Northcutt finds special niche

RIDGEVILLE — Collin Northcutt put makeup on for the first time when he was 14 years old. He designed his first garment when he was 16 years old.
Fast-forward nine years and Northcutt is a world-renowned designer of competition gowns and costumes for drag queens and kings. He has worked on multiple television shows, including “The Tudors,” “Restaurant Impossible” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” And his gowns have won national competitions.
Northcutt, a 2005 Winchester High School graduate, now runs Mountbatton Concepts LLC, a business he started three years ago.
The business sprung out of Northcutt’s interest and participation in the drag world.
As a teenager he started designing gowns and costumes for himself as a hobby. He slowly started designing and creating outfits for other drag queens too.
And in 2009, he turned his hobby into a full-time business. He stopped performing to start creating. “I found out you can make more money making drag than doing drag,” he said.
For a couple of years he worked part-time jobs to help cover the expenses as he grew his business, but he has been devoted to Mountbatton full time for close to a year now.
As his company has expanded, Northcutt has been able to gain national prominence within his field.
Gowns he designed, which generally cost $700 to $1,200, are being worn by drag queens at national pageants.
This year alone, his gowns have been worn by winners at five different pageants.
This works well for him. “Ninety-nine percent of my business is word of mouth,” he said.
This means Northcutt can operate his business from pretty much anywhere. And he plans on moving it from its current home in Ridgeville to Providence, R.I., in March, where he will join his fiancé, John Griffin — a jeweler who specializes in drag jewelry.
It also means connections Northcutt made during his time in the drag world and the experiences he had are especially beneficial.
“One of my biggest principals is to design good drag, you have to have done good drag,” he said.
According to Northcutt, drag queens don’t try to mimic women. Instead they try to depict how they want women to look.
“It’s always big and flashy. … We over exaggerate.” he said. “Real women wouldn’t wear (what we wear).”
“We transform our bodies to match what we’re trying to evoke.”
Northcutt came out to his parents in high school as a gay man, then later as a drag queen. He said they accepted it quickly and never had a problem with it.
“Our religion is liberal politics,” he said, mentioning that his parents gave him every chance to escape conformity.
Still, it wasn’t always easy for him. He had to face bullies and people uncomfortable with his sexuality.
But there were bright sides, too. Within the drag community, members often join together in drag families, working almost like a biological family, supporting and helping each other through tough times.
This family helped him discover what worked and what didn’t in regards to dressing in drag, because as Northcutt found out early on, there are differences in trying to look like a woman and wearing drag. “Covergirl does not cover boy,” he said. This family helped him to discover what good drag looked like.
As he joined the drag family, Northcutt took on a new name, Ivanka Mountbatton – his company’s namesake.
By doing drag, he knows what other drag queens would want – and it’s not always what you might see on TV.
“I hate ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’” he said. “It degrades what we do … It’s a dishonor to our history.
“Reality TV shows are not reality.”
Part of the reason he said he hates the show is because it plays to straight audiences, exaggerating the way drag queens might act and creating stereotypes.
Though he did mention that TV shows like “RuPaul” have definitely made drag more visible to a larger audience and he appreciates the fact that girls from the show can make a good amount of money on their future bookings.
And he’s also thankful for the work the show has given him.
Northcutt said the things drag queens look for in a dress are pretty consistent with what the general population might look for.
“The biggest thing queens look for is longevity and return on investment,” he said.
According to Northcutt, queens usually want to be able to wear their gowns, impress the audience with them, and then sell them to another queen for as much as possible.
Sometimes, he said, dresses will be so spectacular or elicit such a reaction that the queen won’t be willing to part with the dress, noting that he remembers a few instances of girls destroying dresses so that nobody else could wear them.
Often these dresses are symbolic of the queen that wore them, or are especially extravagant, which is something Northcutt definitely knows about.
 “Sometimes I’ll rhinestone and bead (a dress) so heavily it can stand up on its own,” he said, pulling out his phone to show off a picture of a dress like that. The entire bodice was plastered with rhinestones and the dress, he said, weighed 171 pounds.
Inside the dress was a queen who stood nearly 7-feet tall in heels. “A bodice for her could be a cocktail skirt for a normal person,” Northcutt said.
These are the types of gowns he likes to design, flowing and elaborate pieces for queens weighing more than 300 pounds.
He thinks he can design these types of gowns better than most designers. He knows that he can’t design dresses for these big queens that look like they belong on skinny girls, he said. Instead, he must design the dresses to fit the body styles of the queens he’s designing for.
Through all this work, Northcutt has managed to become one of the top-ranked designers in the drag industry.
In fact, his name has become synonymous with a specific type of gown. If you were to follow some queens around at a pageant you might even hear one exclaim, “Look at that dress. That must be a Mountbatton.”
For more information on Northcutt’s business, visit his Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/northcuttmountbatton.[[In-content Ad]]