Matt Gess’s Maiden Crimes 1 (2025) and Militia (2025) were shown at Récréations a show by Gnossienne Gallery alongside work by Nayan Patel, Sasha Miasnikova and Jordan Derrien. View the project on Instagram here.

*Maiden Otto*

There’s something that can only be brought out by being locked away: this is the tension that suspends Maiden Crimes. "It’s about yin and yang", said [legendary erotic photographer] Eric Kroll to Matt Gess, who had tracked him down to his kitchen table in Arizona. Balance is a notion that applies just as much to the climbing of chain-link fences as it does to the ecstasy of constrained compositions; these are all driving forces behind Gess's work.

Coming across a Maiden is a revelation that makes the word casting appear sanitised and crass. “You know what Eileen? I think [NAME] might be a Maiden…” We cock our heads, squint our eyes and pout our lips at each other, considering the idea like we just tasted something new. What’s your taste? Matt describes things like trespassing as ‘delicious’. Maidens are discovered, they walk out of the water of their past dripping with becoming; like every crime, they are unique. For example: Maiden Kirsten was sitting on the pavement of Kingsland road, “parked outside Greggs, lipstick defiant”, “she styled herself, quickly stuffing a circus flyer in her bra”. Charlie Osbourne emerged to Matt in another way: the theatricality of her rigid and heartfelt musical performances. These are subjects Matt observes from the anonymous position of an audience member or passerby- Maidens emerge having built their own kinds of stages: Kirsten with her pile of street cardboard, or Charlie at the ICA... Maiden is a project that poses seductively in the field of surveillance, anonymity and consent; no wonder Matt calls it a ‘license to voyeurism’.

*Maiden Kirsten*

His spare captions under his instagram posts are tantalisingly partial origin stories: “​​I saw Vivi working behind an Irish bar in Helsinki two hours before my flight back home. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my room and play dress-up.” Matt turns to me, “She works in KFC,” he says, breathlessly, “it’s perfect.”

And this is the key to understanding why the pictures have the effect that they do: it is a fetishistic approach to the details of living, of being, that makes Maiden Crimes the realest. The fetish is not the black patent heels, the velvet mask or the nipple cover; it’s not the leather glove, or the absence of a lower arm, it’s not the top of a flesh coloured stocking or the 1930s girdle, or any of the objects Matt plays with - it is none of these things in and of themselves. It’s the focus of an eye on a singular point, it is the tension of bodily concentration until one’s mind empties: not falling from the platforms; the explosion of a stepped-on grape; the expression of breath into an instrument and its contortion into sound, it is the narrowing in on a target until it is the right moment to squeeze the trigger… “you know when you shoot someone you say: I’m going to shoot this person. And it’s like what? With a camera or a gun? It’s the same thing.” This violent metaphor is appropriate for an artist whose alter ego Claudia Speed comes from the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto II.

*Matt Gess in the house of Eric Kroll*

Perhaps it is enough for now, to simply say that the fetish look invests objects with a magical coercive power over individual subjectivity. Matt’s work recognises the addictive determinism generated by Fetish. Careful arrangement of objects set in motion a sequence of events: female clothes on a male body creates certain life-situations. Cross-dressing in West Hollywood, Matt says, “I would find myself climbing over chain-link fences”. L.A plays itself, life seduces itself, one thing leads to another…

“When I was cross dressing and going to these strip clubs I’d literally be getting into these cars with these men and climbing these fences. It wasn’t always sexual. I love iron gates and what it represents of being locked away, and I think that kind of came from growing up in South Africa- the gated compounds with security and it was always just like quite fascinating and really beautiful because you’ve kind of got like these illuminated swimming pools and these big like chunky gates that have, like, electricity going through them.”

Apart from the strip clubs of Hollywood, there is another cinematic influence on the project. In his room in East London, Matt’s nameless Canary likes to perch on his stack of Alan Clarke DVDs. The Yorkshire-born director (1935-1990), whose later minimalist works on topics such as the miner’s strike, Road (1988); childhood heroin use, Christine (1987) and the Troubles in Ireland Elephant(1989) gave the violence of British Social Realist Cinema the Bressonian purity, precision and appeal of a finger dragged across skin, the sound of a dress being unzipped. The video of Osbourne in a prim buttercup-yellow dress spinning and playing her harmonica iconica, is a performance that would not have been amiss from the legendary party scene in Road. There is a clear fascination in Crimes not just with the acting in Clarke’s films, but the social-psychological aura emitted through the stripped-back nature of the sets. Their cheap plain kitchens and unplastered walls, like the pale, rail-thin bodies of Maidens, captivate in their austerity. There is a tension of set and character; history and choice: between the purple pub carpet and aubergine hair; neglected linoleum and patent heels, of weathered junkie skin against orange brick. Clarke’s protagonists and Matt’s Maidens are aesthetic creations that both tenderly embody and fiercely rebel against their surroundings.

We are in a borrowed mansion in Epping Forest, surrounded by chintz and framed photographs of an English family where the mothers wear pearls. Matt is preparing the room, where, in two hours’ time, he will shoot Maiden Rafe. Elusin’s song, silhouette, fills up with the room alongside the smoke machine- the shoegaze haze activates the power of the objects thrown on the bed: Mickey Mouse mask; Eric Stanton Book; black caged hoop skirt; patent heels size 10; a single white gym sock (photographer’s own). Ignoring the still life he had been arranging on the floor, Matt turns to the assemblage on the bed: “accidents are the whole point.” Whilst the shoots are planned carefully, there is a refreshing lack of career-calculation to Maiden Crimes, “I have to hide my phone after I post.” Matt tells me, “quite a few stylists have got in contact, which is nice of them, but a certain part of me is just like… fuck off?”.

This is why Matt’s photos stand out from the scroll; as we are inundated with digital pornography, the analogue fetish adventure endures…

Claire Buchanan expresses nostalgia for the world-building of the forgotten pixellated shoe brand United Nude.

Listen while you read: Miss Kittin & The Hacker - L'Homme dans l'Ombre

When I was ten years old, I had a babysitter named Shira-Rose. Shira-Rose was in her twenties and part of an improv dance troop. It was 2012. I idolised Shira-Rose in the way that any ten-year-old girl without a sister would idolise a cool babysitter. She was funny and intrepid and spoke to me like an adult, even if I was only ten. She also dressed like no one else I had met before. She wore a lot of neon spandex and what seemed like fifty-thick plexi bangles on one arm at all times. She cut up her t-shirts and tied them back together to make braided cutouts on the side. She wore stilettos to pick me up from the school bus.

Shira-Rose had one pair of heels that I remember distinctly: foamy-looking rubber wedges in bright apricot with a shiny white patent strap. They were the perfect shoe for a babysitter on the move: practical, otherworldly and simultaneously elementary - elementary in their colour scheme and silhouette. Years later, I was scouring the internet for a pair of heels and found Shira-Rose’s apricot pair staring back at me from the screen. I bought the same pair in grey, becoming obsessed, not only with the shoes, but with their strange maker: United Nude.

United Nude was founded in 2003 by Rem D Koolhaas (nephew of postmodern Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) and Galahad Clark, heir of the Clark’s shoe family. Their website contains a laughably aspirational blurb, citing heritage and architectural pretensions:

“As the brain-child of architecturally-trained designer Rem D. Koolhaas, the nephew and namesake of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, the brand is guided by an unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of footwear design. Each product is a reinterpretation of an architectural object - an exploration of the possibilities offered by movement, colors, and materials.”

In the noughties, United Nude shoes were made in bubblegum pinks, hazy, eggy yellows and electric blues. They had patent straps as shiny as new cars; clean matte leathers like a psychiatrist's sofa. Mylar, PVC, and soft rubbers constructed a feeling of minimalist space-age. Campaigns featured hazy silhouettes with illuminated, glowing feet. The shoes were by no means athletic but displayed some level of corpo-athleticism, the kind that occurs on the floor of a sleazy gallery like the one Marnie works at in Girls. United Nude collaborated with Iris Van Herpen, Zaha Hadid and Viktor & Rolf. In 2011, during Miami Art Basel, they opened their Miami store and ‘gallery’ where they showed photos and sculptural works alongside their shoes. The perfect shoe for an exceptional babysitter could also be a perfect shoe for the aimless dilettante: halfway between the art world, fashion week parties and her own self-delusion.

Iris Van Herpen x United Nude (Source: United Nude Spring Summer 2011 UNCover Publication)

Koolhaas’ Mobius Prototype (Source: United Nude)

United Nude released a line of shoes called ‘Eamz’ in 2011, named after the leather office chair Ray and Charles Eames designed in 1956. This series of shoes featured heels, boots and lace-ups with a protruding steel heel that imitated the base of the chair. The shoe's construction created an illusion of a foot suspended in mid-air, as if the wearer might exist in some zero-gravity space when she slips it on. The ‘Eamz’ shoe concerned itself structurally with negative space, balance and stability. While contemporary clothing design doesn’t necessarily need to respond to the same level of practical parameters, the shoe, as it holds up the foot and aims to keep the wearer balanced, must consider some small feat of engineered function. United Nude shoes were a moving structure, carrying the wearer through the city, from hot pavement to air-conditioned offices to trembling dance floors beside thronging, open bars.

The ‘Eamz’ Shoe (Image 1: eBay, Image 2: United Nude)

Situating themselves within the world of avant-garde design, United Nude also heavily co-opted the aesthetics of futurism, which was rampant following the millennium. The conceptual holo-screen, megapixel or the flash of a DSLR is realised in United Nude’s ‘Lo Res’ shoe. Inspired by early digital 3-D rendering systems that Koolhaas used at university when studying architecture, the shoe took on geometric surface like a glitchy disco ball. United Nude also designed a model for a Lamborghini using the same system, displayed in their flagship stores alongside the shoes. Techno-optimism was central to United Nude’s direction, reflecting a fantasy relevant at the time, that to most of us now feels painfully tired and charged. Actually, Koolhaas recently contributed to the prototype design of Tesla’s Cybertruck. As tech and automation industries become increasingly adjacent to rising fascist aims, garnering the same optimism for a future of technology no longer seems plausible.

The ‘Lo Res’ Shoe (Image 1&2: United Nude)

On Flickr, I found a lot of images of the store displays. At its peak, the brand had flagship stores in New York, London, Miami, Amsterdam and Shanghai. The lighting was akin to swanky downtown clubs, walls lined with shoes nestled into grid cubbies engulfed in glowing LED hues. The store wall concept was trademarked by United Nude in 2009 and called the Wall of Light™. The LEDs were programmed to oscillate with whatever song would be playing inside. One Reddit user described their shopping experience in the Bond Street store as “utterly overwhelming, nauseating and hypnotising… Ladytron was playing so loudly I couldn’t hear myself think.”

The Lamborghini Model, Lo Res Concept Car

Having never visited a United Nude store or any store with such an ambitious concept, I can only fantasise about what kind of feeling a shopping experience like this would have left me with. For those of us born either just before or after the millennium and interested in clothing and shoes of the past, the act of shopping is almost inseparable from another, sometimes arduous and definitely anonymous process of scrolling. Pixelated square images replace the windows of stores that were once designed for consumers to absorb a message, concept or feeling --then buy something. While the stated ambitions of United Nude, to stand as some convergence of architecture, design, fashion and technology are kind of goofy at best and fall ostentatiously flat at worst, this level of considered world-building around the marketing of one product and spatial concept is something that I wish we saw more of now.

By 2016, United Nude closed almost all of their storefronts. The only store left standing today is in Amsterdam. United Nude still makes shoes though much of the vibrancy and bubbliness has now been replaced with safer silhouettes and lackluster beiges. The futurisms of early United Nude, the frenzy around the potential of technology, where shopping in stores was still a default on the precipice of an internet that would become a constant presence in our pocket, have quickly been replaced by rightful skepticism, malaise and nostalgia for something
much older. But the shoes themselves remain, at least to me, as rubbery relics of a strange, playful mirage before the storm.