### Curator, writer...Fiona Alison Duncan is the author of "Act Like You Know Me" and founder of the literary event "Hard To Read" as well as an author of the biography of the late and great pioneering artist Pippa Garner. HSR reviewed her most recent Hard To Read, held at Variety Arts Theatre (formerly the Friday Morning Club–a clubhouse for women). READ IT HERE.

In discussing Hollywood's hometown, LA, she says, "LA is a phoenix in the process of dying to be reborn right now anyway" and who better to let us know the metabolics of becoming a celebrity...."There is a system, a clout economy, a play-to-play aspect to it, but there’s also chance, fate, timing, talent, beauty, mass prejudice, and a willingness to let go and be read by others."

Thoughts on fan-fiction and literary theory?

I’ve made fan t-shirts and held fan meetings in honour of of Fanny Howe and have been going to war--gossiping publicly--about the alt-right’s self-serving appropriations of the late French literary theorist René Girard. Both Howe and Girard write towards God.

Do you think that writing ought to be ‘hard to read’?

Any form can be purposeful. An internal motto for Hard to Read is “Read is a word that can be read in more than one way.”

Are driverless cars ‘un-American’?

I started taking Waymo-that’s California’s driverless rideshare company--in LA last year because I was sick of being harassed by male Uber/Lyft drivers. I’ve set my rideshare apps to “quiet mode--” don’t talk to me mode--but that doesn’t stop these guys from blabbing on about their personal problems and fantasies of personal success, the script or app that’ll make them rich in no time, the sexy parties they go to between rides... The more they talk about themselves, the less they pay attention to the road. Driverless cars became the safer choice, a lesser evil for me personally.

I’ve taken several people’s Waymo virginities; I play the Amadeus soundtrack, and people lose their minds. If the world weren’t so dystopian, we’d be in awe over driverless cars; they’re a sign of the future we’ve been waiting for. If only they looked like pumpkins, horse-drawn carriages, or giant cats.

I recently started driving myself again, and I take public transit, so Waymos remain a treat and one that I do associate with America because of the complicit glee they give me, similar to the pleasure of watching the noughties reality show The Girls Next Door--for the girls, knowing it’s Playboy propaganda, knowing about Hugh Hefner’s misdeeds.

I’d trade all the cars in the world, and one of my own legs (from the knee down), for high-speed trains and bicycle lanes across the Americas. Those are tragically un-American because of the car and oil industries.

You do a lot of work to create events, communities, publications- do you feel a sense of duty to do so?

Yes.

Do artists have a responsibility to other artists? **

People have a responsibility to life and death, to humans, animals, rocks, the sky, language.

What makes a social practice? Is it any different from a structure?

An image from my childhood has been coming back to me lately. The park lawns in Montreal were covered in these wildflowers I was told were weeds: dandelions. In their yellow flower stage, you had the makings of crowns and jewellery. Then they’d ripen into fluffy white spheres. I thought they were even more beautiful at this stage and was obsessed with blowing on them and dispersing the fluff, the seed pods, which I understood would make more flowers grow. I think a lot of what I do is like this: gathering, plucking, making chains, dressing up, dispersing things.

Is there any use in the term ‘literary fiction’?

I never use it.

Is experimental a genre?

I wouldn’t have it as a section in my bookstore.

What did you last argue with someone you loved about?

My fear of being taken advantage of, i.e. having my time wasted.

How does one become a celebrity?

There is a system, a clout economy, a play-to-play aspect to it, but there’s also chance, fate, timing, talent, beauty, mass prejudice, and a willingness to let go and be read by others.

What is the difference between a celebrity and a cause célèbre?

The editor in me wants to say that a celebrity is a person while a cause célèbre is an idea or an event--a scandal, a movement--but they can be the same. Luigi Mangione is both. Pippa Garner was both. Chris Kraus has been both. Angela Davis, both. Normcore was a cause célèbre. Who’s a celebrity who isn’t a cause célèbre? They’d have to represent very little but not too little. Even Kim K. is like a cause célèbre for celebrity itself.

Exquisite Mariposa, your first novel won the Lambda award for Bisexual Fiction, what are your favourite bisexual characters? Furthermore, what is bisexual fiction?

My bisexual awakening was the character of Mel (played by Rachel True) in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere but the truth is I’m more like Dark Smith (James Duval), longing for Mel. Ai Yazawa is my most recent bi revelation; there’s George from her manga Paradise Kiss, whose bisexuality is said to be philanthropic, and the Nanas, who are closeted to themselves, comp het heartbreak. The bi characters I relate to most, besides the Nanas, are Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) in Personal Best and Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey) from the L Word. Joe Apollonio and Callie Hernandez are my favorite real life bisexual characters. I also met these two guys recently, very handsome, who previously dated women and now are a couple. They sleep with girls together. I wish I could be them. I’d also love to be Middle Flake, who I’ve been told is very loveable. Her bisexuality is so casual, instinctual, unencumbered by the shame and internalized misogyny that’s wasted my time. Middle’s one of the protagonists of the novel I’ve been writing for the last three years.

Fuck, Marry, Kill: London (Ontario); LA; NYC

Fuck London, Ontario / Marry New York / Kill LA because I could never harm an underdog like the Canadian city I was born in but have no memory of (we left London when I was one) and because LA is a phoenix in the process of dying to be reborn right now anyway. I got engaged in New York last November.

Is life how you imagined as a kid?

What age were you when you started thinking about the future? I’m trying to remember.

What is your relationship to your schizophrenic device?

Life-like, a mixed bag. I don’t think I would’ve traveled alone as much as I did in my twenties if it weren’t for Maps and I probably wouldn’t be here, answering these questions, if it weren’t for the device--that’s the good stuff. The ownership of it all, the data extraction and data centers, the child-labor cobalt mining and water wastage, the addictive algorithms, algorithmic manipulations, shadow banning and surveillance, the unfettered concentration of wealth and power, the broligarchy--all that is fucked, public enemy number 1.

what does hollywood mean to you?

The Boulevard: youtu.be/RVvGRIxAu9I
The Dream: youtu.be/XRh2L7tJqcI

What has Pippa Garner left you? in life and in love and in art?

I hold the keys to her archives and have the geolocation of her "natural" burial site. She was buried in an eco-shroud in the ground. We didn't take her implants out. They won't decompose. Picture her skeleton, implants, and body jewellery (her pussy was heavily pierced) in the deep soil of NorCal. I Killed Pippa Garner is the working title for our story—another book. She left me with a signed contract that said, " Write whatever."

The Superstar is dedicated to speedrunning/recording the history of the present using the convenient placeholder of 'Gen-Z Aesthetics'. In the words of Stone, see this article, which reviews it as "A starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity".

We also wonder how it is with American Birds and plays like Truck at MOMA PS1; loosely inspired by the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hardbody (1997), if the rise of the Cultural Capital Play is the answer to mid-west YouTube documentarians (Andrew, we looking @ u).

THE LINK TO THE FIRST IN THE GEN-Z AESTHETICS RUN DOWN (FASHION EDITION): Yoona on Instagram, Mutation Fashion Realism can be found HERE.

Addressing the fried elephant in the generational room, Johanna Stone finds value in a play which discusses how they might be laughing their way into losing the right to vote. As stated in the MOMA PS1 press text for TRUCK the play intends to "evoke the malaise and melancholia of contemporary life across generations." Well, fuck institutional speak, and Stone actually tells us what it means to address that, discussing American Theater as a conservative alternative to coastal elite thespianism.

Hollywood wonders what the "London" version of American Birds would be, and concludes that, here, Gen Z is a cultural miasma that is thankfully yet to be pinned down by moving image, stage or otherwise. Except for Josiane Pozi and Solomon Garcon in Opening credits 4 sunset beach (pilot) w Josianne Pozi [sub-titles on].

American Birds, written by Lucy Park Urbano, was held at Frank News, Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES (AMERICA?)- On a sweltering Saturday in July, I leave a Millennial art world pool party featuring a pepitas kale Caesar, spiked camel milk, and about 10 mid-size dogs to drive across town to Fairfax for a distinctly Zillennial event: the closing night of Lucy Parks Urbano’s play American Birds.

The show is finishing a sold-out second run, and there’s a large puddle of people without tickets waiting at the door. I add two drunks to this waitlist blob, friends leftover from the pool party, and slip inside franknews, the independent journalism-platform-turned-new-work-incubator that took up residence in the small space between a nail salon and third-rate Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard (on the same block as Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Theatre) last year. After a whispered relay between backstage and the door, everybody gets in, save for an older-than-zillenial woman who sits on the patio of the adjoining Italian restaurant, drinking an Aperol spritz while the show goes on.

A makeshift three-quarter thrust atop the LA underground’s red carpet passes the initial Brecht-del test; the lights never dim, there was no polite darkness to rest your eyes, leaving HOLLYWOOD to size each other up from across the room.

Moby’s The Ceremony of Innocence starts to play, and a man wearing a plastic bag and neon leggings sashays around the room, making eye contact with each audience member. This is the kind of display that is nostalgic for a graduate of NYC experimental theatre school like myself, the sort of thing that screams there is no fourth wall here, and you are complicit in the capitalist machine. This got nuanced as it went on, thank God.

Lucy Parks Urbano plays an undercover detective investigating the modern American city-state, much like Aristophanes dissected Athens in his classical predecessor The Birds. Although Lucy Parks Urbano tells me she prefers the Greek tragedies to the comedies.

Marcel is a house finch. Melinda is a nightingale who only migrates to the cities you find listed on a vintage American Apparel tote. They’re chirping it up in a tree outside the house of Boy, who’s employed as the social media marketer for an athleisure brand run by his dad.
Boy brings Girl back to his apartment. Girl asks Boy to perform an assisted suicide on her 100-year-old (old, but still poor, the play notes) photographer husband.

The dialogue is high on itself: the classic hyper-referential coked-up humour that afflicts the broader Los Angeles scene:

Aren’t you really sad though
Watching the crowd outside La Poubelle
Become increasingly normal and like employed?

But these observations are cut with a methy edge and carved into delicate lines by Lucy Parks Urbano’s steady hand--

What if
There were wars here
And no one cared
Cause we didn’t care about their wars?

The comedown rattles to an audience of Cuspies stuffed with dieting discourse. LA’s contemporary oral storytelling culture (aka the city’s many autofiction readings) rarely gets so sneakily harsh in its reflections. “I fear that one of the effects of our great city, on me, has been to care about things less, unfortunately, and that my not caring has been rewarded,” Lucy Parks Urbano diagnoses.

The birds play The States Game, naming any state or region that is not California or New York and imagining what it might be like based on a patchwork of cruel stereotypes and free associations (New England is literally/ Old America/ They’re like/ Living in brick houses/ And making quilts/ Their first alcohol/ Was whiskey at the creek/At the pond/ Oh my god yeah/ They got like raped/ On the bed of the pond). This verbal tornado fluctuates across the map, crescendoing on a debate about whether Los Angeles is America at all, and collapsing into a moment that ponders whether people from Nebraska matter, “how they are/ Just like/ Lost in a field of dust”. The conversation-game brings the birds borderline-sexual pleasure, and you feel the tension in their apathy as they giggle away the idea of possessing the right to vote.

The birds’ explicit coastal elitism tends to feel cooked after a decade of warnings about its electoral consequences. Director Dylan Frederick recently captured the inverse American viewpoint in his documentary American Theatre (2025), following a conservative theatre group that creates a musical retelling of the Salem Witch Trials in protest of leftist cancel culture. Frederick confirms the ignorance of Lucy Parks Urbano’s birds remains period-accurate: *“American Theatre takes place in Georgia, and when we show that movie on the coasts, [the audience] is encountering folks who talk and think like this for the very first time, and they’re often in complete disbelief that what they’re watching is real. So much so that many, many people believe the documentary is fiction.”

*The play’s human characters are stand-ins for stereotypical contemporary hetero relations. Girl, played by Lucy Parks Urbano, is a calcified girlboss, self-described as “a wall you can nail anything into” (Lucy Parks Urbano was inspired to write her own roles after being typecast as “a teenager or a prostitute, sometimes both at once” too often throughout her acting career) Girl mourns the decline of her historied husband, who lived through the North Korean occupation of Seoul and the persecution of his family; conversely, the Boy in the room with us feels completely spiritually castrated, a lonely virgin who experiences the Army through YouTube ads, swiping blindly through the algorithmic jungle looking for love, so desperate for any kind of intimacy that he’ll pile onto someone else’s herstory of violence.

Boy can only communicate effectively via Drake lyrics; at the height of the action, he breaks down while attempting to rap the entirety of “In My Feelings” - Melinda makes similar use of “Passionfruit” to deal with her breakup from Tyler, the Robin. This seems to hit home for the audience.

“Lucy is giving herself an opportunity at every turn to make language fail in the most interesting and funniest ways, the ways that are unsettling,” says Frederick. “You’ve got high stakes, and you’ve got people who are meeting these stakes with failing language.” Through a series of circular fumbles, Lucy Parks Urbano fertilises a Yassified Theatre of the Absurd, where language falls flat due to an excess of meaning, every phrase deep-fried with predetermined memetic significance. It’s barely an exaggeration of Zilennial-speak, and gets a lot of laughs.

A fitting genre for a generation stuck in learned helplessness. The play doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions aside from placing a sword in the hands of its protagonist, a gesture lifted from any romantasy novel.

Now for a brief cold plunge down the scenic iceberg, if you even care: American Birds has gestated amid a bubbling ecosystem of Los Angeles experimental theatre, a gap in the city’s art scene finally brought to attention by the arrival of Berlin-based artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s New Theatre Hollywood, where I saw Lucy’s surrealist 4HL doomspiral short A Business, last fall. Since its arrival, New Theatre has put up a good chunk of exciting new work that blends mediums and comments on the current- Jasmine Johnson’s immersive reality TV series The Death of a Star was a notable early example. Siena Foster Soltis has also brought new life to LA theatre with site-specific psychosexual dramas- her latest, Sugar Tub, was enjoying a simultaneous run across town, with choreography by Mamie Green. Green’s Volta Collective has been a crucial player as well, heavily incorporating text by local writers into their dance pieces.

Less visible yet no less important is the influence of playwright Agnes Borinsky, whose writing workshops have fostered neural networks in the community- I met Lucy’s former teacher and current collaborator, Kap Taylor, in Agnes’ workshop. Borinsky, herself a student of the legendary playwright Mac Wellman, established a name in the NYC downtown theatre community before relocating to the West Coast. I wasn’t surprised to find that Dylan Frederick is good friends with Agnes, and Arne Gjelten, who plays Marcel, is moving in with her next week. Gjelten was offered the role of Marcel after Lucy Parks Urbano saw him in Calla Henkel of New Theatre’s play The End is New at REDCAT, the only place in the city where the GOAT of the theatrical old-guard avant-garde, the Wooster Group, sometimes performs.

More so than its contemporaries, American Birds recalls this very important take that I recently screenshotted off Gen Z starlet Ivy Wolk’s Instagram story, calling for a Zoomer art movement based in its own iconography and history instead of upcycling the millennial, whether that be through drain, sleaze, twee, whatever...The birds’ sadistic song, the Drake crashouts, the surrealist memespeak all feel distinctly like “fetishising what we know and what we’ve seen”, which, as Ivy notes, is at least a starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity.

Underneath their glib exteriors, Lucy Parks Urbano’s characters are desperate to belong to history, to society, to family, to even just one other person, as they survey the increasingly bleak prospects of their existence. The political stakes aren’t new, but the sense of absurdity develops from an intergenerational stasis. In its final moments, the play implicates the audience using a vestige of national unity; the curtain call is choreographed to the Cha-Cha Slide, and when the song instructs, everybody claps their hands.

In rehearsal, I watch as Frederick instructs the actors to sing a line together in harmony. They attempt several times and fail, laughing through each reset. On the night I watch the performance, the singing line has been cut. Set and costume designer Eli Hauser talks to me about the lone dryer sheet on the Boy’s coffee table. “I told Dylan I wanted set pieces that were abstract and ethereal, but still based in reality and domesticity,” said Hauser. “I was like, does that make sense? And Dylan was like, not really… eventually he was like, what about a dryer sheet? And I was like, yeah.” The effort at every level to understand one another’s siloed existence is what makes the thing Gesamtkunst-werrrrrk.

When he’s tired of being told to sit down and be a Good Fucking Boy by Kylie, Timothée Chalamet enjoys being cucked by dominartist Jill Westwood. So much so, in fact, that he asked her to add him to her roster. She declined, because she’s retired now and making art about desiring eschatology in a way Luca Guadagnino won't know shit about. Grow up Twinky!

Jill’s videos, photographs and archive installs are about fucking insofar as Jaws is about a shark. Early work began with liquid latex “second skin” garments she’d sell under pseudonyms – Fetisch or Die and Fetisch World Domination – and performances in her industrial female duo Fistfuck, but now, an art-psychotherapist (people have always wanted her help I guess), she works backwards, restructuring past performances, power relationships, examining ecstasy and violence, the body and the self. Showing at :)) Glasgow’s :)) David Dale Gallery, :// Marseille’s :// Giselle Books* – even :{ :{ east london’s :{ :{ Neven Gallery.

°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°°º¤ø,¸

\,,/(^_^)\,,/ 8======D~~

TC Do you like art?

JW In 1983 when I was 23 years old I wrote this artist statement:

To portray the metaphysical side of human nature.
To establish a subconscious link between myself / others.

In the confused time in which we live. I am aware of the kind of despair I portray and it’s not without remorse that I decided to do so. There is no mistake, it is something on which I have staked everything. I believe in all the threats of the invisible. I am fighting the invisible itself. Applying myself to unearthing some secrets. What I want to expose is this mass of desires, dreams, illusions and beliefs, which has resulted in this lie, no one believes any longer. I would aim to revive some images, obvious images, that are not tainted with continued disillusionment. To succeed in showing the mind’s obscure, hidden, unrevealed secrets and aspects by a sort of real projection. Not aiming to create an illusion of things which do not exist. Aiming to make scenarios indestructible, irrefutable. No single gesture must be void of the fatality of life. I grope blindly towards an ideal. I partly know what I want and how to accomplish it. But I believe a chance, a miracle will occur and reveal to us all, that which we still do not know.

TC Does your own art hurt or heal you?

JW I’m interested in the parts of ourselves we’d rather disown: our capacity for cruelty, selfishness, envy or dominance, alongside tenderness, generosity and care. If my work heals, it’s not because it offers comfort. If it hurts, it’s not because it seeks to wound. I hope it creates enough space for people to encounter something true about themselves, however uncomfortable that might be. That’s where empathy begins.

TC When you think about your tombstone, what do you think it looks like?

JW My first thought was Damien Hirst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ along with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Last year my dear friend and long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth died. Standing by the grave of his ashes in Berlin as the church bell tolled just for him, I unexpectedly found profound beauty in this ritual. I thought, how funerals belong to the living. The finality of death itself remains unimaginable.

TC Is sex like death, or is death akin to sex? Which do you think about more?

JW Both deserve reverence, tenderness and respect; both require surrender, vulnerability and trust. But I think about sex more than death. Not simply as an act, but as a force. For me, eros isn’t simply about sex. It’s about the erotics of knowing and loving life.

TC What do you think about the kink scene in London, and is there any hope?

JW I don’t think I know what “kink” means. I lived through an exploratory phase where fetish practices were underground, socially hidden and unaccepted (1980s). The music, fashion, art and night club scenes crossed over giving rise to a new wave of intersecting contexts, an experimental space. Labels often obscure lived experience. It’s possible that exploring frightening experiences within a context of trust stretches our humanity in ways that expand human consciousness and its mattering in the world.

TC What are you listening to? I wish I could have seen your industrial noise performances Fistfuck (1981-81)

JW Recently I’ve been immersed in listening to Zos Kia preparing a film reel for their performance at VOD. Those Fistfuck performances have taken on something of a mythic quality. From the inside they felt very raw and dangerously precarious. We wanted to discover what performance could do in those contexts, pushing things over edges to find out what happened when sound, body and audience were pushed into unfamiliar territory. I'm intrigued that the energy of Fistfuck has such an afterlife, I’m interested in what those performances were asking more than in the mythology that's grown around them. Although I’m happy to milk their dubious glory now. Hahaha!

TC Favourite worst nightmare?

JW My motto with my long-standing collaborator Antal Nemeth has always been: Love is the Law, Fear is the Key.

TC Do you like ContraPoints?

JW I had to look this up, and yes, I do. I’m drawn to brave people willing to explore beneath appearances. She seems interested in complexity, contradiction and in the instability of certainty.

Dream artistic orgy/sex marathon/ smoke circle.

JW My first thought was a tantric liaison with Bowie. Then I thought what about a fantasy mix of all these ways to be intimate with my favourite people? A gathering of those who have enchanted, influenced or transformed me. Something dreamlike, a beautifully, sensitive exchange of bodies, minds and spirits, so I am imagining an uncensored unfolding, such as you get in dream states, that is timeless and melts from inspiring conversations into sensuous touch that flow into mass-orgasmic splendour. WOW! Seismic Sex Magic. That’s a great fantasy, that could change the world. An erotics of friendship, imagination and aliveness. Thanks for unleashing that thought.

Timmy Tam Juliette, or Justine? And if the latter, do you think Justine ever experienced pleasure, and is therefore an unreliable narrator?

JW This was printed in ID magazine in 1984 to accompany a photograph of me dressed in black latex, leather and stiletto shoes: Dominatrix Vixen “She’s a libertine… “in pursuit of pleasure totally” her alter ego is Juliette a Marquis de Sade character. “My outfit is sexual – involving every aspect of sexuality.” Reading this now makes me smile.

When I made this statement, I was very clear in my desire to find and claim my power. As a young, working-class woman in the 1980s, I felt this was necessary. This was an era of extreme everyday sexism and misogyny, when the Yorkshire Ripper was still haunting public consciousness and Benny Hill embodied what passed for mainstream entertainment. These days I admire my daring boldness and punk spirit; in exploring the sphere and language of De Sade, fetish and transgression, it was a way of stepping into territory usually reserved for men. It was also a way of exploring the frightening capacities in all of us, and of trying to understand the extremes of human experience. De Sade interested me because transgression can expose how power is constructed and maintained. Fetishism can exaggerate social roles until they begin to fracture. My thinking has evolved to understand power as agency rather than domination.

I am not sure how Justine experienced her plight. I can’t imagine she experienced pleasure in the conventional sense. But trauma has a complicated relationship with desire, and fetishism can sometimes become a way of transforming suffering into a strategy for survival.

Marty Supreme Are you happy? Are you single? Can you read me a poem?

JW I recently wrote this poem in Marseille around the opening of an exhibition titled ‘Everything is NOW’ at Giselle’s Books (4 July-16 Aug 2026). This might answer these few queries.

Everything is NOW
Everything vibrates

Skin remembers
Blood feels

Spit
Piss
Sweat
Tears
Shit
Spunk
Menstrual blood

Everything is sacred matter
Every act is ritual

Language is a body
A vast cosmic landscape

Touch it
Feel it
It feels you

Love is a potent magic
Love is a political act
It is how we become one another

We leap
Strapped together
Scared and ecstatic
Already falling

Our saints are among us
They are within us
We are they
They are us

Every touch
Every wound
Every dance
Every intimate moment

Every BODY that refused to disappear

WE CONSECRATE EACH OTHER

Through presence
Through friendship
Impossible LOVE

We leave ourselves in one another
Like sacred relics

Still warm
Still breathing

This is how power returns

NOT AS DOMINATION - AS DEVOTION

NOT MINE - OURS

Everything is sacred
Everything is breathing
Everything is NOW

We are already falling…

TIMMY TTTTTTT Has god ever answered your prayers?

JW Making work is an act of sustained attention. Like sex-magic, I hold an image, a feeling or a desire as clearly as I can. I invest myself in it completely, then in an act of transmission into the unknown, I let it go. Sometimes, much later, something unexpected returns from the world and it feels as though your prayer has been answered and that can feel miraculous.

Ages ago, factory girls skipped across the heather and saw the textile mills churning new material. In our new-new industrial era, aspiring it-girls wear the heather greys manufactured and destroyed in our cyclical/vortex image economy. Our signs are wearing, and meaning is thinner than ever! Bringing together trend analysis and taste-signalling in light of the image economy, up-and-coming fashion writer Yoona, begins in this essay to write a Gen-Z style overview in which the aesthetic is mutation itself. Thank you, Yoona for your research... Mint-green, the colour of the asylum help us to reckon with the fact that dressing takes your whole life... I don't think we will ever be ready.

Brianna Perry's shows "confessional poetry" at TG and "Fantasy in Japan" at Matthew Brown gallery close on August 17th and August 8th, respectively.

In The Feminine Century at Room 3557 in east Los Angeles, six variously dressed retail mannequins pose along a pink floor. It’s Brianna Perry’s ‘ready-to-wear collection that promises an impossible outfit’ (from the show notes written by the artist herself). The garments are sourced from thrift stores and her own closet—each one reanimated with surface alterations in the form of imprinted symbols, custom embellishments and illustration-like embroidery. Most tops feature an imprint of an image: potleaf and gun motifs; the Louis Vuitton monogram; the faces of Che Guevara and Bob Marley. It is anti-establishment chic that does more than just flirt with the political.

Each mannequin presents a look that is meant to be read. It’s the linguistic turn of fashion that Perry touches upon with titles like “Look 04: I Walk Around Reading People, Their Tshirts with Words and Images, Everyone is Text.” The body is a page; style is a code. For me, the pleasure in fashion comes from this process of decoding style and the opaque entanglement between the sartorial, the political, the Internet, and the image.

It is impossible to see Perry’s looks as being isolated from the Internet. Each garment exists within a post-Internet context. But rather than overtly referencing some Internet trend, it is more so that a piece echoes some—albeit niche—Internet phenomenon. Take, for example, the “God Sailor Skirt” from “Look 01: I Am Ready and Therefore Nothing.” The navy blue pencil skirt features a discharge-printed Sanskrit Om syllable (ॐ) repeated across the front—a symbol repeating ambiguously but frequently in recent months across my Instagram, Depop, and Pinterest feeds. At one point it was @harmonytividad’s Instagram profile photo, and I remember innocently wondering if she is Buddhist.

This ambiguous adoption of the ॐ symbol is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon of 2016-coded spirituality (think yoga pose pic in Amaro filter captioned with the lotus flower emoji -type posts) that has become familiar as part of the personal brand of It Girls Of The Internet like Addison Rae. In similar fashion, Perry’s I Am Ready and Therefore Nothing reads like an empty prayer. Look 05: I Am Nothing, When Will I Be Ready? reopens this existential pendulum between Nothingness and Readiness. Look 05’s Evil Eye Acid Wash Rip Jeans hint, again, at another one of the Internet’s beloved spiritual symbols to appropriate.

But there’s a broader discussion to be had here about legibility. Being “early” to what eventually trends is an exercise in cultural cachet. Being “behind” implies some kind of aesthetic illiteracy. The microtrend is simply the outward manifestation of this accelerated cycle of taste-signaling and desire for social + cultural capital that fashion so easily caters to. What gets made in the offstream of this cycle is a class of products that resemble aesthetic mutations of each other and that have this uncannily hyperpresent quality to them. Look 06’s “Formalism vs. Sentimentalism Polo” is my favourite piece in the show because it converges several instances of this concept.

Perry’s Formalism vs. Sentimentalism Polo is made of a deconstructed Victorian blouse, dancer’s leotard and woven cotton. The polo ditches its typical collar for a gold sequined choker with a neck cutout (from the dance leotard) that is playfully kitschy. There is something so Girl Perfect about how the gold sequins work with the rest of the pink and heather grey striped material. The U.S. Polo Assn patch on the front and number 3 in collegiate lettering also play important semiotic roles here. The varsity-style number and the horse and polo player patch both evoke and make legible the aesthetic nostalgia for preppy Americana / “Ivy-League-core” (notably solidified as an aesthetic form in the 1965 photo book Take Ivy). This legitimization as a form denotes its ability to be referenced—this referential quality must exist in order for any subversive meaning to be built upon it. To me, this is what’s at work in Miguel Adrover’s Spring 2001 look that pastiches the Ralph Lauren logo.

The popularity of Perry’s polo gestures at several Internet phenomena that I think can be described as three overlapping yet distinct phenomenons:

1. The Great Polofication of like every Internet-popular brand ever (circa 2025 to early ‘26). This is better demonstrated visually than in language, so here is an image surveying some of the polos released since 2025— also the year that Kim Petras released her single Polo.

2. The dominance of heather greys and stripes (especially stripes combining greys with neons, butter yellow, pink, or mint green/blue) that is still being done by brands today.

3. The aesthetic mutation that blends together silver/gold metallics, heather greys, stripes/polka dots, and collegiate lettering into its own legible genre. This aesthetic mutation [might I add that I do not mean “mutation” derogatorily!] emerged roughly around 2024. This is specifically the year that the first three collections of Lucila Safdie were released: 01—Lick the Star, 02—Girl’s Don’t Cry, and 03—I Desire The Things That Will Destroy Me In The End that were the first iterations I saw, in my corner of the Instagram Universe, blending together these visual tropes (silver/gold metallics, heather greys, stripes/polka dots, and varsity lettering) all into one metamorphosed aesthetic.

In fact, these Lucila Safdie collections are a perfect case study for theorising the aesthetic mutation; coquette-core (the ruffles, polka dots, florals), Americana (the varsity numbers, metallics, red / white stripes), and Zooey Deschanel -esque twee all find themselves in one amalgamated form. I feel that this post-2024 era is marked by a plethora of Internet-popular brands making garments derived from this evolved visual genre that Lucila Safdie forwards. While the post-2024 boom of garments resembling Lucila Safdie designs may only be legible to those existing within the same Instagram Universe as mine, these garments are like fossils preserving the hyperspecific microtrends that produced them. They are fashion’s algorithmic backwash — byproducts of the Internet itself that we may look back upon in 20 years to remember the cultural milieu of this post-2024 era that birthed these styles.

Speaking of the Internet native styles we’ll remember in 20 years, what would a conversation on 2026 aesthetics be without a discussion of MINT GREEN / MINT BLUE / TEAL / TIFFANY BLUE / PASTEL MINT / all of the above?

I recently posted this Story to which a Genzennial-cusp mutual of mine replied to it saying she saw a group of three teenagers at the Palo Alto Brandy location fighting over the last pair of these teal Priscilla gaucho pants. She considered buying them off but figured it’d be futile (it is Silicon Valley after all). I’ve seen Reels of girls lining up for hours outside of the NYC SoHo flagship to get their hands on it or simply complaining about having visited multiple locations just for them to be sold out everywhere. The chokehold that this color has is undeniable.

Mattie Barringer (@nurse_stockings on Instagram and founder of Women’s History Museum with Amanda McGowan) had also posted about the color, saying “The Gen Z obsession with this hospital color speaks volumes of the collective mental state… It’s a color used to calm hospital patients which makes sense because we’re in an open air asylum.” I whole-heartedly agree with Barringer’s observation and believe that these pastel mint and teal colors not only attest to a collective need for tranquility and mental soothing, but also speak to a political fatigue, apathy, fragility, and emptiness. To exist at this moment is to exist within a myriad of intersecting, compounding crises; wars, genocide, climate collapse, stifling job markets, mass deportations, rising fascism, exploding wealth divide, global water bankruptcy, late-stage surveillance capitalism, proliferation of gambling / betting platforms, brainrot culture, the forced spread of (and investment into) AI into every facet of daily life… the list goes on. Personally, it feels like dissociation is my only means of staying sane these days. I have grown fatigued, apathetic, jaded, and numb as a way of surviving reality.

In an interview with Fiona Alison Duncan on their show Grisette à l’enfer (Women’s History Museum’s exhibition at Amant that concluded in February), Amanda McGowan mentions, “Fashion has always been a cultural temperature check. It reflects where people are at. I think fashion right now is speaking to a kind of spiritual and aesthetic emptiness.” To borrow a quote from media theorist Ruby Justice Thelot: “The place where chaos is felt most acutely today is the cultural world. The idea of new aesthetics is essentially taxonomy as a way of making sense of it, as a way of creating order in the cultural world.” Fashion is where the state of the world — for all its frictions, fissures, extremities, and uncertainties — materialises itself.

These mint green colors mean so much more than a passing microtrend. Their affective qualities are symbolic of our wider psychopolitical condition. Certain motifs that Perry engages are similar to mint green in this way.

In the show notes Perry writes, “I was a maladaptive daydreamer looking for an unconscious revolution.” Between Look 03’s potleaf sweater and Look 05’s Che Guevara tube top, I felt like I was standing in front of some kind of signification closet—one that offered this somewhat unserious thought “hm… revolution for today or just get high…?” While unserious, there’s something about this dichotomy that gets at the crux of what it feels like to exist within the imperial core—resistance vs. apathy presented as a mundane symbolic choice, proffered to us in this banal way as if we were just picking what to wear for the day. It’s less about where you sit on a spectrum between revolutionary and apolitical nihilist, and more about how terrifying the mundanity of that choice is—let alone its existence as a choice for us in the West where the pains of the world are felt less acutely; where I can retreat into the comfort of soft pastel blues and not think twice about wearing a Guevara tee.

The politically-charged symbols continue with Look 04’s “Murder Weapon Turtleneck”—a skyblue waffle knit with wooden beads and the faint outline of a pistol on it. I think about the guns I’ll see splashed on tanks by DIY-screenprinters and the girls on Depop tagging their listing as the brands Praying or O-MIGHTY for exposure. The gun is just one symbol from a whole arsenal of strong symbols seemingly emptied of any original meaning when pastiched onto a garment. In its transition from a device designed to kill into a sort of t-shirt appliqué, the gun experiences a remediation into a purely aesthetic symbol. But the violence in this aestheticisation is undone with the choice to call a gun for what it is: a murder weapon. There is something forgotten or ignored when a top with a gun on it is considered cute, but Look 04’s Murder Weapon Turtleneck calls on you to wake up from this cognitive dissonance.

“To wear” is to opt in, to occupy, embody, or externalise—impermanently. The sartorial enables a temporary act, identity, or alignment. What transpires within this idea of the political or the nonpolitical (which, in its denial of politics is itself a political statement) becoming externalised? Talking to Brianna via Instagram DM, I was particularly struck by her point, “I disagree with the common thesis that subcultural and/or political imagery is diluted in the process of mass distribution and mass manufacturing (Che T-shirts, etc). For me, all these symbols remain fanged and subversive.” While the post-Internet connotations I bring to my reading of the symbols may differ from the artist’s original intent in choosing them, there is no denial that these garments are imbued in a charged energy that make it impossible to ignore the imagery and symbols we may have become indifferent towards. The Feminine Century renews and reinvigorates a sense of cognizance to the emptiness of our aesthetic symbols.

When Tiqqun wrote their Theory of the Young Girl, some people pointed out that it was a bit misogynistic, using the assumed vacuity, emptiness, and ultimate energetic frivolity of women and girls in the West as both an analogy, a mode, and a mask that governments, men in suits and anyone (?) under late-stage capitalism can don at any moment. Why always dolls and not women, like cmon now.

As Lou Reid explains, Egner's paintings incorporate the mass-market with the acceptable pre-war pedo vibes of Balthus in a manner that could be read as "relatable" for contemporary femininity. But the young girl, or the doll, can't ever just be a vessel, and is more of membrane, bearing the trace of its observer, or theorist, or painter, who doesnt wash their grubby little hands before handling.

Anyway, post-impressionist paintings of dolls...

— Syd

There is desire, a burning passion for the all-too-real and ultimately unattainable, and there are one-dimensional figments of the imagination – undeveloped castles in the sky to be drooled over, lest any intricacy ruin the dream. Jeff Egner’s recent show “Guest Room” at Lomex dances the line between the former and the latter, conjuring scenes of strange, lurid intimacy with well-heeled influences and unrefined (yet enthusiastic) figurative techniques.

Across twelve oil paintings almost exclusively depicting dolls and feminine playthings, Egner oscillates between the high and low-brow, attempting to merge the (tastefully) suggestive language of Balthus’s children with the more brusque obscenity of the mass-market Temu sex robot. Take Untitled (Room III), 2025, a work depicting a seemingly inanimate girl bent over a table, offering a glimpse of her underwear as she looks directly back at the viewer. Her body is posed unnaturally – her club foot at the end of her outstretched leg bends at a bizarre ninety-degree angle, and her only visible arm twists around her back before disappearing behind her upturned second foot. At the bottom of her raised leg, a mass of thigh resting on the table accumulates into an abhorrent puddle. Two seams appear at the top and bottom of the contorted arm’s elbow joint, definitively marking the figure as a fleshy cast of silicone stretched around a Barbie-like series of pins and bolts. An easy comparison can be drawn between Untitled (Room III) and Therese Dreaming, 1938, a Balthus painting of a young girl daydreaming while exposing her underwear beneath her arched leg. This is a provocative theme, and any work influenced by the voyeuristic gaze of the adult male on the helpless girl must tread carefully lest it cross over into the realm of the flagrantly exploitative. Egner meaningfully tweaks Balthus’s unrepentant examination of his sitter with a healthy dose of self-admonishment, positioning the doll to look back at the viewer, implicating them in their overt sexualization of the figure. The tension (and thrill) of the Balthus work is absent, and instead replaced by the shame and contemplation akin to a fleshlight collector memorialising his own perversion, turning his urges inward and mixing his lust with an unshakable embarrassment. To so obviously fetishise the inanimate qualities of the doll is to take away from its uncanny appeal, and render an otherwise complex being disappointingly flat.

In Swallow’s Nest, 2025, meanwhile, two women appear before a picturesque castle in a crudely painted scene, haunted by a floating male visage. Appearing somewhere between a reflection of a face on a glass pane and the ominous floating phallic rhino horns which crowd the female subject of Dali’s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, 1954, the face watches over the women with startling proximity, as though the cloud-like lines which define its hair and brow will soon be breathed in by the girls. The taller woman, wearing a crop top and short shorts, leans against a railing. The other sits on a stone ledge, crossing her bare feet and closing her eyes in a slump. While the painting overtly sexualises the Barbie-like figures of the two women, it is less a piece of toe and leg worship than a fetishisation of detachment, a work dedicated to the “cool girl” as a figure which can be observed yet never approached. Dali referred to Young Virgin as the most chaste of his paintings, in spite of the penis-dream’s paradoxically “erotic appearance”. Egner lands on a similar feeling in Swallow’s Nest, bringing a male figure into a painting in the most ineffectual, flittering manner possible – while the women could breathe in the wispy vapours of the face, they could just as easily turn and blow them away. The delicacy of this relationship is, however, jeopardised by the cardboard-cutout inertia of the women. Painted as placid amazons in fantasyland, they are frustratingly disconnected from the unstable encounter Egner is anticipating.

This is not to say that Egner is incapable of producing complex and captivating work: In Her Blue Dream, 2025, a female figure in a schoolgirl’s uniform looks longingly to her side, straining her right hand to play with the fabric of her sleeve. The woman’s pupil-less eyes do not rest on the viewer, but out a window, conveying disappointment or yearning for something outside the scene. Her face carries more emotion than any of the other inanimate personages here, and her body is posed in an avoidant stretch. The question of the figure’s animation is the painting’s greatest success, highlighting the importance of Egner’s rendering of his girls in the success or failure of his unsettling tableaus. Unlike the mottled and flat daubs which comprise the majority of the show’s works, Her Blue Dream is painted in long smooth strokes, emphasising the drape of the figure’s arms and floes of hair. It appears as though Egner has positioned his doll to reject his advances, engaging the productive tension between each inanimate yet uncannily attractive doll to question the root of his desire. Here – at last – Egner imagines the doll as being able to say no, and produces a portrait instead of another silicone still life.

Teo has the time and energy to go places in London that our editorial team (who are all ex-vice staff in their late thirties) do not. One of these places is Christ Dillinger and Acid Soulja Boy's jacked-up internet rap that really makes ur brain go WHUUUURRR WHUUUUURRR WHUUUURRRR. Keywords: Hikkokimori; Tung Tung, EDM Beats.

Christ, we know ur real name.

When Keir Starmer sucker-punched British teens with a social media ban, I was left paranoid about the future of music. Albeit uplifted by the rappers’ chimerical charisma, Acid Souljah and Christ Dillinger’s London show felt like a spirited requiem to a subculture epitomised by its severely plugged-in teenage fans and innovators.

Outside The Garage, himkimori’s are hitting vapes from the black market and crying “Tung Tung Tung Sahur is so leng” after he came out on stage for bloodonmybalmain’s set. The bouncers don’t bat an eye when my friend and I promise we’re on the guest list and sneak in while Acid Souljah is mid-verse, rapping every bar in a falsetto that makes him sound like a slacker yelling at his parents from his gaming set-up.

This doesn’t feel like the usual underground rap (whatever that means now) extravaganza; barely any phones are in sight and the moshing etiquette is surprisingly considerate, which also means it’s appropriately and absolutely frenetic in there. The compound of Acid Souljah’s hilariously cunning bars and the sheer bounce of the music draws a twisted grin on my face; there’s something exhilarating yet uncanny in seeing such a mythical subject from my fyp in the flesh. You can tell he’s been performing for years now, and when the music is so authentic, the swag follows: naturally.

Joining Acid, Christ Dillinger glides onto the stage in a green Vetements shirt that droops down to his ankles — his silhouette harks back to a faded memory of a 2000’s MC. Inaugurating his utopian American party is X MAN, which entices an eclipse in the enthusiasm of the crowd, charging in droves towards the rapper. As he waltzes and nods about, a colourful contrast is cast between his virtuosic, based flow and the infectiously funky EDM beats he’s barring on.

Whether he’s expertly listing drugs or flexing his after-hours endeavors, Dillinger injects his music with a fluency in online-humour that never betrays his integrity. In between songs, an edited version of the trapaholics tag warns us,“This song is fucking is horrible.” Freud believed that collective laughter occurred at the breaking down of authority — that seems to be happening a lot tonight.

I get goosebumps when a vulgarly ear-stimming trance beat drops after the MC candidly confesses: “The only opp I got is depression”. Diving into the mosh for a few minutes and fulfilling a kid’s request to end the show on the triumphant and familial note of “based world mansion”, Dillinger proves he is as unaffectedly committed to his fans as they are to him.

The rappers share the stage with their friends; they want the lights off; they pause the music for water breaks; and launch free Palestine chants. Based negative squad CEOs assured me that youth culture can only endure.

The Jaded cosmopolitan multiculturalists long for the orientalised pseudo-monoculture of ‘the north’, and what they come up with is “Club Nite” at Village Underground. This is not so much a review of Clubnite as a club night; Olivia Twist turns her attention to the club decorations, courteously provided by the so-eminently-crap-it-almost-goes-without-saying artist Corbin Shaw. What was the deal with this ironic nationalist boy’s club of a club night? - HSR

It's not often that people actually talk about the decoration of clubs anymore, since unfortunately we as a culture have succumbed to the plain black quasi-warehouse: boring bland and industrial. The idea that an artist would collaborate with a club night to decorate their walls is therefore an appealing idea. However, the delivery makes me wonder whether its worth even hoping for good things to happen. To think! at the time, the world cup was still a month away.

A note on the aural/oral before we get into aesthetics. The sets were good and fun: Mysrry (DJasianbarbie) made her debut set. A big highlight was Taylor Richardson’s featuring a mix of esoteric computer guided remixes with cassö, RAYE, D-Block Europe - Prada (STAR SEED & PIERCE Remix) and an EsdeeKid-4 Raws Budot edit, Rihanna Hit List (Bassline Remix) and I have Nothing, Big G. Drunk in Love Diplo Remi; Lancer Victorious Honey Buns; Murder Club Nirvana & Cardi B Remix, a set list rooted in the online, or as he likes say: “I just play music”. Big up Paritos’s set and organisational verve.

This was promptly followed by BoyPillow (1 of the three founders of premier e-girl and -boy clubbing event, Maxxxing) who downed a bottle of Henny while playing his signature High BPM High bass tracklist. The eminent if-you-know you know Bailey Holmes Music’s USB was corrupted, so the same track kept running back, over and over again, until he MC’ed over Jenny Spark’s dope two-hour set. The act of inviting memes like OGMeathead (who didn't even turn up) and mixing them with other artists smacks of this weird exotica-approach that people from London have about Bradford MC type music. It’s annoying.

I have been to insanely good MC type nights. I have seen Marky B kick the soundguy in the face after only one song. But these kinds of things do not happen in hipster-adjacent spaces.

So yeah, the Corbin Shaw Flags. The club was filled with them. One huge one behind the decks that said “Clubbing” then a bunch of others dotted throughout Village Underground emblazoned with phrases like “tart”, “Filler”, “2014” and “Klarna”. It was unclear if the DJs got briefed that they’d be playing beneath twenty St. George’s flags during a historic upswing of the Xenophobia-fuelled Reform party that is threatening to ‘deport’ or exile hundreds of thousands of our loved ones.

Corbin’s flags remind me of those nihilistic affirmation instagram accounts littered with phrases like “my country is so psychologically stable” or words like “lit” overlaying AI gen rainforests and squashed pics of Ed Sheeran. AI’s evolution from the visuals of DALLE-1 to realistic deep fakes relegated these affirmation pics to the internet graveyard. But these flags summon them back, reading similarly to Corbin’s recent AI-influenced campaign poster for SXSW festival that reads “REEL LIFE” over an image of Stone Henge filtered through the “impressionism” prompt on Adobe Express. They give nostalgia for recent years swiping at instagram affirmation images on an iphone 5c fused with some kind of affirmative pseudo critique painted on a crusader knights shield.

“Nobody knows what it means, but its provocative.” – Blades of Glory

What is more provocative is perhaps the feeling of being on drugs in a club with sexy people, in a sexy environment. Instead we were mired within empty, basic irony because of the flags, which people kept looking at, feeling weirded out by.

Exemplary of the power of instagram to give soft power to the most shallow and unresearched work, it sanitises the violence, suffering and anxiety endemic to contemporary British life. Shaw smoothes down anger into the barest of worded signifiers. Using the same dumbed-down visual language of his object of critique speaks to Corbin Shaw's poverty of imagination, that starves the brain like a nitrous oxide balloon, except in a bad way. In his world, we are fed only the rehashed codes of an easy liberal target: ‘nationalism’. Whatever that means for England, satellite state of Palantir.

It doesn’t help that Village Underground has the shape and feel of a WW2 bunker.

Not to labour the point too much, but it felt ketty-fascistic.

I love tarts and I love clubbing. Clubbing tarts should have far more power in this country. As concepts they shouldn’t be sloganised and put on a crap piece of bonehead art.

Superstar leaves you with two messages: Justice for my tartiness! AND, let’s respect clubbing! Leave St George out of it.

If you haven't already got with our flipping program, there is a 16 year-old spectre haunting the most tasteful musical events in London and abroad- it's Nico.

He took a trip to Paris to review an Atomiser show (oui!) but its our reporter's hilarious review of the mire of FakeMink that really set hearts alight across the globe.

The courtyard below the Marble Arch fountains has been fenced off since the year I was born, so it’s a nice alignment of the stars that Hollywood Superstar suggested I report on its Westminster council-approved return into the civic for one afternoon. London is still waking up as the orderly queue of longhairs in band tees descends into the disused exit to the train station; a stage has been set up in the centre of the pit, but everyone stops in front of it despite the staff’s innocuous requests to fill the whole space.

Two metres away from me, Lolina rises onto the stage wearing sunglasses, a thrashed leather jacket, zebra-print trousers and white air forces; it looks like she put on whatever she found littered around Marble Arch. Her mega hit single Gg (remixed by New York) starts playing and she’s already asking cold and daring questions on the concrete dancefloor. She’s expressionless while delivering the hook, “Who’d you throw under the bus? Who might you run over?” Her set is amorphous, covering a range of UK Bass sounds (also briefly recalling Chicago’s footwork) tainted with her trademark Londonese Hypnagogia that is as nauseating as it is ecstatic. If not a smoke filled basement, this dingy pit feels like her home ground.

YHWH Nailgun fist bump each other as they take their positions, only to dillydally with leads and microphones for five minutes. A screeching feedback needs fixing and the singer is teasing us with adlibs. The frontman begins to twitch and wave his mic around like a wand, casting the band to run through their fresh 11-minute album Magazine.

I’m immediately flinching at the drums which are appreciably louder than on the mix of the album. The pitched down rototoms give the drumming a primal feel (he’s also not wearing shoes) that reminds me of binging videos of early Death Grips shows- I saw at least two drumsticks snap throughout the set. The vocalist is certainly matching this ferocity, manically quaking with every unintelligible croon and roar.

It would be nice to see the other two members resemble the outrage of their instruments a bit more; the guitar and synth parts are indistinguishable, combining to resemble sharp sirens and hums of machinery, also merging with the industrial sounds of central London. In The Art of Noises, futurist Russolo hypothesised the modern ear would come to crave the sounds of the metropolis in music; indeed, the quieter moments in which this fusion is apparent feel surreal!!

I think these four New Yorkers should be an urgent reminder, for some of today’s rock bands, that you can still make compelling music when guided by pure intention rather than image (not naming names.)

Fifteen minutes is not yet sufficient to appease an audience and so the band play some old songs, setting off a mosh that carries a few crowd-surfers. The most eager call for an encore I’ve ever heard ignites the one-minute throwback of Hawk Violence which ends at five on the dot, precisely as promised by NTS.

A free show is an irresistible way to lure Londoners back into the exponentially unapproachable circus that is the city’s centre.

When we covered the show at the cause last year, a week after LV Sandals came out, we predicted the invasion of the UK underground into the mainstream. A year on, we have seen the mixed results of this success, epitomised in the success and unsuccess of Essdeekid post-Capitol records deal, and here with this alternately banging and uncertain, slightly pretentious release from Fakemink. We can hope for a British invasion, but we have to fear the possibility that Britain becomes a site of cultural extraction in service of the empty American imperial core.

Thank god we have Teo to guide us. Find here, the return of our high school music reporter. Here he dishes his opinions, as the superstar does: with panaché and natural online research-habitus.

Terrified is fakemink’s synthesis of the terror beneath the pride with which he lives his self-prophesied life. The Essex boy faked it till he made it; the fantasies of Hollywood and fragrances he seduced my generation with are real now.

Between the opening instrumental and spoken-word finale, he revisits his older sound – hazy beats, ranty verses and hypnotically jarring hooks – but with a confidence that was absent from the angst-punctuated songs he blew-up with. Retard Angel drowns a Tirzah sample under, like, a million layers of effects and bass; the haunted trap beat on Wrong Relief feels terrifying after the danceable fyp anthem Night, Blooming Jasmine (not-so-politely taking its name from Lynch’s grave); and 51 Ttashpel Pony Ave proudly recalls the jerk-beats the rapper used to release in industrial quantities. But underlying the aesthetic sensibility and chaos that mark the prodigal rapper so distinctly is an eerie feeling of fame-induced apathy. His unrelenting flex of having “lived out the chateau” testifies the extent to which he has been consumed by the LA lifestyle.

The occasional confessions, “Miss Marmont driving me crazy” and “fuck Sunset, really miss Mayfair” remind us of how distant the London Saviour has become. Essdeekid got an eye-watering deal when he entered the LA Capital Records deathstar and his music payed the price. He was immediately paired to prop up the acts of yesteryear aka. the floundering Yeat, dropping a god-awful track from a Rap Caviar type producer. Almost instantly, the vitality of his image became like the hair care gummies plugged by an ex-love island reality tv star. It’s a cautionary tale that Mink has yet avoided, but still creates a bad taste in the mouth by association. Indeed, there is a jarring contrast between the phone scrolling in a dark room night-time feel of Mink’s music and the much-publicised awkwardness of his bright sun-lit performances on the post-millennial mainstream festival circuit. How long does it take to get back from Rolling Loud to London Fields?

With Terrified, fakemink tries to evolve beyond the single, which he has mastered over the last 2 years, and arrives at a broader scale of storytelling - one which fakemink places Victoria Davidoff at the centre of. The 9-fingered Soundcloud princess clutching a pole and hiding behind the curtains of Chateau Marmont in the cover is a muse in fakemink’s tragedy. Her demented dance and grin at the end of the Like A Virgin music video reminds me of the Virgin in Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary, who achieves liberation and transgression in the final scene by putting on lipstick. Victoria is a figure of fantasy in his Mulholland Drive-esque dream, and like Dante’s Beatrice, a remote crush deeply written into his lament.

It’s no surprise the self-proclaimed genius has directly named Lynch and Dante’s Inferno as inspirations. Comparisons are certainly not warranted, but they signify fakemink’s ambition which, much like the album, treads thin ice between visionary talent and self-indulged redundancy. It feels like fakemink has a tendency to be infatuated with things he can’t quite grasp, whether it be art, fame, Victoria Davidoff or himself. This perplexity is glaring on the sadistically titled Retard Angel, perhaps the most discordant moment on the album narrating a love story turned rotten as mink cries foul play.

Despite his claim that the tracklist simulates Dante’s Divine Comedy, beginning in hell (lustful subject matter etc.) and resolving in enlightenment (naively signified by the erasure of low frequencies and drums), the conflict at the core of terrified is not so easily resolved. The final song “Etna .” replaces Enzo’s bars with Victoria Davidoff’s uncanny attempt at a British accent, who warily considers:

“So here we are, a little older, a little wiser, and slightly embarrassed about the theatrics, but alive, which all things considered is not a bad outcome right?”

You wonder how self aware fakemink is of his own image, to invite both a muse and a creative director to collaborate with him so closely on an album that de facto ends up hiding its more thoughtful, introspective poetry behind her mystique. While hits scattered across the tracklist recall the swag the savant-level rapper bulldozed into the scene with, it feels like fakemink is asking himself questions he can’t answer as he takes a hubristic leap and, in the end, finds himself stuck mid-air.

Fashion is Alec Monopoly is Art

"Costume Art" is on view through January 10th, 2027.

Read her review of the Met Gala here, where she outlines that...

"I will review the costume institute show at face value, they got blood money and from what I can tell they used it to buy and display the best."

N.B.

—

On the second monday in may, I trekked to the upper east side, home to the most fabulous of art hoes of yesteryear (old angry wealthy ladies with puffy lips, hair teased high, and the tiniest frames being engulfed in Miyake’s Pleats Please) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose facade and grand steps just a week before had been transformed into the backdrop that makes up the internet-drenched playground that has morphed into the celebrity/corporate-ego-orgy known as the Met Gala. As it has done since 1947 (although once a humble affair), the 2026 gala (spectacle) was held to celebrate (ego-gorge) the opening of the Met Costume Institute’s May exhibition Costume Art: ‘fashion is art’.

So let’s get into it… First and foremost highlighting the importance of the discussion that is Costuming Art. It has formed the crux of many artists' practices and works over the decades, myself included. First grounded officially in language with Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes aka a Fashion History 101 textbook and also my own personal bible: my copy a tattered, dog-eared-to-oblivion old thing, replete with highlights and embarrassing notes left in the margins by a girl in her early 20’s. I was pleased and surprised to see it in the giftshop, here she is in all her glory:

For the first time ever, the show pulled from the museums’ 15 other departments, juxtaposing works dating back as far as 5000 BCE, using said works to prop up (metaphorically, the overworked conservators would never!) the clothing displayed, instead of the usual other way around.

I must admit, despite the promise of a face-value review, I was still donning my hater cap, a grey felted beret with oversized deco hat pin, upon my arrival. The show was oversized with goods — a gluttenous display of pockets so deep, you had not 1 or 2 but EIGHT examples of tattooed garments. I could not shake the knowledge that the Costume Institute had blood money, which they so fittingly used in the display of a whole section of blood-related garb entitled the ‘Vital Body,’ (love…) from the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos along with his wife Laura Sanchez Bezos, to make the exhibition possible with a donation of ten million dollars to the institute. This amount is the Bezos-equivalent of finding change in your pocket, just saying! Anyways, I guess it is a discussion we can’t count on fashion to fix– but I think if we are trying to make a show that hoists fashion out of the realm of the superficial – the exhibition establishing itself alongside a new wing of the met — it's a pretty damning start.

In case you have not had the privilege of diving into this nerdy ass textbook from the 70s, upon entering the main gallery, there is an automated speaker a la robotic voice overhead, announcing “PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE ART,” anytime a viewer got to close to something… which was every goddamn five seconds because it's so crowded in that place. So yes, Fashion is Art, and security agrees. Speaking of surveillance, the mannequins are 1984 chic; something about their presentation-height combined with the chopped off profiles replaced with mirrors, that gives you the eerie sense you are actually the one on display, and those mirrors are, in fact, two way (or two-faced?). What was the conceptual decision for these over-the-top mirror faces? A physical manifestation of the way we project our own societal ideals and ideas onto dress and the dressed body? Sure, but there are pages and pages of pretentious placard text throughout the exhibition that really hammers this idea into your skull for you. It felt gimmicky… and creepy within the framework of amazon money.

Sidenote– drinking game idea: go through the exhibit with your friends: take a shot every time you see the words: liminal, allegorical, abstraction, allegorical abstraction, transcultural, temporal, dialectic, transcend, externalize… leave obliterated. I mean, I loved the text sometimes, but it was a bit much– not to mention even my seasoned in fashion-theory-reading brain had a hard time consuming the word salads with a robot yelling in one ear while simultaneously bopping and weaving between the very thick crowd, this type of culture ingesting is not for the faint of heart (or potentially for the sober).

Vionnet, Adrian and Madame Gres-clad surveillance systems watching down on you plebs!!!!!

Ok ok I can continue to nitpick.. Or, I can show you my favorite parts. I adore and learn so much from looking at fashion through the context of art history; I was a child, and the proverbial candy in the store was archive Vionnet, Madame Gres, 19th century undergarment structures, Archival Mugler, Iranian Iron-age sculpture, a whole section dedicated to the Grecian Stance, 15th century italian temperas, 18th century anatomical drawings, Albrecht Durer, old school Yves Saint Laurant, Miyake, a TON of Undercover, Victorian Mourning mementos, Mcqueen, 4th century BCE Etruscan Armor, and a lot of each. The pockets were DEEP and the show was massive. Please regard some of my own personal highlights- details that made full use of the limitless possibilities Andrew Bolton had to work with; So, I cordially present…. moments that had me forgetting that I was a hater:

Female figurine kneading dough(?)
Cypriot
ca. 600–480 BCE

The section on the Grecian Bend, a by-product of the freaky late 19th century. The lithograph is fabulously juxtaposed with a grecian sculpture from ~500 BCE. There is an entire section on the grecian bend and bodily apparatuses that helped women achieve the booty-as-shelf aesthetic synonymous with this fashion period, hotness is fashion is circular!

This Louise Bourgois Drawing paired with a Marine Serre body suit, I don’t think Louise would have liked Marine Serre Body suits very much… but I do think they were starting to scratch at something here.

This ultra special boil-chic cotton muslin number from the early 19th century, god bless you all for letting this 1981 acquisition see the light of day!!!

Victorian hair mementos; Victorians were true freaks (Valerie Steele writes extensively on their horny weird freak-ness if you are interested), and one of many death-obsessed rituals that came out of this weird time/place are hair mementos. Missed opportunity to incorporate the Mcqueen line from the 90s where Lee incorporated locks of his own hair into the garments, BUT I love any opportunity to see these high drama mementos in real life.

Pairing Munch with fashion… I think Evard would have LOVED the Dress and Psychoanalysis show at the Museum at Fit last year, but I think knowing his work was propping up the fashion lords in the skull section at the Met Fashion exhibit would have the expressionist absolutely furious!!! Which I find charming.

Jacques Fabien Gautier Dagoty (French, 1716-1785)
Plate, from Joseph Guichard Duverney's Myologie Complette en Couleur et
Grandeur Naturelle, 1746

Andy Warhol's torso shot by Irving Penn juxtaposed with a dress by NY contemporary Susan Ciancolo. The scars from surgical sutures mimicking the hand-basted work done by the seasoned artist/designer was highbrow new york.

Wooden carved prosthetic limbs by Alexander Mcqueen

There were lots of beauties not making it into this image carousel- custom Michaela Stark, a plethora of contemporary designers, mannequins displaying underrepresented bodies in fashion, a section on the corpulent body educating one on fat theory- all great things saturating the internet if it's sparking your interest.

The Chopping Block

Ok time to put my hater hat (black cloche adorned with rooster feathers) back on, for just a couple things that I need to get off my Kamali-Clad chest.

Starting with the most literal chopped, how can you show a silhouette like this with a profile like that?? It was so close to being so good. The lack of a profile/face from this victorian dame is in an attention-argument with the shelf-like derriere synonymous with 19th-century dress and a focus point of the Seurat work. In my humble opinion, NOTHING should be distracting from the majestic booty-popping of the bustle.

I also wanted to share an interesting parallel of this display from a mere month ago at the Museum at FIT Art X Fashion show:

Although I do think the victorian dress the Met chose to parallel the painting was much more successful than the Museum at FIT’s, I am most likely hating on the Met’s display because, as my work was curated into the FIT’s show, I am biased and potentially jealous that the Met got a real study from Seurat, and we got an LED display. Alas.

This iconic Margiela tattoo top from 1989 had the CI using the term “liminal space” (drink) to describe the area of skin between arms and shoulders.

Nobody asked them to show Anselm Kiefer paired with Joseph Thimister’s collection addressing the lasting effects of WWI on modern society. You really want to go there? With a current war raging and genocide we are witnessing real time through our phones? To include this, almost as an afterthought, as an element/way to look at the mirror that fashion holds up to society, rips whatever it was you were trying to do right back down, in super-sonic speed, to the superficial realm. Maybe this mannequin's face was chopped after falling flat on it.

Typo alert– Quote from placard on this dark pairing: The disembodied female head emerging from the permafrost suggests a chthonic haunting, recasting the land as a vessel for historical indictment. Yikes.

The copious amounts of dust everywhere… The Costume Institute accomplishing dusty in every sense of the word

The Skims Section

The last room the exhibition ended on was the “Epidermal Body” aka the skims room. This room looked at fashion recontextualizing what the term or color “nude” represents- shifting away from a singular (and white) definition mainstream fashion has adopted for hundreds of years, to one that takes on the multifaceted meaning that it should, seen here for example with Louboutin's “Nude collection.” Also featured were different nude colorways of Telfar Bags. I thought it was extremely interesting to not include Skims, the entire room looking like it had been plucked from the brands’ instagram. I think the Skims brand holds enough cultural relevance in terms of what a contemporary interpretation of undergarmenting looks, the history of “second skin” being one that dates thousands of years, and Skims being the most prominent reflection of how we as a western society approach our once-unmentionables. Certainly not a tragic oversight, just an interesting one is all.

But, I will say, with the “Epidermal Body” room, they did end on a beautiful installation of Miyake’s brand, APOC (or A Piece Of Cloth), and this mid-17th century sketch, so it I was immediately distracted by said shiny object before being ejected back into the museum lobby.

Author Caspar Berthelsen Bartholin Danish
Editor Thomas Bartholin Danish
1651