For decades, Zaldy has been responsible for making other people impossible to forget. Be it RuPaul's gowns or Lady Gaga's early visual mythology, his work has travelled through television, music and the particular machinery of pop culture that turns a costume into an image people remember years later. Now, after spending so much of his life dressing everyone else, Zaldy has finally decided to make clothes for himself.

His Fall/Winter 2026 collection, …Boys Like Me, marked his return to the runway after almost two decades. It was also his first menswear collection, presented at New York's Hotel Chelsea. The title itself suggested a shift in perspective. These were clothes for Zaldy, his friends and people who, in his words, see things the way he does. 

The Man Behind the Transformation

Zaldy's name may not always be as immediately recognisable as the celebrities he has dressed, but his visual fingerprints are everywhere. His most enduring collaboration has been with RuPaul, whom he began working with in the early 1990s. Their relationship eventually became inseparable from RuPaul's Drag Race, where Zaldy's designs helped construct the glamour surrounding one of the most influential figures in queer popular culture. His work has earned Emmy Awards and recognition from the Costume Designers Guild. 

Lady Gaga's early career was built through an unusually intense relationship between music and image, and Zaldy was there during that formative period. He also designed for stars Katy Perry and Michael Jackson! Zaldy has spent years understanding something that pop culture occasionally forgets: a performer does not simply wear a costume. Sometimes, the costume helps create the person we think we are looking at.

Now He’s Asking: What Would I Wear?

That question sits at the heart of …Boys Like Me. Zaldy explained that his professional work, however creatively rewarding, always existed within somebody else's parameters. A client arrives with a project. A television production has a particular visual world. A pop star needs to become something for a particular moment. Menswear offered an escape from that structure.

Zaldy loves shopping and getting dressed, and he wanted clothes for the different moments of his own life. His criterion for the collection was remarkably straightforward: a piece would only make it into the show if he would genuinely wear it himself. That is probably why the collection feels so personal.

There were suits and tailoring, but they existed alongside skin-hugging knitwear, leather palazzo trousers and a sleeveless polka-dot shirt. The show moved into clubwear too, with low-rise leather trousers featuring large zips and models in leather underwear with thigh-high boots. The clothes were explicitly queer without becoming an exercise in sanitising queerness for an imagined mainstream consumer. 

A Gay Man Walks Into Fashion Week

Zaldy did not want to turn his collection into a carefully calculated marketing exercise. He wanted it to be super gay. Fashion has always had an uneasy relationship with queer influence. Queer people have shaped the industry for generations, while the industry has repeatedly treated queerness as something to borrow when it becomes commercially useful. Zaldy's collection appears to reverse that calculation. He looked towards lifelong influences including Leigh Bowery, Karlheinz Weinberger and International Male, then made something intended for his own community. He was not asking whether the clothes could be diluted into universal appeal. He was asking what he and his friends might actually want to wear. There is freedom in that and perhaps a little danger too. Because fashion becomes far more interesting when a designer stops asking whether something might offend the market and starts asking whether he wants to put it on.

Coming Home to the Hotel Chelsea

The venue made the return feel even more personal. Zaldy chose the Hotel Chelsea because the building is deeply connected to his own artistic history. It was where he developed his creativity, worked on his earlier womenswear collections and collaborated with RuPaul. His connections to Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga also began there.

The building was full of memories, but Zaldy was careful about describing the collection itself as nostalgic. His outlook was directed towards the present and the future. The Hotel Chelsea provided familiarity precisely so that the clothes could offer something unexpected. That feels like the perfect way to understand his return. He went back to where so much began, only to do something he had never done before.

The Biggest Pop Star in Zaldy’s New Show Was Zaldy

We often talk about fashion designers through the people they dress. Zaldy becomes the designer behind RuPaul, behind Gaga, behind a pop-cultural transformation we can immediately picture. But …Boys Like Me asks us to reverse the direction of the gaze. After decades spent making clothes that helped other people become icons, Zaldy has made a collection around his own body, his own desires and his own idea of what fashion should feel like.

Zaldy did not spend his career waiting for permission to become a designer. He already was one. He simply spent much of his life making other people's fantasies visible.

Now he is making room for his own.