Queer Eye ’s Jonathan Van Ness Eats Bacon and Shops for Beauty Products With Vogue

Jonathan Van Ness was celebrating more than one milestone when we met in Soho for breakfast on a recent Friday in June. First of all, the second season of Queer Eye had just premiered on Netflix to legions of adoring fans, many of whom had deemed watching the new Fab Five descend on unsuspecting small-town straight guys as a kind of balm for troubled times, Van Ness chief among its palliative qualities. Second, he had just reached 1 million followers on Instagram, where he not only chronicles photoshoots and yoga workouts but also delivers tear-streaked appreciations of messages from viewers and nurtures a near-hysterical love of figure skating. Third, he’d just moved into his own apartment on the Upper West Side after crashing at a friend’s place for the past year when in New York, and he had just lugged an Ikea dresser “up four gorgeous flights of stairs.” And lastly, he had impulse-bought a sky-high pair of Vetements sock boots with stiletto heels and was wearing them out for the first time. He had calculated that the shoes cost just $11 a day if he wore them for a year. “You’d actually be losing money if you didn’t get them,” he reasoned.

Van Ness, 31, is Queer Eye’s canary in the coal mine when trying to assess whether or not these five gay men are really as loving, genuine, funny, and friendly in person as they seem on television. With his long-haired sexy Jesus look, his former male cheerleader spirits, and his seemingly unending stockpile of catchphrases (“Can you believe?!” has taken hold), I anticipated finally experiencing JVN in the flesh as I would any meet-your-heroes moment: nervous to spoil the mirage. Would he be the same graceful grooming shaman who lovingly helped season one’s Tom bring down the redness in his Lupus-afflicted skin, with the tenderness of a mother of the bride on the eve of her child’s wedding day? (Van Ness and the Fab Five eventually helped Tom remarry his lost love Abby, who was featured in the episode.)

The answer is yes: Within fifteen minutes of our sitting down together, Van Ness had gently cajoled me into helping him finish a side of bacon he ordered after a particularly taxing morning gym session—“We’re just, like, really bonding today,” he said. Putting a few strips on my plate, he described us as “chic people eating bacon.” His self-confidence and warmth are contagious: He told me he was obsessed with me more than once, and it miraculously felt true. As we were both trying to pronounce “Vetements” correctly, he said that Tan [France] and Antoni [Porowski], his fellow Queer Eye stars, always correct him, but he pays it little mind: “All I know is I like how sock boots look on me.”

As the Fab Five have evolved in their journey toward megastardom (Gigi Hadid attended France’s birthday party in April, with heavy social media documentation), so has the show upped its bid for relevance, featuring in season two a few more firsts: the show’s only woman makeover subject, and its only trans makeover subject, a man named Skylar. But its greatest success isn’t in paying lip-service to progressive politics by simply featuring a more diverse cast of people: Queer Eye’s five experts are as human—meaning flawed—as the semi-hapless people they’re tszujing. In the much-discussed episode featuring Skylar, Van Ness describes learning that his costar France, who lives in Utah, had never met a trans person before. “I’ve had the honor of working with so many trans people as a hairdresser over my career in some way,” Van Ness told me. “When Tan said that, I definitely was like, ‘Oh, God, what do you mean? Don’t say anything weird or bad.’ I’m so touchy and protective.” France’s resulting candid conversation with Skylar about his transition is a standout moment of the season. (As Van Ness recounts, in trademark hyperbole, “Tan is like one of my favorite people of all time, that ever drew breath on the face of the world, and obviously he handles every situation with the dignity and grace of, like, Kate Middleton.”)

Queer Eye’s politics are an undercurrent to what really makes it compelling: The genuine interactions it privileges between the five stars and with their subjects. On the simplest level, it shows human beings interacting with other human beings that they likely would not otherwise have met, a situation that seems increasingly unlikely in an rapidly dividing America. To wit, Van Ness has learned a lot about the rural Georgia towns he and the cast have traveled to while based in Atlanta for filming: “I think that this is true of Illinois, where I’m from, too,” he says, “In states where there’s one really big city, a lot of outlying counties and smaller towns really don’t have very many resources.” The biggest makeover lift in each episode is likely Bobby Berk’s home improvement renovations, which are applied to workplaces as well as homes.

People have noticed how much the Queer Eye guys keep up on Instagram with supportive comments and emoji hearts. As if proving that yes, they really are best pals, Berk called Van Ness as we were enjoying our bacon together. The Fab Five actually lived in the same apartment building while filming. “We would work out together all the time, Postmates together every night,” Van Ness remembers. As for squabbling, like most coworkers, the cast aren’t in agreement at every moment, but the crew’s culture expert, Karamo Brown, was once, thankfully, a social worker and keeps the peace. And Van Ness has been “doing hair for thirteen years, and going to therapy twice a week for like most of it”—so one gets the sense he could talk through anything.

We eventually set out to Ricky’s, the legendary New York City beauty emporium—a slightly difficult expedition, given the stiletto sock boots, but Van Ness was a high-fashion trooper. He was about to start several long weeks of Queer Eye press, for which the shoes will hopefully be broken in. I asked if he feels pressure to be always on—we couldn’t walk a few feet down Broadway without someone cooing over him, and he stopped to chat and take a selfie every time. “If my energy was fake,” he thinks out loud, “then I would feel pressured, because I gotta, like, keep this up. I thank God it’s just how I am. But I find myself wanting to work on being more comfortable in the silence with people.” He likely won’t get the chance to try out quietude for a while, starting with the shopping spree he shot for Vogue inside Ricky’s. The same goes for dating: “My life all of a sudden became so insanely hectic that it, like, literally doesn’t accommodate it, especially because my love language is definitely quality time and touch.” I suggest a bicoastal Olympic athlete as a possible fix. “I love that,” he says.

Filmed by Rebecca Fourteau