresses, watched Youtube makeup tutorials, and did really bad drag,” she remembers. “But it was during the pandemic that I started focusing on learning to sew and practicing makeup.”

When Coco’s engineering job went fully remote in 2020, she and her partner decided to move from St. Louis to Denver, craving more connection with the outdoors and a thriving queer community. Around the same time, she started teaching herself to sew with the help of Youtube tutorials, and quickly found herself immersed in all things drag. “Learning to sew and make drag was my gateway drug into performing and makeup. It started with sewing, and the rest followed,” she says. “I was thrifting old patterns from the 1970s, upcycling blankets, and just learning step by step through trial and error. I ruined so many curtains in the process.” 

Luckily, with her engineering background, Coco is a problem-solver by trade: “The biggest takeaway I got from studying engineering is just problem solving, pivoting, and thinking critically through an issue.” Being good with numbers and math helps, too. “I make all my own patterns, which is a lot of math and a lot of measurements. I also learned how to 3D print in college through my engineering major, so now I’m trying to incorporate some 3D-printed elements into my drag,” she adds.

Coco sees designing and creating nearly every aspect of her drag as the perfect marriage of her artistic and technical skills. “The reason I love drag so much is that it’s this way I can balance the skills I learned in engineering, while tapping into this creative part of myself that has always been there, but gone dormant. Because engineering is creative in some ways, but it’s also deeply technical, which sometimes I couldn’t give a shit about,” she admits. “If I could wake up and not be an engineer tomorrow, I wouldn’t think about it again, but if I couldn’t do drag, that would feel like part of me was lost. But they complement each other for sure.” 

Now almost three years into her drag career, Coco’s style is characterized by sculptural silhouettes, vivid colors, and campy, narrative-driven performances. “My drag is a little bit unhinged, but it’s got this polished edge to it. I love to do multimedia production-style numbers. They’re telling a story, they’re theatrical, they’re conceptual, and all of my looks play into the storytelling as well,” she explains. “It’s sharp, graphic lines, like this 2D illustration come to life. It’s always changing and evolving, but it’s always going to be bold and colorful and visually in your face, with lots of whimsy and camp mixed in there.”

She’s inspired by boundary-pushing performance artists, like Drag Race season 9 winner Sasha Velour, who is known for producing her own elaborate theatrical works: “From a Drag Race perspective, my north star is Sasha Velour. Drag Race has created its own superbubble, and Sasha has pierced that and formed her own universe. She’s expanded the boundaries of what is possible through the lens of drag.” And of course, Lady Gaga: “I feel like every drag queen loves Lady Gaga, and I am no exception. [I love] that angry, unhinged, dark pop energy that somehow is also celebratory and joyous.”

Coco exploded onto the Denver scene seemingly out of nowhere. Her first performance ever was an audition for the competition Denver Drag Olympics, which she went on to win, much to the surprise of her competitors: “I remember, it was kind of the premiere local competition at the time, and everybody knew who was going to audition, and I just popped up out of nowhere. No one saw it coming, and they were a little upset.”

The four-month “mini Drag Race-style competition” (which fellow Denver Drag Race alumni Yvie Oddly and Willow Pill both participated in) taught her many of the finer details of drag, from editing a lip sync mix to gluing on nails. Though she didn’t have an official drag “family” that took her under their wing, the panel of judges and her fellow competitors from Denver Drag Olympics became her most frequent advisors and collaborators. “I feel like my mentors in drag were the people I met through Denver Drag Olympics. The judges of that competition, so Kelela C Staxxx, Mariah Spanic, and Bootzy Edwards Collynz, were the people who literally taught me to put on a nail, install a wig, all of that,” Coco explains. The contestants from her season (including Banana Splits, Petty Patty, Raquelle C. Schelle, and Dr. Zackarina) now refer to themselves as “The Breakfast Club,” a nod to the unlikely bond formed between the very, very different drag performers. 

Then last year, Coco got the call that she had been cast on Drag Race. “I was click-clacking away at my day job, and I see the call coming from California, leave the Zoom meeting immediately, answer the call, and I felt my life change in that moment,” she recalls. “I thought I was being punked. I thought RuPaul was pulling a sick trick on all these little divas around the country. It was this combination of disbelief and terror and also joy.”

Naturally, when she had to start preparing her looks, she turned to her Breakfast Club sisters for help. “Up until Drag Race, I made every single thing I ever wore. Outfits, wigs, props, all the things. For Drag Race, I think about 80 percent of what I brought was stuff I made. I also reached out to Evelyn Evermoore, who introduced me to her sister Dee Whitcomb, who helped me do all the 3D printing that I was able to do for the show,” she says of working with other Denver artists. “A few other collaborators here and there, but for the most part, it was the Breakfast Club folks conceptualizing everything as a team and helping me execute all the little details.” 

They also lovingly reminded her that as a Denver queen competing on Drag Race, she had the additional pressure of continuing the city’s winning streak. “They would always remind me that I have huge shoes to fill. Every Denver girl has been a finalist or winner, and you don’t want to be the one to break the tradition,” she emphasizes. “But my biggest competition was always myself. I’m always trying to just one-up myself, so I tried to ignore all the noise about it, otherwise I would’ve just imploded.” Coco had previously met Denver-based Drag Race winners Yvie Oddly (Season 11) and Willow Pill (Season 14) in passing at shared gigs, but she personally reached out to Oddly right before leaving for any last minute tips. “It sounds cliche, but the advice she gave was just have fun, and the more fun you have the more infectious it will be to the people around you and the people watching. She also sent me a list of cursed images of the judges. She was like, ‘If they ever say anything nasty, just remember they looked like this,’ and sent a group of horrible photos of them,’” Coco says with a laugh. “I did reference them on set.”

So far, Coco is more than holding her own in the competition, which premiered January 2. She won the first episode’s challenge, where the queens were tasked with making outfits out of materials leftover from past seasons. Using paper bags, zip ties, and hot glue, Coco created an architectural orange top and skirt that stunned the judges, prompting guest judge Cardi B to declare she would personally wear the look. But even more stunned were her castmates, who were underestimating Coco the entire episode, and had no problem telling her so in Untucked, Drag Race’s drama-filled aftershow.

“I had no clue these bitches didn’t like my look until I got into Untucked,” she discloses. “Imagine you’re on the main stage, the first time RuPaul is talking directly to you, you’re over the moon, and you walk back into the workroom and everyone is like, ‘So Nini, you suck at drag!’ I was like, ‘Let me get a drink first!’” In that moment, she realized the competition had begun: “I forget that everybody has an ego and an opinion and now is the moment where I either listen to it and let it affect how I feel about myself, or just double down on what I know I can do, and what the judges are saying to me. So let the ducks quack.” 

As one of the younger and greener queens on a season stacked with veteran performers, Coco is somewhat of a dark horse in the competition. But though she’s still growing as an artist, this wasn’t an opportunity she was going to miss. “There are things about my drag that I wish I had more time to cook with before the show,” she concedes. “But if you get the call ,you have to go. We’re not going to wait around; this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We’re gonna send it.” 

RuPaul’s Drag Race airs every Friday night at 6 p.m. MST on MTV.