Amanda Lepore, Permanently in Progress

She’s been building herself for decades. Amanda Lepore came up through New York’s downtown club circuit in the late eighties—Limelight, Tunnel, all that sequined wreckage—and somewhere along the way became less a person than a living sculpture, a hyper-feminine ideal she’s been refining through surgery and reinvention ever since. David LaChapelle understood it early and photographed her accordingly: candy-colored, monumental, unapologetically artificial. The body as artwork, or vanity as practice, or maybe there’s no difference. "Almost as good as new" is probably the most honest way to put it. She’s never finished. That’s entirely the point.