RuPaul Charles, known internationally (and by now probably intergalactically) as RuPaul, supermodel of the world, opened the first New York DragCon the same way he opens most things: in velvety dulcet tones and with a whole lot of love. “Let me hear you all say love!” America’s first lady of drag goaded the hundred or so queens and exhibitors and helpers and VIP ticket holders on hand an hour or so before the doors of the Javits Center were officially opened to the public. “Love!” “Let me hear you say love!” “Love!” “That’s right,” said RuPaul, who had just cut the ribbon with the help of Desmond Is Amazing, one of DragCon’s youngest featured guests at 10 years old and dressed for the occasion in fuchsia tulle, rhinestones, and pasted-on pictures of the man now embracing him, the impresario who turned a reality competition show into an Emmy-winning empire that brought drag out of America’s nightclubs and into its living rooms. The crowd chorused back, singsonging the affirmation that has closed every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race for the past nine seasons, no matter the catfights or catastrophe, sashays or shade-throwing that preceded it: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else!”

The freely given embraces and Saturday’s surprise wedding of Ginger Minj aside, it would be disingenuous to say the entire point of DragCon is love. The main point of DragCon is the merchandise: seven aisles of booths selling wigs, lipstick, enamel pins, baby bibs, Rounderbum underwear (with Lift and Package Tech), double-stick tape, waxing accessories, eyebrow shapers, paste jewelry sets, airbrushed T-shirts, disco balls, handheld fans, eight-inch rhinestone platform heels, “RuPaw’s Drag Race Kitty Couture” 2018 calendars, leather harnesses, handmade gilded headdresses, loose cosmetic glitter, corsets, psychic readings, felt hats with animal ears, breast forms, press-on nails, fruit smoothies, theatrical contact lenses, Boy Butter lubricant, a framed leather glove autographed by Alan Cumming, rainbow flags and baseball caps, key chains, sex toys, Manic Panic hair dye, iron-on Resist patches, and pictures with the queens, of course, all from Drag Race seasons past, which necessitated roped-off queues that curled through the more than 35,000 guests who turned up on Saturday and Sunday, down the shocking pink carpet, and out into the Crystal Palace of the Javits Center.

So money matters: “A girl’s gotta eat,” as season 6 contestant Darienne Lake said on Saturday. But the crowds and the queens come to DragCon for another reason, too, and its rooted somewhere in a fundamentally desire to be safe, to be seen, and to be accepted, if not always understood, exactly. (The guest who, facedown on a dolly, scuttled, spiderlike, through the event, high-heeled stuffed legs attached to his back, was not there for the conversation, for example.) Attendees had periwinkle-tinted beards and wheelchairs, light-up headdresses and thick body glitter, tattoos and hair dye and elaborate makeup and things about themselves that they were trying for the first time, and things about themselves that they would never be able to change, no matter how hard they tried. Everyone would get to have time with a queen, if they waited long enough. And every queen had a message to give back to them, one of triumph, of self-love, of the world’s oldest trick—transformation through fashion! authenticity through artifice!—and that, to paraphrase Tony Kushner, no matter how horrible the headlines or how truly bad things get, the world only spins one way: forward.

“This is the future!” crowed Mickey Boardman, remembering when RuPaul covered Paper magazine in 1993. “To go from that to the line of rich white people who can’t get tickets who are waiting outside? That’s how you know we’re in the right place.” Drag exaggerates, and fashion exaggerates, and Balmain and the Kardashians didn’t get those cinched waists, ballooning curves, and stage paint–style contouring tricks from just anywhere, said beauty entrepreneur Edward Bess. “Drag leads the way a lot of the time,” said fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. “Its influence on fashion isn’t this cultish thing that’s going to happen and then go away, like punk or like goth or something. It’s something that is here.” And if we’re lucky, it’ll set the pace. “I think that fashion will follow the lead of what’s happening here,” said Bess. “I think the future of drag is acceptance. To see kids under the age of puberty knowing who they are and being accepted, that’s beautiful.” And a lot of that has to do with awareness, a lot of which has to do with RuPaul and with that entrée into the American consciousness. If shows like Project Runway made fashion design into something accessible (or at least understandable) for most of the country, Drag Race has made the idea that supporting and celebrating one another for who we are and aim to be can only make the world a more beautiful place for everyone. “No matter the size of the wig or how big the shoes, how small the waist or how big the hips . . . it’s no longer a matter of getting jeered at or looked at quite so strangely,” said Bess. “So think about what this is going to look like in two years, in 20 years. I think if fashion could have half as much fun as we’re having here today, they’d be A-OK.”

Drag queens have been on the forefront of every single social movement for queer people, said season 8 winner Bob the Drag Queen, who sees his inherent visibility as a boon for the causes he has championed, like equal rights, gun safety, and marriage equality. “One day I got on the train in full drag, and everyone was staring at me,” Bob said. “And I realized that meant that I had their attention. Having people’s attention is having power. So the question then becomes, what are you going to do with that power? You’d better use it.” Now more than ever, “with what is happening politically, what is happening socially, we are ambassadors for these young, gorgeous kids . . . the promise of America’s future,” RuPaul said that morning, as the pieces of the ribbon fell away and Desmond twirled in his tulle as cameras flashed. “We are hope.”