“I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” Dylan Mulvaney says, her voice uncharacteristically hushed. At the moment, that means lounging in the shade of a gazebo outside her villa at the Amanjena in Marrakesh, Morocco—espresso martini in hand, a bowl of French fries delicately placed between us, the North African sun beating down and reflecting off the glimmering pool. Her manager Mitch wades in the water nearby, iPhone in hand, while Mulvaney—clad in a loose black slip-on dress that hangs elegantly off her shoulders—looks less like a TikToker and more, dare we say, like a Los Angeles ingénue on location for a Hollywood blockbuster.

But Mulvaney isn’t on a film set. She’s in Morocco as a guest of Jean Paul Gaultier, invited to celebrate the brand’s fragrances Le Male Elixir Absolu and Gaultier Divine Le Parfum (which she describes as “femme, classic, and inclusive.”) And yes, this is exactly where she’s supposed to be. Because Dylan Mulvaney is not only famous—she’s important (the two aren’t synonymous). Her “100 Days of Girlhood” series, in which she documented her transition, catapulted her into a very Gen-Z type of “online” celebrity. But it also thrust her into the center of a national conversation, one being argued in government offices and dinner tables across America. In the “attention economy,” visibility is currency—but for Mulvaney, it’s come at a cost. Paparazzi camped outside her home and global backlash from conservatives made everyday life an obstacle course over the past few years. 

“I talk about a lot of dark things, but I try to do it in a funny way,” she says about her retelling of the events in Paper Doll, her first book and a New York Times bestseller. “I’m not trying to bring the room down.” Balancing humor and seriousness is no easy task, but it’s one Mulvaney has had to master—as both a natural comedienne and a politicized figure, viewed by many of her fellow dolls as a role model. Soon, they might also see her as a style icon—although, as a loud and theatrical Broadway type, this relationship with the hyper-poised fashion world was never promised.

“First of all, my dad would only take me shopping at Costco for the longest time, so that made it a bit difficult,” she reflects on her childhood days. “But I started taking dance classes when I was three, and the costume I’d get for the June recital was the most important outfit, because that’s the costume I would wear for the next year. But it sucked, because I would get the boy costumes, and I’d always get so jealous of the girls. Then, when I was like, 10, I got to dress up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz for Halloween, and that was a little chance at feeling like somebody….like the way I wanted to be perceived.”These days, Mulvaney is leaning into her sexiness, no longer dimming it to win the approval of some unseen Greek chorus—the endless voices weighing in on her every decision.

But back when she first came out as trans, Mulvaney was wearing bright, quirky getups— “colorful, rainbow, Cabbage Patch, adult toddler outfits,”—as she puts it. In her memoir, she recounts her first red carpet experience, during which she begged PR girls to let her walk the carpet in her Hope Macauley knit dress, for example. This evolved into a more refined, Audrey Hepburn-inspired style, something “very palatable,” as she describes it. “I was scared that as a trans woman, I was going to be overly sexualized,” she explains. “So I went in the opposite direction, trying to dress in a way where people wouldn’t see my body as the first thing when I walk through the door. Now I really love my body. There are parts of it I want to show off. I want to feel sexy.” That evolution reached a milestone when she dyed her hair blonde, slipped into a sheer Jean Paul Gaultier dress, and walked into Outfest radiating the confidence she’d spent years cultivating. “That was my sexy moment,” she says. “And it wasn’t even that bad.”

Still, she’s relatively new to fashion’s inner circles, and she admits to feeling intimidated. “I was confused when I started getting invited into this world. I thought, ‘Do I need to pretend like I know everything?’” But what has mattered most, she says, is the people behind the brands—the ones who make her feel seen not as a token, but as a creative force in her own right. She is also a breath of fresh air within an industry in which people notoriously take themselves too seriously, saying she really just wants to explore “the funny in fashion,” explaining, “Some of the things we’re doing are so ridiculous, and I think humor can transcend any context, any generation. I feel like so many of the dolls right now, we’re trying to find our spaces where we can work, where we can get a gig, where we can feel safe, and it’s in fashion.”

That search for safety—for places where she doesn’t have to perform or explain herself—extends far beyond the runway. “It just feels so polarizing to be a doll right now,” she says. “Being anywhere where you don’t feel that sense of fear or otherness is such a beautiful thing. To me, that’s camping with no makeup, or being with a group like this this week, where I know that’ I’m safe with these people. I’ve put myself in a lot of situations in the past couple of years where I was the only doll in the room. That can be scary, and progress can come from that, but it can also be really lonely. Being here with Miss Benny and Josie [Totah] and Gigi [Goode], that is such a gift.” 

It’s funny to think that, in an alternative Sliding Doors universe, Mulvaney might have already spent about a decade in the fashion sphere. “When I was 16 or 17, I was actually deciding between fashion design and musical theater,” she says. “Maybe down the line, one day, I’ll want to do some sort of collab…something very retro. I’ve been trying to come up with a great airport outfit, one that feels cute, for meeting someone hot who’s sitting next to you at the airport.”

As for what’s next (beyond haute airport fashion), Mulvaney says she hasn’t been able to shake the book-writing bug—especially now that she runs her own book club. “How lovely it is that, if the internet goes down, we at least have books,” she says. One idea she’s considering is a book centered on her relationship with God, a connection she’s maintained through thick and thin. “Coming back to some version of a higher power—that’s something that is so often used against us as trans people,” she says.

She’s also continuing work on her one-woman show, currently titled Faghag, which she debuted at Fringe in Scotland (while wearing a Mugler dress), and which received five stars from the Scotsman. “I’ve felt such an extreme sadness over the years,” she recalls. “But I remember walking out onto that stage and like everything was going to be okay. As long as I had those 200 people in the room, that was much more gratifying than two million people seeing a video.” She adds, “I feel more comfortable on stage now than I do making a video.”

While Mulvaney certainly doesn’t seem to be someone to stray from her roots, the conversation with her makes one feel that she is beginning to see social media as more of a platform towards something else—perhaps wearing a pair of platform heels while sitting, for example, at a Gucci show in Milan, noting that going to a European fashion show is one of her “biggest dreams.” The social media videos, then, aren’t the finale—they’re the fitting room, where she’s already trying on what’s next.