Spilling rose petals from her wig and gloves helped Sasha Velour win the crown, but she spent only $12 to make it happen. “[The craft store] Michaels sells red mixed with pink, so I had to go through and separate!” the queen says of purchasing the petals hidden inside the wig, which was pulled off during the final lip sync of the season. “The song told me what it needed,” Velour says of performing to “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston. “I thought about romance, pride, anger. Roses conjure all of that. The rose moments [on stage] grew the same way [Houston’s] voice gets louder and the intensity of the song increases.”

Velour adds that she also prepared a second number for the other song option — Britney Spears' "Stronger" — which would've involved a pair of golden scissors. Still, that wig was coming off, one way or the other.

"I do not like to step on stage and just improvise. A song tells me a story and I want to prepare that to share with the audience. I prepared conceptual numbers to those two songs. When I walked out there, I had a holster strapped to my thigh with scissors [to cut off the wig and reveal the roses] in case I got the Britney number," Velour continues. "If you go the other way around and you come up with a trick you can do and look for a song to fit it, it will never have the same kind of theatrical impact."

Where is the look now? "I have two versions of the wig, and I’ve lost track of which one is the original.… I had them both touched up, and they both look great. I turned one of them into a wig I wear in [my stage show] Smoke & Mirrors in a completely different style, so we recycled it into something new. The dress is in a garment bag in my closet.... My body shape has changed a lot. I corset tigheter and wear bigger pads now, so I don’t think that dress would really fit anymore!"