The Booked and Blessed look is an ethereal mermaid fantasy in sequins and chiffon, worn by Anita Piss, star of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK Season 8, for the episode four runway of the same name.

The runway asked for a book. Anita chose Julián Is a Mermaid, the picture book by Jessica Love, and built the look from it. Sequins throw light back and chiffon lets it through, so the gown holds both at once.

A pair of white pumps was spray-painted to exactly the right turquoise and finished with pearl details. The wig, from House of Head, was styled by Anita. On the show it was a single stack, so when she got home she teased up a second wig and built a double stack for the shoot, giving the photographs more height than the runway had.

The set is hers too. It took its cue from Yana Frost, whose sets have appeared in Vogue, and from the cover of Michael Morpurgo’s Kensuke’s Kingdom, which Anita reads as a nod to Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. She edited stock images of waves together in Photoshop, cut carefully around every crest and backed each one with cardboard so it would stand up. Then she arranged the waves and designed the lighting herself.

Anita calls these shoots a passion project, a way to build a whole world around each look and to practise skills she wants to take beyond drag, into set design and creative direction.

The behind-the-scenes video on Anita’s YouTube channel shows the set being built. The signed polaroids in this collection come from that shoot, taken on her own camera, her own film.