Catalogue Winter - Issue 8

catalogue $9.95 NZ $10.95 inc GST

MEGHAN COLLISON ALEXANDER McQUEEN CHARLES BUKOWSKI MACKENZIE DAVIS ANNA CHLUMSKY FRIDA KAHLO SYLVIA PLATH KATHLEEN HANNA SOFIA COPPOLA

Meghan Collison by Nick Hudson

ISSN 2200-8950

9 772200 895007

04

ALL OUR HEROES ARE

WEIRDOS

EDITOR’S LETTER

PHOTOGRAPH: JO DUCK

W

riter Chuck Klosterman is to the 21st century what Lester Bangs (immortalised as a jaded, drug dependent music journalist by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous) was to the ‘70s: a dorky, unattractive outsider who – through a singular creative focus – became influential, and then totally fucking cool.

Klosterman’s New York Times’ best-selling book Sex, Drugs And Cocoa Puffs is full of ranting, persuasive essays in which he absolutely convinces you that outsider creative types (much like himself) profoundly influence society. He argues that Tom Cruise’s “awe-inspiring, shattered, troll-like face” in Vanilla Sky answers some of the most important existential questions (like, what is reality?). He argues that John Cusack and Coldplay’s construction of “fake love” ruined his – and everybody else’s – chances of being content with real love. They’re whacky arguments, but despite their whackiness they’re utterly true. He’s the voice of, if not today’s generation, then certainly tomorrow’s (just like Lena Dunham in season one of Girls, I can totally imagine Klosterman – high on prescription medication – wailing: “I’m the voice of my generation, or at least of a generation!”).

That’s just it: our collective creativity progresses because of people who are whacky enough to be living like it’s tomorrow today. Sometimes tomorrow is similar, and these weirdos are appreciated during their lifetime. Sometimes it seems like they’re from another fucking planet before their work is considered “normal”. Well, to hell with normal: in this issue of Catalogue our contributors celebrate their favourite outsiders! For our cover story, our fashion director Elle Packham and photographer Nick Hudson collaborated with model (but so many other things, too) Meghan Collison to evoke her heroine, Jane Birkin (actress, singer, style icon, inspiration for famous handbags – the original slashie, really). Elle also headed into rural Australia with photographer Jo Duck to find an appropriately (very, very, very) creepy setting to re-imagine the Source Family cult, who were certainly outsiders, just not in the progressive way everyone else in this issue is (unless your idea of progressive is hang-gliding off a mountain when you’ve never hand-glided before, which is exactly how Source cult leader “Father Yod” died).

Fiona Duncan discusses computer tech warfare with Mackenzie Davis, star of new AMC show Halt and Catch Fire and asks My Girl star Anna Chlumsky about working on what could be the weirdest (and smartest) comedy on television: Veep. Our contributors (who are our heroes of today and tomorrow) make dedications to their favourite weirdos, too. Sarah Nicole Prickett, founder and editor of Adult magazine, writes a moving (seriously, I cried got chills) piece about Sylvia Plath, Triple J host and extensive Tweeter Max Lavergne espouses on Jarvis Cocker’s wordsmithery, and Hannah Cooke celebrates Frida Kahlo’s subversiveness. Dominic Corry argues that, whether in Taxi Driver, Pretty In Pink or Reality Bites, film has always rooted for the weirdo, while I pay homage to my feminist – and therefore outsider – heroines: Virginia Woolf, Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna and Tavi Gevinson.

So come over to the weird side with us for the next 150-odd pages: your weirdness today might just be the next big thing tomorrow.

Courtney Sanders

catalogue CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Steve Bush Markell Hughes

EDITOR

Courtney Sanders

FASHION DIRECTOR

Elle Packham

EDITORIAL CO-ORDINATOR Jillian Tasker

1 MAX LAVERGNE WRITER My ultimate outsider hero would haaaaaave to be Korean rapper Outsider’s song Hero for lyrics like: “Set dul hana deo keuge oechyeo” which smash every expectation about rap lyrics... or at least the expectation about rap lyrics that they be in English! Inspiring!

2 BETH HOECKEL ILLUSTRATOR My outsider hero is Patti Smith and all other influential female artists who carved out a niche for themselves from nothing and didn’t compromise.

3 MARI DAVID STYLIST My outsider hero is Lisbeth Salander.

BOOKS EDITOR Melissa Ellis

CONTRIBUTORS David James Maria Clara Tripier Jody Rogac Elle Packham Matin Rebekah Forecast Shibon Kennedy Bobby Whigham Fiona Duncan Greg Griner at Next Claudia Lake Pooneh Ghana Jo Duck Clare Thomson Rachel Colless Bec Parsons Bart Celestino Victoria Barron Peter Lennon Gadir Rajab Dale Delaporte Molly Oakfield Carly Scott Amy Drammeh Masato Inoue Vicki King Francesca Pinna Akari Sugino Satomi Suzuki

WHO IS YOUR OUTSIDER HERO?

Zachary Handley Mari David Shuko Shimada Damian Garozzo Catarina Ravagli Kevin Lavallade Bryan Monaco Coline Peyrot Prune Le Page Beth Hoeckel Oliver Rose Koh Peter Beard Daniel McMahon Rachel Rutt Dominic Corry Gemma Rasmussen Hannah Cooke Sarah-Nicole Prickett Meghan Collison Nick Hudson Taichi Saito Christine Cherbonnier Dean Podmore Billy Yuan Dale Delaporte Daniel Knott Jaclyn Hnitko Elsie Stone

4 RACHEL RUTT MODEL The Oms of Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. They seemed really scary and aggressive but just needed to be shown kindness for harmony and peace to ensue.

5 CHARLIE BROPHY PHOTOGRAPHER My outsider hero is Pippi Longstocking because she can clean bubbles with brushes on her feet, survive a shipwreck, always be optimistic... and she has a pet monkey. Living the dream!

6 JODY ROGAC PHOTOGRAPHER My outsider hero is Jane Goodall. She is Just. So. Cool. And she’s my #1 dream portrait subject.

7 GEMMA RASMUSSEN WRITER My outsider hero is my Mum. As woman in 1970s rural India she dared to drive a car, get her degree, refuse an arranged marriage and marry a foreigner. She did it all with such unashamed grace and charm, even though her actions firmly placed her outside of her community.

8 MATIN MAKEUP ARTIST My outsider heroes are my sisters, especially Mina Amiri. She is/has always been fiercely avant-garde and independent. In Afghanistan in the ‘70s she would cross dress in Beatles-style suits and haircuts in order to get into places only men could go. After that she entered the Afghanistan beauty pageant and was crowned Miss Congeniality.

9 BEC PARSONS PHOTOGRAPHER David Bowie for his reinventions. x 10 HANNAH COOKE WRITER My outsider hero is Harriet M. Welsh – child spy, friend, complete weirdo.

She spoke her mind, insulted her friends, stymied her shrink, spied on her neighbours and went from grade-school voyeur to social outcast to editor of the class newspaper all in one book.

COVER Photographer NICK HUDSON at 1+1 Mgmt/Stylist and Model MEGHAN COLLISON at NEXT/ Creative Director ELLE PACKHAM/Hair TAICHI SAITO/Makeup CHRISTINE CHERBONNIER at Art Department Photographer’s Assistants DEAN PODMORE, BILLY YUAN

11 RACHEL COLLESS FASHION ASSISTANT My outsider hero is Marilyn Manson. He’s a strange character who never tries to justify himself for being himself, he’s super intelligent and creatively fantastic.

CONTRIBUTORS

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2

3

4

7

6

5

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10 9 11

PEOPLE

8 MACKENZIE DAVIS 18 MARIA CLARA TRIPIER 20 FUTURE DEATH 22 ANMARI BOTHA 24 ANNA CHLUMSKY 30 MARY ELLEN MARK 32 EMA

FASHION

34 TRENDING by Elle Packham and Jo Duck 52 NEW YORK LABEL WATCH by Bobby Whigham and Shibon Kennedy 54 SYDNEY LABEL WATCH by Elle Packham and Gadir Rajab 56 LONDON LABEL WATCH by Francesca Pinna and Vicki King 58 PARIS LABEL WATCH by Mari David and Zachary Handley 68 CAMILLA & MARC by Oliver Rose, Beth Hoeckel and Elle Packham 74 TOME by Daniel McMahon 80 THIS IS THE UNIFORM by Maria Clara Tripier and Carly Scott

ALL OUR HEROES ARE WEIRDOS

88 REBEL GIRLS

Courtney Sanders pays homage to her feminist heroines

92 OUR HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WEIRDOS Dominic Corry celebrates the role of the outsider in film

94 THE STREETS ARE FOR EVERYONE The art of photographer Cheryl Dunn

100 KATHLEEN HANNA

by Courtney Sanders

102 CHARLES BUKOWSKI

by Gemma Rasmussen

104 SOFIA COPPOLA

by Camilla Macaulay

106 JARVIS COCKER

by Max Lavergne

108 FRIDA KAHLO

by Hannah Cooke

112 ALEXANDER McQUEEN

by Chip Lambert

114 SYLVIA PLATH

by Sarah Nicole Prickett

116 MEGHAN COLLISON The New York-based model as her heroine, Jane Birkin

128 THE AQUARIANS The Source Family cult reimagined by Elle Packham and Jo Duck CATALOGUE 123 Reservoir Street Surry Hills NSW 2010 Australia cataloguemagazine.com.au info@cataloguemagazine.com.au Distributed by Gordon and Gotch Australia AU 1300 650 666 NZ (09) 928 4200 Catalogue is published four times a year by B5 Media Pty Ltd Š B5 Media Pty Ltd 2014. All rights reserved.

The contents of this magazine, including stories, photographs and artwork, are strictly not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the publisher, B5 Media. The advertisers and suppliers of editorial information and photographs warrant that any material published in Catalogue is in no way an infringement of the Copyright Act or other such acts, is not unlawful, defamatory or libelous or does not infringe the Trade Practices Act or other regulations, laws or statutes. Advertisers and suppliers agree to indemnify B5 Media against any claims, damages or costs including legal expenses, penalties or judgments occasioned to the publisher in consequence of any breach of the above warranties. All information and prices are correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of print.

Printed by Offset Alpine Printing 42 Boorea Street, Lidcombe NSW 2141 under ISO14001 Environmental Certification.

PHOTOGRAPH: BOBBY WHIGHAM

CONTENTS

PEOPLE

MACKENZIE DAVIS After a string of supporting roles in independent films, Canadian native Mackenzie Davis is about to step into the limelight (albeit the incredibly unflattering fluorescent light favoured by corporate offices in the ‘80s). She plays a punk computer programmer in AMC’s new series Halt and Catch Fire, which is being heralded as the “new Mad Men”.

Writer

Photographer

Stylist

FIONA DUNCAN

BOBBY WHIGHAM

SHIBON KENNEDY

M

ackenzie Davis’ bleach job is uneven. The top of her boyish mop is platinum, but the short brush along her nape is brassy – it’s the piss-on-snow yellow of bleach not set long enough, a mistake no professional colourist would make. Unless it’s deliberate: it is.

This hair – hair Davis has been wearing for six months now – belongs to Cameron Howe, the punk programming prodigy (a do-it-yourself, “don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation” kinda girl) Davis plays on AMC’s latest original series, Halt and Catch Fire.

Halt and Catch Fire is a fictional period drama about early computing culture set in 1983, roughly one year after IBM released its first major product – the IBM PC. The show, which Mackenzie explains “has little pieces of a lot of people, but is in no way emblematic of any one life or history”, follows a team of three – executive Joe McMillan (Lee Pace), engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and hacker

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Richard Chai Love jacket, Richard Chai Love turtleneck

Catalogue 85

The Flamethrowers. There’s Cameron Howe – as they an affinity between those two race to create a product that novels and Halt and Catch will get them into the Fire. All are 20th century burgeoning PC market. In the historical dramas featuring opening scenes of the pilot, radical politics and strong the somewhat swarmy female leads: Telex tells of an McMillan, scouting for talent at American expat community in Austin Tech, ends up sleeping Carven coat, Eugenia Kim leather headband, APC jeans, Cuba in the years (1958-59) with the rakish Howe in the Marissa Webb tube top leading up to Castro’s back storage room of a video revolution; The Flamethrowers is the coming-of-art story of game arcade. a 20-something girl traveling through the Salt Flats of Utah, “There’s a lot of sex on the show,” says Davis. But the sex, the conceptual art scene of New York and the “Years of Lead” she insists, is neither gratuitous nor exploitative; rather, it’s protests of Italy in the mid-1970s; while Halt and Catch Fire essential to the plot: “This is sex as power play or sex as a captures the idealistic and anarchic dawn of the Internet key to unlock one’s creative potential”. Even coding is sexy culture as it manifests in Texas’s “Silicon Prairie” circa 1983. on the show, according to the actor: “There’s this eroticism For her role on the show, Davis delved deep into this that you get when you’re really close to cracking something history. “I researched early hackers like phone phreakers, that mentally turns you on,” she says. “It’s an excitement that who’d create blue boxes and hack into AT&T phone lines and comes from within, a sensational creativity, and that’s in the make long distance calls. They’d run these offline systems show: there are scenes where it’s like the characters are where they could have up to 18-way calls on another grid having a ménage à trois with computers as the third party.” that wasn’t immediately detected by AT&T. Captain Crunch In developing the character of Cameron, Mackenzie was the name of one early phone phreaker. He had the same focused on the erotics of hacking as she found the math and sort of egalitarian access to information ethos that motivates science to be beyond her. “I audited an introductory MIT my character, Cameron.” class on the programming language Python and my mind just Davis also did a lot of research into women in the tech doesn’t operate that way. I have so much respect for those industry. She wanted to understand the roles that were that do.” “carved out for women and the roles they needed to carve Mackenzie’s mind is bent more towards art and literature. out for themselves from the 1960s to the ‘80s, ‘90s and Before pursuing acting, the Canadian stunner (she was born onwards”. She was baffled when she learned that there were in 1987 in Vancouver, BC) studied English Literature at more women pursuing careers in programming and computer McGill University in Montreal. On the day that I met her, at a science in 1983 than there are now. “It’s such a male restaurant in Brooklyn (she was in town for 24 hours to sign dominated industry still,” bemoans Mackenzie. Within this an apartment lease and visit “best friends”), Mackenzie was masculine sphere, Mackenzie says Cameron Howe is a great reading Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba which she’d feminist role model. “My character neither asks permission picked up after reading Kushner’s second, bestselling novel,

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Sonia Rykiel stole, Ports 1961 tee

Kaelen faux fur collar mohair jacket

Carolina Amato opera gloves, Scosha rings, Ports 1961 tee, MAWI chokers

Marc Jacobs jacket, Levi's Made & Crafted jeans

nor accepts it when it is exploring Internet and startup handed to her,” she says. culture. There’s HBO’s new “Cameron believes so fiercely original series Silicon Valley, in the power of her ideas and which debuted two months in her abilities that her being before Halt and Catch Fire, looked down upon because Andrew Bujalski’s 1980-set she’s young or a woman never 2013 Sundance hit Computer clouds her thoughts. She Chess, Dave Eggers’ GoogleEllery coat, Ports 1961 Dress, Karen Walker sunglasses doesn’t allow her male dystopian novel The Circle, superiors to tell her what’s what.” the Jobs biopic (2013) starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Feminism is important to Mackenzie. Though she studied Jobs, and, of course, David Fincher’s The Social Network. some in school, her most formative feminist education has These very recent histories tell us as much about where come from being online. Davis follows a number of feminist we’ve come from as they reveal our anxieties about where critics on Twitter, including Ayesha Siddiqi – aka @ we are going. pushinghoops – an editor at the online-only publications Halt and Catch Fire captures its time – Star Wars: Buzzfeed and The New Inquiry. Mackenzie says of Siddiqi: Return of the Jedi is visible on the banquet of a local “She has made me a believer: she’s smart, funny and has a theatre, the cubicles are fresh out of the factory, and young very clear point of view on race, feminism, and media. Her Cameron is styled like a cross between Annie Lennox (the words wake me up”.

Eurythmic’s Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) topped the Thanks to tools like Twitter and users like Siddiqi, charts in 1983), The Clash (Rock the Casbah – another ‘83 Mackenzie says she’s “never felt more educated, like I’ve chart-topper) and Pris, the acrobatic replicant played by never had so many tentacles out in the world”. Still, Daryl Hannah (with whom Mackenzie bears more than a Mackenzie recognizes that the Internet we know now is a far passing resemblance) in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult film Blade cry from the utopian community its innovators, like those Runner. The anxieties and conflicts of the show, though, are Cameron and her colleagues are based on, wanted it to be. very now, and personally felt by Mackenzie Davis. The big “People creating computers in the early days of the Internet question, which Davis struggles with in pursuing acting had this sense that they were creating an ultimately good within Hollywood and its adjacent arenas, is how can one contribution to the world, a product imagined – in that create change and maintain creative freedom when there’s young, idealistic, Liberal Arts mindset – as one that could a ruling supersystem checking you along the way? One change minds and bring people together.” If Cameron were a solution comes by way of Cameron Howe: “She’s an real person alive today, Mackenzie says she could see her anarchist, at least intellectually,” says Mackenzie, admiringly. getting involved in the hacker collective Anonymous: “She doesn’t buck the system and order entirely, but “Something to counteract the evil – the surveillance, the data her way of operating in the world is much like how she mining – that she has wrought”. interacts with a computer: she’s tweaking and improving Halt and Catch Fire is one of a series of new media from within.”

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Rxmance tee, Richard Chai Love pants, PLUMA bracelet (pluma-italia.com)

Ellery coat, Ports 1961 dress

MARIA CLARA TRIPIER T Maria Clara Tripier is a creative polymath who splits her time between styling (for the likes of Catalogue magazine) and curating her beautiful online publication Nou magazine.

he adage that video killed the radio star is outdated today. Television may have temporary disabled radio but now the Internet allows stations to broadcast their dulcet tones to fans worldwide: I’m listening to my favourite New Zealand station while at work in Sydney, and on my way to work I streamed Slate’s Culture Gabfest Podcast. Similarly, while the Internet has created panic within the print industry, strong publications have commandeered the medium to strengthen their content for (and connection with) their readers, and have thrived in their own highly competitive, niche environment. Speaking of the competition, enter NOU, a London-based, digital magazine edited by Catalogue contributor Maria Clara Tripier, in which she collates her favourite contributors and commissions work by them for NOU, in order to create a unique, digital world.

When and why did you start NOU Magazine?

It’s a funny story. I was in Milan studying fashion design back in 2012, and was sitting by a river drinking a bottle of wine with my friend Sofia Hernandez. We discussed our love for new talent and fresh aesthetics, and decided to create our own platform and vision. We started building up NOU and it’s taken a while to shape because we don’t know a thing about websites or magazine publishing. But we’ve been learning everything step-by-step, and we re-launched the site in March 2013. It’s been a great ride!

How would you describe NOU Magazine?

It’s fresh, young and raw, and finds the ordinary extraordinary. We don’t like stereotypical standards of beauty; we’re trying to dig a little deeper.

You’re curating new talent from around the world. Is there any common thread that you’ve noticed in your contributors’ work: a “creative subconscious” so to speak?

I think the common denominator is that everyone who does something for us shares, or would like to share, the aesthetic

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we’ve developed. They like the “freshness” of NOU and want to create ground-breaking work.

What are the benefits of an online publication to you?

Online publications are easier: you can upload as much content as you want, however you want, and it’s immediate.

It also gives people the opportunity to get published when they’re perhaps not ready to be published in a print publication.

What do you still love about print publications?

I love everything about print – I go nuts for it and collect as much as I can. There’s nothing that feels better than holding on to a beautiful print magazine and flipping through it: the photographs, typefaces, layouts – the whole ensemble. I wouldn’t trade it for anything! There’s a place for both print and online, though – they’re both as important as each other. If a magazine can work well across both mediums, they’ve reached an equilibrium, right?

Do you have any grand future plans for NOU Magazine?

Well, I wouldn’t want to jinx anything! If all goes well, we’ll turn it into a bi-annual coffee table magazine. It’s going to take time, work and patience. But, most importantly, taking every day as it comes...

You’re a stylist and writer yourself. What do you enjoy about each medium?

It feels good to be able to express your ideas visually and in words! With styling, I enjoy the fact that any idea I have in my head can come to life. Writing is a challenge – it’s really surprising how much work there is behind a written piece or an interview, there’s so much to think about when relating, in words, to your audience. I think both things go hand by hand and are important for a creative publication.

What fashion labels are you keeping an eye on at the moment?

We recently bumped into this great brand from spain Yuppie YPS! Their progressive approach goes beyond fashion!

London-based label Vidur is also great. I’m very into their unconventional silhouettes, and really feeling menswear right now!

PEOPLE

Catalogue 19

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PEOPLE

FUTURE DEATH Austin noise band Future Death have just released their debut solo album Special Victim, which they recorded in a repurposed funeral parlour – an environment that apparently set the tone for this spontaneous, schizophrenic trip.

I

just scat over the melody to begin with, so it sounds like nonsense in demos,” says Future Death frontwoman Angie Kang. It’s not the most endearing explanation of a singer’s lyrical process – maybe because scat is a terrifying word, for multiple reasons. However the songs on Special Victim, the band’s debut album, are so violently quick and technical, one actually wonders how Kang can turn said scatting into anything at all comprehensible. Via a Skype session from drummer Alton Jenkins’ Austin flat, Kang and core songwriters Jenkins and guitarist Bill Kenny explain that the point of Future Death is to capture the intensity of spontaneity, and that they believe they did so – with a little help from their friends and a funeral parlour...

Hey, Alton. Hey, Bill! How did you guys get together?

ALTON JENKINS: A couple of years ago I was at a buddy’s house, drumming. My friend videoed it and it made its way onto YouTube and ended up with my friend Scott, who is also a musician in Austin and plays in a band called Boyfriend. He’s friends with Bill [Kenny], and Scott knew that I was looking to play music with someone and he knew that Bill was a really bad-ass guitar player. So Bill saw the video and got in contact, and we got started a week later.

What kind of music did you both want to create, when you started?

ALTON: Bill and I have both been playing in bands since we were teenagers, and at this point we just want to create something that hones into what we really want creatively. I’ve played in a couple of bands where I wasn’t satisfied. We have no desire to impress anyone or be anything. I just wanted to make something that was totally real and emotional, and luckily

we were able to connect on those points.

Were there any references that the two of you shared when you started?

ALTON: Honestly, for the first few months that Bill and I started playing music we didn’t really talk to each other much: I would go to his house and we would say hello and then we would go straight into the room and start writing.

But we do both love artists like Zach Hill – he’s the drummer from this band called Death Grips. The Flaming Lips are a big influence because we love people who are trying to push things. I personally love Conan Mockasin from New Zealand – he’s awesome. Ah... our singer Angie has just arrived!

Cool! So this is a good time to ask how going from a two piece to a four piece affected your sound?

ALTON: Yeah. Bill and I were doing our thing – we’d tried out a few bass players and this guy Jeremy [Humphries], who I’d known a few years before, had just moved back to Austin and he was interested, so we taught him the songs.

We were nervous that we weren’t going to be able to find a singer who was going to be brave enough to try to sing over such angry, fast music. We weren’t very optimistic but we made a few Craigslist posts and Angie popped up. She just happened to be this total gem who we just vibed with straight off the bat.

Angie, what was it like coming into this group of dudes?

ANGIE: I was looking for a specific kind of punk project so I was totally ready to immerse myself into something that was super aggressive, and they matched the aggression that I was looking for.

Is Special Victim the first thing that the four of you have worked on together?

ALTON: Yeah. Bill and I decided to keep doing what has worked in the past so we came up with the infrastructure of the song and then bring Jeremy in, and

then Angie takes whatever chaos and mess is there and makes it work. She’s really able to find melodies that mesh so well with what we’re doing – we don’t know where it comes from but it’s such a good fit.

You recorded Special Victim in a funeral parlour-cum-recording studio owned by John Congleton, right?

FUTURE DEATH: Ha ha…

Is that the question every journalist has asked you since it was written on your press release?

ALTON: Ha ha, yeah. Some buddies of mine play in This Will Destroy You. Their drummer works in a studio called Elmwood in Dallas, owned by John Congleton. Before it was a studio it was a funeral home, and the vibe there is definitely kind of weird but it seemed to fit our approach.

ANGIE: It was really comfortable, actually. And it doesn’t look like a funeral home because, well, it’s in Dallas.

Capturing spontaneity is an important part of your approach, right?

ALTON: Yeah, definitely. There are moments when we’re playing music and we’re just in this natural zone where we’re not forcing anything or trying to portray anything, but something great happens naturally.

Is there a strong, like-minded community of musicians in Austin?

ALTON: You know, there’s a lot going on in Austin, there are a lot of bands here.

I can’t say everyone would agree with this, but I think there’s a nice community of musicians who are making really forward music.

ANGIE: Austin lacks the hater vibe.

Alton: Yeah, totally. There’s genuine interest here. I’m from Houston and you work 1000 times harder and get significant less results there. There’s a genuine interest in something that’s fucking weird here.

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PEOPLE

ANMARI BOTHA

T

he first time I worked with Anmari Botha was in a graveyard, notorious for being occupied by junkies and the homeless.

During the second time, she fell off the back of a white stallion and landed on her head: we thought we had killed her. Neither of these experiences were particularly glamorous, but Anmari behaved like an absolute champ and bounced back from the latter because those inexplicably long, toned limbs of hers are due, in part, to her experience as a horse rider.

Her limbs and personality combined – The Full Package, so to speak – have seen her rise to the top of the fashion ranks this past season. She’s been favoured by the likes of Carine Roitfeld (for her fashion book, CR) and Dior, featured in countless magazines including Numero and Stonefox, and walked for Haider Ackermann and Jean Paul Gaultier among countless others. I caught up with Anmari recently – and several years on from those initial encounters – to get an insight into her now, actually quite glamorous New York City lifestyle.

How were you scouted?

While I was horseback riding in New Zealand – Peter from RED Eleven noticed my potential. I started modeling during my last year of school because I wanted to wait until the time was right, and I haven’t looked back since!

What do you dig about modelling?

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Constantly meeting new people and travelling.

What have been recent career highlights for you?

I got to walk in some amazing shows this past season, including [haute couture] Y3Mens, Dior, VERSACE, ARMANI, Margiela, Gaultier, [readyto-wear] Hervé Léger, J Mendel, Jason Wu, Marchesa, Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, Haider Ackermann, Jean Paul Gaultier... and heaps more.

You’re now based in New York: what do you like about the fashion scene there? What’s the daily grind like?

And how does it feel to be a New Zealander in the Big Apple?

New York is a bizarre city to live in when it comes to fashion because it’s

very unpredictable. Some weeks I may be working every day and others hardly at all. I have to be prepared for anything, including spontaneous flights to other countries. It’s impossible to tell someone my daily routine because it’s always changing. Mind you, I can say that every morning I wake up an hour earlier than my roommates and make coffee and lie in bed reading.

If you weren’t modelling you would be: In a fine arts institute Right now you are: Answering these questions while sitting in my favourite cafe in Brooklyn, sipping on coffee and about to play chess with a friend.

Listening to: Warpaint’s new album.

Reading: If Minds Had Toes by Lucy Eyre.

Watching: Documentaries.

Travelling to: Hong Kong next week for a Dior Couture show.

What’s the best thing about getting back to New Zealand?

Being a kid again with my brother, and having parents to consult whenever I need to. Oh, and going to the beach whenever I want!

PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID JAMES

Anmari Botha has gone from falling off the back of a horse on set in rural New Zealand to walking for Saint Laurent and Haider Ackermann and working with Carine Roitfeld.

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ASOS dress

PEOPLE

ANNA CHLUMSKY

HBO’s Veep is the weirdest, cleverest comedy on television today (with a stack of awards to prove it). Enter Anna Chlumsky, best known for My Girl, who was cast as Chief of Staff to Julia Louise Dreyfus’s Vice President after playing a similar character in the 2009 movie In the Loop. The third season of the show is airing now, so we caught up with Anna in New York to find out what it feels like to shed My Girl in favour of something that is – like Veep’s representation of Washington and the futile nature of politics – really honest.

A

Writer

Photographer

Stylist

FIONA DUNCAN

JODY ROGAC

ELLE PACKHAM

nna Chlumsky is punchy. Funny. Zippy. Like, you can imagine her singing Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah on a sunny morning. Musical theatrical. She makes faces. Puts on voices. Is cute. No, adorable. She is, in her everyday performance of self (or the one she performed for me), the opposite of Amy Brookheimer, her character on Veep. Amy Brookheimer, chief of staff to Vice President (and, this season, bidding Presidential candidate) Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is stiff-jawed and stiffer-shouldered. Selfdescribed as Selina’s “troubleshooter, problem-solver, issuemediator, doubt-remover, conscience-examiner, thoughtthinker and all-round everythingdoer”, Amy does not relax much.

“She doesn’t let her impulses out as much as I do,” explains Chlumsky, making a series of kooky facial adjustments: a head-shake, an eye-bulge, a wide, Anna in My Girl. gummy smile. Amy “holds it all in”. Anna’s played Amy for three years now and she says that her character’s mannerisms are so rigid that she has to get regular massages and do vocal exercises to avoid getting stuck in Amy’s stiff mold.

“She’s the type of character who really likes her methods,” says Chlumsky. “That’s why we made the character choice that Amy never changes her hair.” On day one of filming, Chlumsky and the show’s stylist decided that Amy would always have a perfect blowout. “No matter what, Amy’s going to blow her hair out,” Chlumsky says with a laugh. (Her own hair is pulled back in a nonchalant bouffant.) “Every morning she’s going to blow that fucking hair out. She’s going to spin

class and she’s going to Blow Her Hair Out.” Perhaps because they are so different, Chlumsky keeps a notebook on set filled with Amy-isms for times when she needs to snap into character quickly. In that book are notes like speed chess. “Amy’s a game player,” Chlumsky says. “And her game is speed chess. She’s quieter about her machinations than some of the other characters, but she’s a very young Chief of Staff and she’s gotten there for a reason.

I think the thing she’s addicted to is winning. She’s competitive as shit and she’s more interested in politics than she is in government. She doesn’t care about governing a populus, she cares about winning a game.”

This is perhaps the starkest difference between Amy Brookheimer and Anna Chlumsky.

Anna is the type of creative who works for means, not ends. It’s the process – the working with peers and connecting with audiences – that gets her going.

As Amy Brookheimer in Veep.

The process is what brought her back to acting after a near decade-long hiatus.

“As a kid, it was always about getting it right, getting the adults to like you,” the once upon an early-’90s child star confesses. “But as an adult you learn that much of the best acting is in the accidents.” Anna came to this realisation when she was in her 20s and living in Manhattan. She had paused on acting in 1999 to study internal relations at the University of Chicago. After graduating she moved to New York where she worked as a fact checker at Zagat and then as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins. During this period she was attending a lot of theatre and cinema. “It dawned on me then that acting is about communicating someone’s text to an

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By Johnny dress

Scanlan and Theodore dress

audience. I was so inspired by that I thought I have to give this a try again, but for all the right reasons.” And so Anna enrolled in the Atlantic Acting School in Manhattan to brush up on her craft. She started auditioning again, acting in a number of bit roles. In 2009, she starred in director Armando Iannucci’s political comedy In The Loop. Three years later Iannucci cast her in Veep.

Veep is a show that rollicks with process. There’s an exuberance to the performances that comes from a cast who loves what they do, which is hanging out with one another.

“We’re all honest, game, generous actors,” says Anna. “That’s why Arman hired us. We like to collaborate, and we like to have fun.” Anna suspects as much laughter goes into the making as into the viewing. “Laughter is our litmus test: if we’re having fun while we’re doing it, that’s going to make for a good show.”

The show is heavily scripted (the writers are, like Chlumsky, “brilliant and tireless”), but that still leaves room for physical improvisation. The fly-on-the-wall feel of the show comes from the actors’ back and forth bantering with the script material. “It’s fast paced,” says Anna earnestly. “We get into this frenzied band – it almost feels like The Fellowship of the Rings. We’re in, like, this fellowship of comedy: we all come from such different comedic backgrounds and we’re all banded together on this journey to get to the end of the season. Ha! I won’t take the analogy any further...”

One of Anna’s mantras is: “Acting is the art of surprise”. She sees acting as an extension or amplification of human interaction. “Every conversation we have in life, we don’t know it’s going to happen. That’s what humanity is.” As an actor, Anna says, your craft is learning to live in the unknown, in surprise: “Acting is the allowance to have flaws and that to still be truth. That’s the juice, man!”

Chlumsky’s extreme positivity is of a tone I recognise as coming from someone who’s familiar with its opposite: she’s wielding a willful positivity. Because, like Amy Brookheimer, Anna’s no fool and doesn’t “suffer fools easily” (her words).

She’s smart, cynical and “very into” what she calls “Big Talk”.

Big Talk being, I gathered from her usage, the discussion of ideas. “I’ll get right in there right away,” she says. “Let’s go!

Tell me about your mother trouble. Let’s talk politics.”

In college, Anna claims she was very into talking about politics because that’s what she thought smart people talked about. As the years progressed she became increasingly disenchanted with the way her American peers would adopt politics as a religion or favourite sport: “People will fight you tooth and nail over something, and it won’t be debate anymore,” she says. “Our political spectrum is so narrow. Our parties are all the same. To pit one against the other: gang warfare is what I call it. And I’m not interested in gang warfare.”

Working on Veep has confirmed Anna’s suspicions about

American politics, which is “that it doesn’t matter”. The characters on Veep are an assembly of narcissists, sycophants and power mongers dashed with the occasionally salty altruist. The comedy of the show comes from watching self-interested people cheat and trade for their own interests; it’s all empty promises and backdoor deals. “Veep is great because finally someone is showing that our political world is full of flawed individuals, some of whom are good at their jobs, some of whom are bad; some of whom are there with good intentions, some bad. There’s no reason why DC and the Beltway should be immune to the human flaws that the rest of us are.”

Chlumsky uses “being human” as an explanation for both individual’s flaws and strengths. “We’re all human” she says a few times within our hour-long chat. Regarding Armando Iannucci’s strong female characters, she points to the “humanism” in his feminism: “He’s the ultimate feminist in that he knows that we’ve all got brains and they’re all the same size.”

One can imagine that a former child star – an icon, really – would have had to grapple with simply “being human” in a way someone like myself, who grew up in a chill Canadian city, did not. Anna Chlumsky is still best known for her role as the precocious Vada Sultenfuss in My Girl. That movie came out in 1991 (Anna was 11 years old) and, over two decades later, she continues to be stopped on the street for it.

Chlumsky looks like a child star, which is to say that those of us who knew her as a child look at her forever with that child in mind. We measure her current looks against those of that iconic young girl. Eyes to eyes, lips to lips, ears to ears. Child stars don’t get to exist in real time. Their faces are cued with signs of the past.

In Anna’s presence I feel my eyes grow wider, trying to take all of her in, to see her clear from the shadow of little Vada. Like all celebrities, she’s smaller in person than you’d imagine (no matter how many tiny celebrities I meet, I still haven’t adjusted my expectations to account for their tininess). She sits with one sneakered foot on the opposite leg’s knee, bouncing her leg from the hip socket. Her jeans have paint splatters and there are fine wrinkles on her large forehead. She tells me I should read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In despite my self-important feminist skepticism (“even if just to understand where so many women you’ll be meeting now are coming from”). She muses, from the non-philosophic subject of book buying, that: “Life, as short as it is, can be long”. She jokes about how, having just given birth to her first child, her “uterus is its own character in the early episodes” of season three of Veep. She laughs, in a few different modes, the most alarming involving a rapid snap back of the head.

She utters the word “neato” and calls me “man”. I think about her acting axiom, the juice she quenches herself with: “The art of surprise… the allowance to have flaws and that to still be truth”. I think she embodies this flawlessly.

“Laughter is our litmus test: if we’re having fun while we’re doing it, that’s going to make for a good show.”

Photographer JODY ROGAC/Stylist ELLE PACKHAM/Makeup MATIN at Ray Brown Productions/Hair REBEKAH FORECAST at The Wall Group/Photographer’s Assistant AMANDA HAKAN/Special thanks to Layfayette House

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Scanlan and Theodore dress

MARY ELLEN Mary Ellen Mark is one of the world’s most groundbreaking documentary photographers. In her 50+ year career she has covered the lives on society’s fringes – Indian circus performers, street prostitutes, the inmates of the Oregon State Mental Hospital – and this May Stills Gallery in Sydney is hosting Mark’s first solo exhibition in Australia which will include her most iconic works.

D

o you find identical twins creepy yet compelling?

Chances are this is because you’ve seen photographs from Mary Ellen Mark’s 2003 book Twins (and maybe you’ve also seen The Shining).

Mark photographed the series of twins in a simple way - together, in studio, in black and white – to allow the image to ask (and dare I say begin to answer) those piercing questions we have about the phenomenon of twins: how identical is identical? Can twins communicate telepathically? How do twins identify themselves as individuals? This is the strength of a documentary photograph: it can communicate some truth about a strange phenomenon within our society, and groundbreaking American documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark – who has been working in the field for over 50 years – is one of the genre’s finest proponents. Here she chats to Courtney Sanders about her obsession with depicting reality (regardless of how weird and confronting it is), her previous projects, and her current work alongside husband and filmmaker Martin Bell: a Kickstarter-funded film in which the pair explore the life of a Seattle prostitute with 10 children, who they first photographed when she was 13 (for the celebrated documentary film, and then book, Streetwise).

Hey Mary. What are you working on at the moment?

My husband [the film maker Martin Bell] and I ran a Kickstarter to make a book and a film about a character from Streetwise [his 1984 documentary

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film about the young inhabitants of the streets of Seattle, based on the Life magazine article Streets of the Lost, written by Cheryl McCall and photographed by Mark]. One of the main characters in Streetwise is a prostitute named Tiny, and we’ve been following her for 30 years. Aperture is going to republish the book with new imagery that depicts what has happened to this girl’s life: she’s been a prostitute since she was 13 and she had five children through tricks, and then five more with her husband. We’ve done a story on her life and what it’s like to be her, and it’s fascinating because she’s totally open as a person.

A lot of your work has documented “outsider” characters. What draws you to these people?

That’s an almost impossible question to answer because the work reflects who you are. I guess from the very beginning – when I started out as a photographer in my early 20s – I was drawn to people who had less of an opportunity in life than myself. I’ve photographed famous people too, but my personal work has been more about covering the people who are not known: I’m not, and would never want to be, a movie star photographer.

Are there any social or political angles that you are trying to explore?

No, I’m not at all political – I want to be a voice for people, but I’ve never thought politically. I’m just interested in telling the story of the people who I photograph, and if that’s being political then I’m political. But honestly, I don’t think I am.

Has photographing “outsiders” affected you?

I’ve also photographed people who have

made a choice in life. For example, I’ve photographed people who have made a choice to be in the circus, and if you make a choice to be in the circus it’s because you want to be in the circus.

I’ve also photographed people going to the prom, which is a nice experience – it’s about exploring a social tradition; an American tradition. It’s unusual situations that I find interesting.

Obviously the medium of photography, and in particular photographic journalism, has changed forever with the advent of digital and Internet technology...

It certainly has. There’s no more documentary work, and certainly very little documentary work that covers something other than extreme events like war. Magazines don’t publish reality, except for the hardest and toughest reality. They would never go into a small town or photograph an area of, for example, Redfern in Sydney [which is where some of the photographs in the forthcoming exhibition are from].

No-one would say: “Do a story on Redfern”, it wouldn’t happen now.

There has to be a much more commercial reason to photograph anything now, which is too bad.

Which, in turn, is affecting our view of the world, right?

Yes. And I also think that Photoshop has changed it a lot, too.

As has social media and the likes of Instagram.

Yeah, everybody thinks their work is going to turn up on a website somewhere. Everybody is taking pictures with cell phones, and therefore everybody is a photographer these days.

I think photography is valued a lot less today, but I still believe in the value of

PEOPLE

MARK the gelatin silver print.

What is it about this medium that you love so much?

I’m not against digital at all – I’m more against transforming images. I love reality, and photographs that depict reality are my favourite images. I’m attracted to film because of the content, not because of the medium. The camera is just the tool, and for me my pictures are about content. So I’m wondering why, at this stage in my life, I need to change? My students have taken fantastic pictures but they use Photoshop as a dark room, not as something to change the reality of their images. I love reality, and everything is so decorated and illustrated now. I think the field of photography and magazines has become much more about illustration and much less about photography.

It’s totally changing our perspective of reality.

There are people who use the convenience of digital to take beautiful, realistic images. It’s just unfortunate that we don’t see those pictures nearly as much because publications have become more commercial and more illustrative.

You mentioned your students just before. What do you enjoy about teaching and passing your knowledge on to a new generation of photographers?

I think it can be inspiring when you see really good work and you see that you’ve been helpful in making someone become better.

Above: Vera Antinoro, Rhoda Camporato and Murray Goldman, Luigi’s Italian American Club, Miami, Florida 1993.

Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney. © Mary Ellen Mark Right: Hippopotamus and Performer. Great Rayman Circus, Madras, India 1989. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney. © Mary Ellen Mark

The Mary Ellen Mark solo exhibition at Stills Gallery runs from May 7th until June 7th, 2014

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PEOPLE

EMA

Erika M Anderson became so shit-scared about being “Google-able” after the success of her 2011 album Past Life Martyed Saints that she decided to focus on the source of her fear – the dark side of the information age – for her latest record, The Future’s Void.

W

hen I Google my name, the website of an American athletics champion and a photo of a girl with shit all over her face come up.

I’m no athlete, nor have I ever had the other thing happen, and the narcissistic act of Googling myself reinforces the opposite: there are women who share my name who are more famous and infamous than I will ever be. I’m OK with this: no misrepresentation of who I actually am, and no stalkers. When American musician Erika M Anderson (EMA) released her second album Past Life Martyred Saints (PLMS) in 2011, she found herself on the shitty (sorry) side of this divide. “When PLMS came out it was fantastic in many ways because things that I never dreamed of happening, happened. But there were aspects of it that were strange for me,” explains Anderson. “I wasn’t used to having my picture online and I started feeling very weird about it all. After we got off tour for the record I made myself very low-key.”

Before EMA went viral Anderson had been a member of Californian drone-folk duo Gowns.

They gained attention on the live alternative music circuit in the States, sure, but their reach was limited, and controllable. For Anderson, her inability to control how she was being perceived publically was the most frightening thing about her newfound fame. “I didn’t like that people might know what I looked like or recognise me without knowing who I was. There’s a part of me that was like: The Future’s Void.

‘Isn’t this what everybody wants? What’s wrong with me?’ I think that’s what actually fucked me up: I was getting this thing that I had wanted for so long, but it was making me crazy.”

2013 was the year of Edward Snowden. It was the year in which Kim Dotcom’s arrest and subsequent release drew attention to government surveillance. It was the year Sinead O’Connor told Miley Cyrus to control her appearance in an online open letter – something every person on the Internet then had a meta-opinion about. 2013 was, perhaps, the year in which we all, as global citizens, began to realise the Internet’s power to control both the supply of information and how that information is represented.

Anderson’s feelings about this run deep down into Dystopian literature. “OK, this description is kind of embarrassing but I’m really into, like ‘Cyber Punk’ authors.

It’s amazing because so much of what they were writing about has come true,” she says. “I’m a pretty omnivorous reader, but lately I’ve just been obsessed with watching the old Terminator movies to see what has eventuated from them. I feel like a lot of output from this genre had something

32 Catalogue

like today in mind as the Dystopian or Utopian future, and it’s probably much more exciting to read those books now than when they came out because now it’s so much more realistic.”

The result of Anderson’s crystal ball gazing is her new album The Future’s Void, which is a riotous trip into a Turing-like world: humans and technology co-exist, but only just, in a state of silvery, knife-like tension between bliss and total annihilation. “I’ve tried to explain my personal feelings about these things without being totally didactic. I just put how I felt out there and people can take what they want from it,” she explains. “Some of the lyrics feel a little bit shattered by technology, but the record itself could be seen as very pro-technology and pro-Internet because I’m meshing with technology. I have humans play electronic instruments, and that’s more interaction with technology than in a lot of electronic music”.

The song Neuromancer is perhaps the album’s most literal incarnation of all this sci-fi stuff, and not simply because it’s named after the well-known William Gibson novel. A primal rhythm section (sort of M.I.A circa Galang) is cut into by glassy monotony while Anderson chants: “It’s such a narcissistic baby / it’s such a new millennial baby” and: “They know more of it than you do / they know more about the things you do”. The song that follows, Here She Comes, is a grunge-ballad about “teenage Riot Grrrl friendship”, and Anderson alternates between her personal and clinical perspectives throughout The Future’s Void.

Over Skype while in bed with the flu, Anderson sounds like someone who has taken up a cause and finds every little facet of it mesmerising. “In Dystopian literature they try to make data piracy exciting – and it is kind of exciting now – but I can imagine that when it came out people were like: ‘Who fucking cares, what are you talking about?’ Whereas now it’s like: ‘Oh man, offshore data havens!’ You look at what Google is doing and you wonder when they’re going to go into international waters,” muses Anderson. “To me people don’t seem that concerned about the NSA because I think they’re like: ‘Well, we figured the government was spying on us somehow’. I’m less concerned about that than about the corporations that are harvesting our data with the very capitalist interests of selling us more, probably subliminally.

That’s more insidious than having the government know who you called.”

EMA can rest assured (or very concerned) that, when The Future’s Void is released, Big Brother – along with a lot of new fans, probably via those social media corporations – will be watching.

TRENDING

TURTLE NECK

Front Anna Quan top, Thursday, Sunday pants; middle Jac + Jack jumper; back Gant jumper

Photographer JO DUCK/Fashion Editor ELLE PACKHAM/Hair DALE DELAPORTE at Names Agency using TIGI Makeup CLAIRE THOMPSON at Company 1 using Chanel/Photographer’s Assistant HENRY LEUNG Fashion Assistant RACHEL COLLESS Model/OLLIE HENDERSON at Chic

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Catalogue 27

I Love Mr. Mittens beanie, Ann Demeulemeester top from Poepke

OVER SIZED BEANIE

Metalicus dress, Voodoo socks, Stuart Weitzman shoes

LOAFER

Haider Ackermann top from Poepke, Skin and Threads pants, Stuart Weitzman shoes.

On left shoulder: Lacoste Jacket, Vanishing Elephant pants. On left leg: Equipment shirts

GREEN

TRENDING

Stolen Girlfriends Club skirt worn as top, Carly Hunter skirt, Voodoo socks, Stuart Weitzman shoes

FLUFFY

TRENDING

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N.L.P. bikini top

PRIME COLOURS

Ann Demeulemeester trench jacket, Voodoo socks, Stuart Weitzman shoes

FLORAL

Metalicus dress, Vanishing Elephant pants, Saba coat, Saba belt, Voodoo socks, Stuart Weitzman shoes, artwork by Qin Chong at Mclemoi Gallery

BELTED COAT

TRENDING

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FREAK OF NATURE

Photographer Bec Parsons at Company1/Digital Operator Bart Celestino/Creative Director Elle Packham Makeup Victoria Barron at MAP/Hair Peter Lennon at Company1/Photographer’s Assistant Garth McKee Stylist’s Assistant Rachel Colless/Models Elle Brittain at IMG and Lauren F at Priscillas

Earring from Four Winds Gallery

NEW LOOK WET LOOK

This look is a little grunge and a little surfer. To achieve it, begin by evenly combing your choice of product through the roots of your hair: for refined results use a wave gel such as Redken Elastic Works and for exaggerated results, start with wet hair. Clip your hair into place wherever you’d like to accent the look.

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UPSIDE DOWN FOLD-OVER

Pull your hair back into a ponytail, wrap your hair over itself and pin it to the top of the ponytail. Pull a few bits out of the bun using a piece or two to hide the elastic. Finish with Moroccanoil Luminous Hairspray for hold and shine.

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FLYTRAP LIPS

To turn pillow lips into flytrap lips first stain them with MAC Ruby Woo lipstick, pressing the colour into them and then blotting it off with a tissue. Purse your lips together as tight as you can (as if sipping a straw). Tap MAC Myth lipstick onto them, set with a light dusting of setting powder... and relax. You can try alternating colours or other combinations of lipsticks, powders and metallic pigments.

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Earring from Four Winds Gallery, jumper 3.1 Phillip Lim from Robby Ingham

THE LOW DOWN CORNROW

Begin by spritzing the ends of your hair with water until it’s damp – this will catch all the loose hairs and create a neater finish.

Brush the hair back and divide the end of your hair into sections (about 4-6, depending on its thickness) and then divide those sections into three. Begin braiding as tightly as possible, as much to the ends of your hair as you can. Use a little ultra-firm holding wax (such as Uppercut’s Monster Hold) on the ends to keep the braid together.

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BRUSHED UP BROW

Draw tiny hairs in an upward and outward motion using a Kevin Aucoin Eyebrow pencil, and set with a clear gel.

Brighten and tighten your skin with a layer of Sunday Riley Good Genes cream. Apply a light layer of Ellis Faas foundation for a natural looking base, and sweep Ellis Faas eye cream E108 on your eyelids and curl the lashes. For extra sheen add Egyptian Magic to your eyelids, cheek bones, brow bones and lips. (All available at Mecca Cosmetica.)

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NOVIS

LABEL WATCH

NEW YORK

SUZANNE RAE

Photographer BOBBY WHIGHAM Stylist SHIBON KENNEDY Hair and makeup DOMINIQUE FARINNA Models ALIX at New York Models, ELEANOR HAYES at Supreme

NOVIS

LOOKS LIKE A hot air balloon festival SOUNDS LIKE Summer hits of the ‘90s SMELLS LIKE A strawberry milkshake TASTES LIKE Chocolate-covered gummy bears novisnyc.com

RICHARD CHAI

SUZANNE RAE

LOOKS LIKE Venus SOUNDS LIKE Songs that are pretty SMELLS LIKE Cardomom TASTES LIKE Panna Cotta suzannerae.com

RICHARD CHAI

LOOKS LIKE My favourite view on my favourite day SOUNDS LIKE White noise SMELLS LIKE Class, bottled TASTES LIKE Cold, white wine richardchailove.com

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KARLA SPETIC KNITWEAR

LABEL WATCH

SYDNEY

KAYLENE MILNER

Photographer GADIR RAJAB Fashion ELLE PACKHAM Hair DALE DELAPORTE at The Names Agency Makeup MOLLY OAKFIELD at Company1 Model SARAH V at Chic

KARLA SPETIC KNITWEAR

LOOKS LIKE A Sweetly layered liquorice all sort SOUNDS LIKE Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s duet Je t’aime moi non plus SMELLS LIKE Le Labo’s Santal 33 TASTES LIKE Fairy floss karlaspetic.com

SARA PHILLIPS

KAYLENE MILNER

LOOKS LIKE Mufti Day SOUNDS LIKE Deee-Lite SMELLS LIKE (Pre) Teen Spirit TASTES LIKE Playdoh kaylenemilner.com

SARA PHILLIPS

LOOKS LIKE A kaleidoscope of colour and print SOUNDS LIKE Jasmine by Jai Paul SMELLS LIKE Peonies TASTES LIKE Earl Grey tea saraphillips.com.au

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THIS IS THE UNIFORM

LABEL WATCH

LONDON

ALICE LEE

Photographer VICKI KING Styling FRANCESCA PINNA Makeup AKARI SUGINO using MAC Hair SATOMI SUZUKI

THIS IS THE UNIFORM

LOOKS LIKE Simplicity SOUNDS LIKE An orchestral manoeuvre in the dark SMELLS LIKE Crisp white sheets TASTES LIKE Ice cold water

MARTINA SPETLOVAS

thisistheuniform.com

ALICE LEE

LOOKS LIKE Almost transparent SOUNDS LIKE A bubbling brook SMELLS LIKE A wooden cherry scent TASTES LIKE A little drop of poison alicelee.co.uk

MARTINA SPETLOVA

LOOKS LIKE A brave new world SOUNDS LIKE Nothing you’ve ever heard before SMELLS LIKE Teen spirit TASTES LIKE Blueberry gum martinaspetlova.com.au

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LABEL WATCH

PARIS

UN JOUR À PARIS Photographer ZACHARY HANDLEY at The Artist Group Stylist MARI DAVID at Quadriga Hair SHUKO SHIMADA at Walter Schupfer Makeup DAMIAN GAROZZO at Jedroot Model CATARINA RAVAGLIA at IMG Photo Assistant KEVIN LAVALLADE Digital Operator BRYAN MONACO Stylist Assistant COLINE PEYROT Producer PRUNE LE PAGE at Quadriga MM6 Cotton and wool cropped overcoat, Falke spandex socks, Monki leather and fabric shoes

Pièces d’Anarchive felt hat, Pièce d’Anarchive wool jersey, Pièce d’Anarchive silk hairnet pants, Pièce d’Anarchive fabric and wood shoes, Bernard Delettrez silver ring

Lea Peckre cotton top, Issey Miyake silk foulard, Ungaro cotton skirt, Christian Louboutin leather sandals, Bijules silver bracelet, Bernard Delettrez silver ring

Ungaro wool and spandex jersey, Maison Martin Margiela cotton panty, Junko Shimada plastic boots, Bliss Lau golden metal rings

Sacai cotton and hairnet dress, Giuseppe Zanotti leather and wood shoes, Bernard Delettrez double finger golden ring

Sacai cotton shirt, Talbot Runhof wool and cotton jumpsuit, Bliss Lau pink gold and yellow gold rings

MM6 Cotton coat, MM6 cotton and wool cropped overcoat

Issey Miyake leather coat and skirt, Monki leather and fabric shoes

Masha Ma cotton and spandex top, Sportmax silk spotted top, Guy Laroche silk jacket, Sportmax silk spotted skirt, Monki leather and fabric shoes, Bliss Lau golden rings

Dries Van Noten linen jacket, Dries Van Noten cotton lamĂŠ top, Dries Van Noten wool and cotton embroided skirt, Dries Van Noten leather and cork sandals

NEW COLLECTIONS

BETH HOECKEL X CAMILLA AND MARC American artist Beth Hoeckel transforms mundane found photographs (a person wearing a sweater, a scientific photograph of the moon) into surreal, creepy collages. She contributes to the likes of Rookie magazine and collaborated with us to create these haunting images.

What drew you to collage in the first place?

I’ve always been an avid collector of old books and materials. I love the idea that collage is kind of scrappy, but that sometimes I can try to make it look perfect, like a surreal photograph. I also enjoy the haphazard element of placing random things together and finding narratives.

How did you develop your personal style?

Mainly by trial and error. It started several years ago: I was continuously playing around with different things until I found a groove that suited me. All of my work is always done intuitively, so it organically comes out the way it is.

What kind of themes do you enjoy exploring?

There are certain images that are always interesting to me, like stormy seas, starry skies, hair, hands, found papers from old books, mouths and other fragmented body parts.

I’m interested in exploring many different themes, but intimacy, nature, simplicity and nostalgia all seem to recur in my work.

What was the inspiration for the collages you created for this issue of Catalogue?

To me it’s like an excerpt of a much longer story of personal freedom, and the loneliness that sometimes comes with that. Even though it’s spring here [in the US] I was definitely feeling more dark and intimate vibes with these images. Nighttime, solitude, introspect, a little bit of coldness... nothing cheerful or sunshiney.

You collaborated with the Catalogue team for this editorial. What do you like about the collaborative process?

I found it really fun and exciting! I usually search through old magazines to find figures I’m drawn to, so it was really interesting to have them presented to me. And all the photos were so beautiful it was hard to narrow it down. Also, I’m not accustomed to using “modern” images of people in collage – especially their faces – because of copyright reasons. So it was fun to be able to do that. I’d love to do more fashion editorials like this!

Photographer OLIVER ROSE/Artist BETH HOECKEL/Fashion Director ELLE PACKHAM Hair KOH at Work Agency using O & M/Makeup PETER BEARD at Work Agency using MAC Model ISAAC at Priscillas

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Line Of Sight dress

Catalogue 69

Grayscale trench, Alternate skirt, Sequential knit pullover

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Whitelist dress

Catalogue 71

Profile knit pullover, Marcel pant

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Legacy lace dress

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NEW COLLECTIONS

RACHEL RUTT X TOME 2014 NEW YORK FASHION WEEK If you thought knitting was reserved for grandparents and cute teenagers with Etsy accounts, think again. Australian model Rachel Rutt channels her creativity into hand-knitted, one-off garments, and her friends Ryan Lobo and Ramon Martin of Tome commandeered her skills for their New York Fashion Week show earlier this year.

How did you begin working with TOME? I met Ryan Lobo six years ago while working on my first fashion week in Sydney. When he and Ramon started Tome, I worked with them as a model for their first range.

You created two bespoke pieces for Tome’s New York Fashion Week show. What were they like?

Both wraps were made of hand-spun, un-dyed merino from Tasmania and woven in a plain weave. I love to use as much local Australian wool as possible. The pieces were kept quite raw which felt appropriate for Tome. We celebrated the qualities of wool and the hand-made garment by presenting a direct simplicity.

You attended the show at New York Fashion Week. What was it like seeing your garments on the runway?

Incredibly surreal. I felt overwhelmed and blessed and very thankful. From weaving in my dining room in Sydney to a runway at New York Fashion Week! I was also just so proud to see Tome in its debut runway show.

What did you enjoy most about collaborating with the designers at Tome?

Ryan, Ramon and Michelle are such a powerful team. To know and work with them is to be a part of a tight knit family. I learn so much just being in their presence. They are wonderfully nurturing and I am blessed to be able to learn from them.

Why do you think collaboration is an important part of the artistic process?

When working alone I feel free to explore single thoughts or emotions and allow the internal process to come out of my hands naturally. When working with others there are multiple communication levels, and rather than only trusting yourself, that trust must extend to others. It’s a leap of faith.

You’ve said that complete strangers are often attracted to you when you’re knitting in public. Why do you think this is?

I’ve met some great people through knitting in public. One woman in London ended up telling me about a refuge she ran for the destitute. I still have a photograph she gave me. A young man in New York turned out to be an avid knitter himself, and now we’re doing a trade from across the seas.

Children are amazed by it, which really compels me because I always hope it initiates a deeper interest and/or pursuit of the craft. It’s the peacefulness that strangers are attracted to. It’s a universal craft and heritage that carries a great deal of nostalgia. I believe people have an innate desire to connect on this level, which has become a big part of why I continue to pursue knitting as a craft.

Photographer DANIEL MCMAHON

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RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

How can two geographically isolated people have exactly the same idea at exactly the same time?

Yeah, I know that you’re going to say in a “duh, how obvious” tone: “The Internet!” But using that premise, how do you explain the advent of the airplane? In 1903 two “first flights” took place: the famous Wright Brothers flew their powered aircraft in Dayton, Ohio, and Richard Pearse took off in New Zealand. Just as the advent of the Internet can explain collective thought today, perhaps developments in technology can explain historical events as well. There’s something in that: technological, political and intellectual advancements combining to form the zeitgeist of the day. In our last issue, Catalogue’s London fashion team introduced us to This is The Uniform’s simple, slightly futuristic garb. This issue, we sent our London Label Watch and London New Collection teams on their way, only to receive a This is The Uniform story back from both. Rather than order a re-shoot, we’re celebrating this advent as evidence that This is The Uniform is channelling today’s zeitgeist and –considering today’s fashion zeitgeist is simple, slightly futuristic and utilitarian – this all makes perfect sense. Naturally then, we want to own most of it.

Photographer CARLY SCOTT/Stylist MARIA CLARA TRIPIER Makeup AMMY DRAMMEH using MAC/Hair MASATO INOUE using Bumble & Bumble

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ALL OUR HEROES ARE WEIRDOS

REBEL GIRLS Ninety years ago Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, her manifesto that states “a woman must have money and a room of her own” for emancipation. Since then punky, punchy women have advanced Woolf’s cause and Courtney Sanders celebrates the lineage of her heroines – Woolf, Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna and Tavi Gevinson – and checks in on how the cause is doing.

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n 1929 Virginia Woolf published a series of her essays as A Room of One’s Own; a manifesto that became a cornerstone of the First Wave of Feminism. Kathleen Hanna’s DIY Riot Grrrl movement, starting in 1991 in Seattle, became an iconic part of the Third Wave, and five years ago during an interview, in a voice that sounded like a thousand cigarettes, Joan Jett told me that throughout her career she had “gotten so much crap for being a girl”, and that between forming The Runaways (in 1975) and today “things haven’t changed very much at all – women still have all kinds of barriers if they’re trying to become anything that isn’t a traditional field for women”. Right now Tavi Gevinson, former wearer of gigantic pink hair bows to New York Fashion Week, is affecting a new, influential and worldwide female audience via her online magazine, Rookie. Why have

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united these four women here, in order to discuss the state of feminism in popular culture? In V for Vendetta (bear with me) – a graphic novel and film that, considering its revolutionary attitude, is more related to this piece than you may think (it’s also awesome) – Eric Finch, the police officer charged with capturing “V”, has a moment of enlightenment in which he realises several seemingly unrelated historical events are, in fact, connected: “It’s like I could see the whole thing: one long chain of events. I felt like I could see everything that had happened, and everything that was going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern, and I realised that we were all part of it, and all trapped by it”. Virginia Woolf, Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna and Tavi Gevinson represent this “long chain of events” for me: they exist(ed) in different places at different times and contributed to feminism in different ways. But together they represent an historical thread that has determined how we are treated today and how we should act to be treated tomorrow.

I love Joan Jett: she’s the kind of non-giver of two fucks woman I consider a role model. But mainstream society today has an alternative; an alternative who is far easier to sell product to.

It’s Miranda Kerr and her clean brown hair and clean white smile, suggestively gazing at me from a hair care advertisement (Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth: “What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women, is actually what their advertisers want from women”); it’s the cover story for a women’s magazine in which slim women are unflatteringly compared to their even slimmer counterparts (you can search through “fat” articles on Australian NW, the most recent being “Beyonce Felt Crazy Fat During her Pregnancy”); and it’s a podcast where Miley Cyrus’ lack of clothing in Wrecking Ball is considered “irresponsible” while the myriad sexual abuse allegations against Terry Richardson (the clip’s director) are omitted (although, after model Emma Appleton spoke out about an alleged explicit story involving Richardson, even Vogue has distanced themselves from the photographer: “The last assignment Terry Richardson had for US Vogue appeared in the July 2010 issue and we have no plans to work with him in the future”). Woolf argued: “The

“Women still have all kinds of barriers if they’re trying to become anything that isn’t traditional for a woman.”

Joan Jett

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“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of the mind.”

Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own history

of

men’s

opposition

to

women’s

emancipation is more interesting than the story of the emancipation itself”. Yeah: it’s so interesting it’s being sold as entertainment.

From body image to physical bodies, issues like marriage, birth control, rape and abortion have also been hijacked by particular media outlets and politicians to win votes and sell newspapers. During his coverage of the 2012 American Presidential campaign, Stephen Colbert – in reply to comments from Republican candidates (including Roger Rivard who casually stated that “some girls, they just rape so easy”) – argued that “since women gained the vote in 1913, rape’s approval rating with eligible voters has steadily declined”. Closer to home, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared that “it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons” before deciding that abortion is the “easy way out” of a difficult situation. Oh, and The New Statesman also have him announcing the v. modern viewpoint that “the right of women to withhold sex... needs to be moderated”. Wow. I read The Beauty Myth several years ago and found Naomi Wolf’s tone pretty harsh: “To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long”. The Third Wave had arrived and wearing anything like lipstick in its presence was out of the question. However, I sound more like Naomi Wolf every day (can you tell?) because I feel threatened by political and social agendas that are determined to decide what is best for me, without consultation.

Ninety years ago Virginia Woolf felt similarly threatened and declared the necessity of private space for women to determine their own lives. Since then, DIY bedroom-style

movements have become a cornerstone of feminism: from enfranchisement, through the Civil Rights movement and into the Third Wave, the bedroom has been our base camp: a place in which we can set our own agenda and then take it to the outside world. It’s a fight we wage from those rooms of one’s own Woolf describes, and it’s often about what we are allowed to do in them, too. As Naomi Wolf stated in The Beauty Myth: “The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her beauty”.

Suffragettes congregated for “Drawing Room Meetings” in the homes of the wealthy among them. In that interview, in that seductive, learned voice, Joan Jett told me that Kathleen Hanna was a hero of hers and suggested that “the Riot Grrrl movement inspired me, and will inspire whatever that next movement is going to be”. In a new documentary called The Punk Singer (more about Kathleen Hanna and this on page 100), the narrator positions Hanna at the centre of the Third Wave of feminism: her songs empower women and her bedroommade, zine-based Riot Grrl movement unite them. “Girls’ bedrooms can be this space of real creativity and acceptance. The problem is that these bedrooms are all cut off from each other, so how do you take that bedroom and share it with everyone?” explains Hanna. “I wanted my music to sound like it was made by a girl in her bedroom, but instead of throwing it away I took it out and shared it with other girls.” She notes that Washington-based bands (Black Flag and the meaty, meat-free voice of Henry Rollins among them) felt that they “had this feeling that what they do is super important because they are ‘closer to the seat of power’.” Kathleen Hanna took her bedroom to the world because she thought she could change the fact that “noone has listened to me my whole life and I have something to say”.

Today’s Tumblr generation, bedroom-based feminist is influenced by Hanna, too. “It’s moments when you’re arguing and arguing [about feminism], and some people can just be very narrow-minded or apathetic, and that’s

“No-one has listened to me my whole life, and I have something to say.”

Kathleen Hanna The Punk Singer

“Feminism to me means fighting. It’s a very nuanced, complex thing, but at the very core of it I’m a feminist because I don’t think being a girl limits me in any way.”

Tavi Gevinson when it’s really nice to listen to Bikini Kill, hear girls scream and basically be the opposite of what girls are told to be, which is, you know, loud.” Eighteen year old Tavi Gevinson is a creative polymath with a political objective: she’s Virginia Woolf, Joan Jett, Kathleen Hanna for the Tumblr generation. Together Gevinson’s Rookie magazine website and the physical incarnation of it – a DIY bedroom-made thing now sold at Barnes and Noble – are popularising feminism (Dazed and Confused called Gevinson the Fourth Wave). “Feminism to me means fighting. It’s a very nuanced, complex thing, but at the very core of it I’m a feminist because I don’t think being a girl limits me in any way,” explained Gevinson to Vogue Australia last year.

“I think the reason that so many people shy away from the term and prefer to call themselves humanists or whatever is because they think feminism is all about women, but it’s a lot about breaking down the social constructs and ideas about gender that oppress all of us, frankly.”

When you pull out the negative representations of women today – by politicians and by mainstream media – the state of things looks bleak. But then there’s this invisible thread of tireless progress by women going their own way. Virginia Woolf’s writing, Joan Jett’s lyrics, Kathleen Hanna’s manifestos and Tavi Gevinson’s website are all part of this, and tomorrow this thread has to take over because, as Woolf declared in 1929: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind”.

“To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.”

Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth

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OUR HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WEIRDOS Since some outdated rules (like all baddies must be held accountable for their actions, because that’s realistic) were removed in the ‘60s, movies have celebrated the outsider figure, whether they be good, bad or regular old dorks. Dominic Corry traces this phenomenon from Bonnie and Clyde through to John Hughes’ reign during the ‘80s and beyond. And if you think Ferris Bueller is a better outsider than his BFF Cameron, apparently you’re tripping.

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n his 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, critic Mark Harris highlighted how the 1968 Best Picture Oscar winner, Bonnie and Clyde, represented a cultural turning point in Hollywood. The film blew the doors off the old model, and set the tone for the next 50 years of outsider-centric cinematic storytelling. Telling the real-life tale of a sensation-causing 1930s couple who robbed banks and killed people while on the run from the FBI, the enormously successful film turned immaculately-attired leads Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into enduring style icons.

Before 1968, the content of American films was governed by a hilarious list of rules called the Hays Code, which dictacted that no criminal act could go unpunished – the perpetrators had to die or be incarcerated, lest impressionable audiences somehow infer that crime indeed pays. Bonnie and Clyde conformed to this aspect of code – the titular duo (spoiler!) eventually go down in a hail of bullets, just as they did in reality. But despite the flagrant criminality on display, there was no question about who the audience was rooting for, and it wasn’t the FBI. While anti-heroes have existed as long as there has been storytelling, the broad commercial pressure on movies meant they tended to homogenise the greyer aspects of human behaviour. In the wake of Bonnie and Clyde’s popular success, the Hays code was abandoned in favour of the more permissive MPAA rating system. Outsiders were the new insiders.

A couple of years later, 1969’s Midnight Cowboy became the only X-rated film to ever win a Best Picture Oscar. The

controversial film starred Jon Voight as a tall, stupid Texan who comes to New York intending to make it big as a high class gigolo to rich ladies. After reality smacks him in the face, he aligns with a scummy conman named Ratso Rizzo, played with still-impressive grime by Dustin Hoffman. This miserable pair make for two of moviedom’s most endearing outsider heroes.

Not coincidentally, the rise of the cinematic outsider hero occured at the same time as the fabled Hollywood creative boom of the 1970s, when the studios began allowing film school graduates to indulge their artistic whims with more freedom than ever before.

Beginning with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), which is built on outsider status of its protagonist, reluctant mob heir Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the 1970s would offer up innumerable iconic outsider heroes (Harold and Maude; Luke Skywalker), but none more enduring as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, the awesomely fucked-up ultimate outsider hero of Martin Scorsese’s 1974 ass-kicker Taxi Driver. Bickle remains cinema’s defining outsider hero because that’s how he sees himself. The Vietnam veteran takes it upon himself to clean the scum of the streets of New York with extreme prejudice. Despite the abhorrent acts he perpetrates, who couldn’t relate to Bickle’s social awkwardness? Especially in his doomed pursuit of an idealised love interest played by a peaking Cybill Shepherd.

As the ‘70s drew to a close and outsider heroes increasingly pervaded popular cinema (Rocky; Mad Max; First Blood), it took fresh perspectives to lend them any real weight. One came in the form of Alex Cox’s 1984 cult

“Whether they’re in the form of murderous lovers, twisted vigilantes, pinkladen teenagers or leatheradorned mutants, outsider heroes will always have a role to play in cinema.”

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favourite Repo Man, the perfect ‘80s response to ‘70s cinema’s outsider hero. In his finest ever hour, Emilio Estevez plays a punk who takes on the titular job under the tutelage of legendary repo man Frank (Harry Dean Stanton) and discovers a wide world of weird wonders.

But the 1980s’ most poetic odes to outsider heroes came via a genre so repeatedly mistreated by Hollywood it could qualify as an outsider hero itself – the teenage movie.

Building on valiant first steps made by Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Valley Girl (1983), John Hughes arguably changed outsider cinema forever with 1984’s Sixteen Candles. Infusing the high school movie with a sense of character it had never seen before, Sixteen Candles nailed the inherent power of the outsider status every teenager feels. Molly Ringwald’s Samantha is an outsider in her own family; and Anthony Michael Hall’s breakout supporting character Farmer Ted is an outsider in high school. Hughes was equally interested in both of them, and explored the types with greater depth in 1985’s The Breakfast Club. Hall once again textured the nerd stereotype, and Ringwald even managed to convince us that her high school princess character had actual problems. Rounding out the film’s quintet, Emilo Estevez; Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy embodied other aspects of the outsider hero with varying levels of success. Hughes delved even deeper into the outsider hero in what many consider to be his best movie, 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. As any true fan knows, the secret main character of the film is Ferris’ best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), a role tellingly first offered to Anthony Michael Hall. As amusing as Matthew Broderick’s brashly cool title character is, it’s only tormented outsider Cameron that undergoes any kind of forward progression.

Cracks in Hughes’ take on the outsider began to show in another 1986 film, Pretty In Pink, which stars Molly Ringwald as a hip high schooler whose outsider status complicates matters when she begins dating one of the ‘popular’ kids, played by a never-wetter Andrew McCarthy.

The film is justifiably beloved, but it tends to break fans’ hearts when they discover that Hughes originally intended to have Ringwald end up with fellow weirdo Duckie, not McCarthy’s Blane. Rather than let the film’s two coolest outsiders come together romantically, Hughes thought it sent

a better message if Andie crossed the tracks to be with Blane, and re-shot the ending at the last minute. Hughes’ golden period was over, and he would soon begin focusing on violent films about children with absent parents. But his influential work had entrenched outsiders firmly in the middle of any film that attempted to use the awkwardness of youth to tap into the power of the outsider.

Films like Singles and Reality Bites were able to gussie up their familiar dynamics by transposing the setting to young adulthood without adjusting the emotional maturity of their progtagonists. And filmmakers like Richard Linklater were able to offer more pragmatic takes on the teenage outsider – none of the broad ensemble in his 1994 high school masterpiece Dazed and Confused are complete outsiders, but they all feel like they are, and are more compelling for it.

Nineteen ninety five’s Clueless let irony enter the fray with a fresh take on Jane Austen’s Emma.

Although a complete insider herself, protagonist Cher (Alicia Silverstone) was empathetic to the needs of outsiders, as evidenced by her tutelage of audience surrogate Tai (Brittany Murphy). There were a few fresh angles on the outsider hero to be found in the teenage movie boom inspired by the success of Clueless – 1996’s The Craft cottonned on to a particularly resonant take on outsider wish fulfillment by giving its high school outcasts magic powers; and 1999’s Ten Things I Hate About You empowered shy nerds everywhere.

But then the first X-Men film came along in 2000, followed by SpiderMan in 2001, and the outsider hero became increasingly dominated by the superhero genre, which is running the trope into the ground. Thankfully there are exceptions, like the John Hughes-evoking The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which was set in the early ‘90s, but came out in 2012.

Whether they’re in the form of murderous lovers, twisted vigilantes, pink-laden teenagers or leather-adorned mutants (who are also twisted vigilantes), outsider heroes will always have a role to play in cinema, which works best when celebrating iconoclasts. The only question is: what will they look like next?

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THE STREETS ARE FOR EVERYONE Cheryl Dunn is a New York-based photographer who was a core part of the ‘90s DIY street art movement in the States, alongside Mike Mills, Harmony Korine and Aaron Rose. She has been documenting the American Condition throughout her career, which has culminated in a documentary film about street photographers, called Everybody Street, which Cheryl Dunn will speak about at Semi-Permanent 2014 in Sydney.

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unn is one of America’s foremost street photographers. She covers a diverse range of subjects – everything from Hurricane Sandy to music festivals to biker week at Virginia Beach – but all with her inimitable, evocative grit. She recently turned the lens on other street photographers for her documentary film Everybody Street, and here she discusses that film with Courtney Sanders, who also asks what motivates her to photograph all of the places and faces in her work.

What attracted you to documentary photography in the first place?

I’m attracted to documentary photography because I’m very curious and interested in people’s stories. When I was 24 I left New York and lived in Europe for two-and-a-half-years – in countries in which I didn’t know the language. I was all by myself and just

walked the streets and shot pictures, went to art museums, read books and wrote. I didn’t have the use of language, so I sharpened my observational skills: I would sit in a café and study a group of people and write character studies about them, including the dialogue that I imagined them having.

You studied art history rather than fine art or photography. How do you think this has influenced your work?

I think it’s good to use multiple art forms to inspire you. Painting really inspires me and informs my imagemaking, as does my love of music and dance. The creative process transcends one category.

Your human subjects either seem super relaxed around you or completely unaware that you’re taking their photograph. How do you create those relationships with your subjects?

I like this question! When I’m shooting on the street I would rather that people

didn’t know I was there: I want to get the shot without my involvement altering it because people’s mannerisms always change when they’re aware that their picture is being taken. When I’m shooting portraits I see it as collaborative: we’re making the image together – it’s a dance.

Similarly, you have this ability to make still life photographs feel very emotionally profound. Is there something that you’re looking for when you’re taking a still life shot?

Environments are so telling – a lot of my early work would start with an environment. When I first started assisting it was for a really great still life photographer called James Wojcik, and it was great training for the subtleties of light and composition. When I moved into shooting fashion pictures I would always invent back-stories for the subjects and those stories started with their environment. I really feel those stories: I love history and I love to think

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of what has taken place before the scene I’m shooting. Maybe this is what draws me to shoot at a location in the first place, and maybe some of that energy embeds into my images... one should be so lucky!

You feature in the documentary Beautiful Losers that depicts the street artists of the ’90s. What was it like to be part of this movement?

“Movement” or “collective” is a label that gets attached later, so when you are doing stuff you are just living and moving naturally. Back then I was photographing documentary subjects while making a living shooting fashion, and I was going out with a painter graffiti guy. I met Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen through him, and I met Chris Johanson in 1997 when I made a film called Sped for a snowboard company. I just felt that these artists were making stuff that was culturally important and that people needed to know bout it. I was shooting for a lot for music magazines like Ray Gun and Dazed and Confused at the time, and I was always pitching stories about these artists to them. For the most part we

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were just scrappy friends and vandals who were having fun fucking shit up.

There were no stakes really: it was a kind of super freedom. Everybody lived on the edge and survived somehow; scraped together rent, tripped around, stayed at each other’s places.

What was everybody interested in?

Trying to figure out how to afford to be making as much stuff as possible, having adventures, fucking with the system, having fun...

How important was skate culture to this movement, and why do you think it’s so important in the development of cultural movements?

Sharing art and encouraging the making of art is a big part of skate culture. I really loved the way there was this community of sharing. Kids who travelled to skate competitions would stay at each other’s places, trade zines, have shows together and make music together. Skating is one of the most artful physical things I know of, and it’s all encompassing: skaters are great street photographers because they’re cruising the streets constantly.

Why do you think there was an

explosion of street artists at this time?

San Francisco was a graffiti destination.

It was wrecked there, people would take graffiti vacations to San Francisco because it was the most bombed city in the US – like New York in the 1970s. I don’t know what was up with it, but the cops didn’t give a shit, although that changed. I remember being there once and there was word that there was an impromptu punk show on the steps of this giant armory building on 17th Street in the Mission. A pack of us skated down there and there was a cop car parked there when we arrived. Chris Johanson’s band played first and we all figured it would be shut down in a few minutes. But the cop who was there at the start left and didn’t come back for over 90 minutes – it was pretty lawless at the time!

There’s an exploration of the American Condition in your work too, right?

Well, this is one pretty fucked up and awesome country. I try to stay as informed about world politics as my time allows, which is not a general

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American practice: before 9/11 an average American didn’t know shit about the big wide world. And 83% of the population doesn’t have a passport!

There are extremes of patriotism here that are very arrogant, and there are extremes of religion that are very closed-minded. So I shoot things that make me exclaim: “Holy shit did you see that?” My studio is a block from the world trade centre, and during 9/11 I really felt that it was my obligation to present a different point of view than that of the mainstream media. When you’re part of something you have every right to have an opinion about it. My pictures express my opinion on things that seem crazy or beautiful or racist or economically unjust in my culture, and I see it as my obligation to share what I see.

You released your documentary film Everybody Street, about street photography in New York, last year.

Why did you want to make this film?

One cold night in the spring of 2010 I got a call from a friend who had just been hired by a museum to expand their audience. The museum is really

cool but it’s in a tourist area so many actual New Yorkers don’t go to it. She reached out to me and said that this Stieglitz exhibition was happening and that they wanted a film component.

Alfred Stieglitz was considered the first street photographer: taking the 4x5 off the tripod and cruising around Manhattan. People didn’t think much about his work at the time, but he fought hard to have photography considered art. I told my friend that I wanted to make a film about street photographers who came after him and were obsessively compelled to capture the streets of New York. I remember hanging up the phone and thinking that it was one of the best calls I had ever received and like: “Shit, I’m going to meet my idols!”

Documentary photography can be a controversial medium because the “role” of the photographer is often questioned: is it enough that a documentary photographer is simply there to document a scene in order to publicise it to the world or should they step in and help out, particularly in conflict zones? What are your

thoughts?

I haven’t shot pictures of someone being killed before my eyes, so I can’t really speak to that. I have shot pictures while someone is being mugged, and then I’ve called the police. If you witness an atrocity, your job as a documentary photographer is to shed light on it – if you get killed yourself, you’re not helping anyone. I don’t know the specific circumstances of these cases, but more journalists were killed in conflict last year than ever before, and I’m sure it was because they were both trying to help out and witnessing something someone didn’t want them to. A good friend of mine made a documentary last year called Killing the Messenger: The Deadly Cost of News, and this film will give you further insight into this issue.

Semi-Permanent is a two day creative conference (it is super inspiring and we highly recommend it) held between May 22-24 at Carriageworks in Sydney. Check out the full line-up at semipermanent.com

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HER VOICE CUTS INTO FLESH LIKE BROKEN GLASS KATHLEEN HANNA BY COURTNEY SANDERS Kathleen Hanna is the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin and, via her Riot Grrrl Manifesto, became an inimitable part of the Third Wave of feminism.

Courtney Sanders is the lady in the office who gets the “Oh man, not again” eye rolls when she brings up feminism. She enjoys being this person.

“Because we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.”

Kathleen Hanna, The Riot Grrl Manifesto.

Published in Bikini Kill Zine 2, 1991.

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t the start of the ‘90s, college rock created a swell of attention for alternative music, and then grunge turned that swell into a tidal wave.

Young, testosterone-fuelled men who were alienated and bored by ongoing neoliberal politics wrote songs to channel this frustration, and the world turned them into anthems. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Jeremy and Black Hole Sun all spoke to this, but they didn’t really speak to women – rock ‘n’ roll arguably never had. Enter Kathleen Hanna, who formed Bikini Kill in 1991 when she was told that she should start writing rock songs if she wanted people to actually listen to what she had to say.

Until then “feminism had been scared of pop culture music: it was really good at protesting it, and not so good at making it” explains a new documentary about Hanna, The Punk Singer.

As a teenager, Hanna and her friends adopted Valley Girl accents “because we desperately wanted to be the girls who had credit cards – we thought it made us sound rich; we thought it was a posh accent”. According to Rookie wunderkind Tavi Gevinson (who is a fan and friend of Hanna’s): “Kathleen sounds arrestingly young, but it just makes her words have more impact,

especially when she’s singing about subjects like rape”. It’s true: her voice cuts into flesh like freshly broken glass with lyrics as simple as: “Don’t need you to tell us we’re good / don’t need you to say we suck / don’t need your protection / don’t need your dick to fuck” (Don’t Need You). They pierce deep down, probably because they’d never been spoken before. Hanna’s husband, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, described Hanna’s on-stage persona as “a car crash – a good car crash that you can’t look away from”. She would add a babydoll dress, a crop top and naive little hair clips to that accent of hers, and these would often end up in a pile on the stage, eschewed during the show in favour of her other persona – the tough, bratty, sexy one. When Hanna stood on stage in shimmering lurex underwear and asked the men in the audience to move to the back of the room so women could safely watch at the front (grunge crowds in DC were notoriously violent), she became an icon of the Third Wave.

By the powers of High Street however, ‘Grunge Chic’ is now a Thing: floral dresses and Doc Martens boots worn by girls who all stomp to a uniform beat. The Punk Singer will hopefully inject meaning back into their look. In the film, director Sini Anderson reveals Kathleen Hanna’s experiences to conclude: “life is much more than physical survival”. It discusses her haunting home environment of her childhood and her friend’s debilitating experience of a sexually motivated

home invasion. It discuses Hanna’s battle with Lyme disease, a condition that claimed her health and ability to perform for over five years. Only after all of this context does it discuss Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl.

Hanna notes that she started Riot Grrrl because she “wanted to have all-girl meetings where we just talked.

Our first meeting was pretty intense: they wanted to talk about sexual abuse, they wanted to talk about coming out, they wanted to share information with each other”. That information moved from being shared at small physical meetings to being shared worldwide via DIY Riot Grrrl zines, all of which had their own interpretation of Hanna’s original manifesto.

The Punk Singer ends at a Bikini Kill tribute show in New York City. Hanna is standing backstage, watching a new generation of Riot Grrrls interpret her songs and is – true-to-form – wearing a ladylike black suit, accessorised with a hot pink carnation and sneakers. Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) takes the stage to introduce Hanna, but before she does she repeats her favourite part of the Riot Grrrl manifesto: “Because I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will, change the world for real”.

In honour of their 25th anniversary, Bikini Kill Records have re-issued their self-titled EP and their 1993 split with Huggy Bear, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah. Both of these releases are available at bikinikill.com

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NEVER GET OUT OF BED BEFORE NOON

CHARLES BUKOWSKI BY GEMMA RASMUSSEN

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he day that I discovered Charles Bukowski was also the day that life decided to sucker punch me. Ten minutes before I held his novel Women in my sweaty palms, I tripped and star-fished across the busiest intersection in my populationdense Japanese city. With a grazed face and an utterly bruised ego, and to the soundtrack of angry car horns beeping at me (as opposed to something evocative and cinematic #realworld), I scraped myself from the pavement and hobbled towards the closest hiding place I could find: a musty bookshop. I sought refuge in the “B” section. I discovered Bukowski and felt immediately better.

Bukowski migrated from Germany to Los Angeles with his family when he was three years old. Despite a massive increase in opportunities in the United States (compared to depression-era Germany, anyway) Charles’ father was frequently unemployed, and he fell to physically abusing his son and his wife.

Young Charles, with his German accent and strange clothes, was ostracised by the neighbourhood kids, and this resulted in a crippling, lifelong shyness.

He was destined to be an outsider.

Flipping to the back of what would become my first Charles Bukowski novel, I made a v. insightful conclusion: Bukowski was not an attractive man.

Acne craters, a big snoz, a little paunch and squinty-beady eyes combine to make something that is the opposite of

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handsome. If you were lucky/unlucky enough to have gone to bed with Bukowski, chances are he would have written about the experience, and chances are you would have been pissed. His descriptions (of sex and of life and of everything) are the opposite of handsome, too. Readers are treated to veiny-dick-slapping, breast-pumping unsexy sex. Rumour has it that many women who read about their encounters with Bukowski were utterly mortified, and Valencia – immortalised in Women – was just one of them: “She had gone to seed, and was a bit too fat. Her breasts were very large but they sagged wearily. She had short clipped blonde hair. She was heavily made up and looked tired. She was in pants, blouse and boots. Pale blue eyes.

Many bracelets on each arm. Her face revealed nothing although she might once have been beautiful.”

Critics turned their noses up at Bukowski at the beginning of his writing career: those short, bone-dry sentences apparently lacked “embellishment”.

Many suggested he also lacked imagination (which was, no doubt, partly down to his lack of embellishment) because he never strayed far from the details of his personal (sex) and professional (he worked for the Post Office, his first novel was Post Office) life.

But therein lies his appeal: he provided something raw and fresh and, as history concedes, there were people who were desperately seeking it. In the

words of his widow, Linda Lee Bukowski: “[He wrote] about a common man doing common things and being honest about his reality. He doesn’t make anything up, there’s no need to. I know because he didn’t lie about us, and it was very embarrassing.”

Today is the Real Life Media Age. There’s Girls’ Hannah Horvath, who spends her time Google-searching “the stuff that gets around the side of condoms” and declaring herself “the voice of her generation”. There’s Lesley Arfin’s account of heroin addiction in her VICE autobiography Dear Diary.

There’s VICE itself. We now expect – no, we demand – these moments from our cultural product. We want the truth.

In 1992 Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles graveyard with a very succinct epitaph: “Don’t Try”. This is pretty fitting for a man who spent his life drinking and womanising and documenting the whole thing with unflinching honesty, whether people were ready for it or not. Arguably, Lena Dunham is able to broadcast her own experiences to the world because long ago Bukowski taught the world that it was totally cool to do so.

On the day of my intersection starfish fall face graze, I left the bookshop with my first Bukowski novel, Ham on Rye, and a collection of his poems. I figured, on the scale of things, a mild dousing of public humiliation was worth it for a chance encounter in section “B” of a musty bookstore, especially if it led me to the words of Bukowski.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOAN GANNIJ/GETTY IMAGES

Charles Bukowski was a warts-and-all writer and womaniser who, via his seminal works Ham on Rye and Post Office and his profound insights into life, basically taught us what it means to be human beings.

Gemma Rasmussen is a writer and global wanderer who lived in Japan before settling down in Sydney.

Japan taught her to respect the (relatively) relaxed pace of Australia as well as totally Kawaii stationery.

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IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN SOFIA COPPOLA BY CAMILLA MACAULAY

Sofia Coppola creates Moments in her films (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette...) that move us all, even if we can’t quite explain why.

Camilla Macaulay is a university student who is obsessed with Classical literature and lives her life as if it was a Greek tragedy. Moments are, therefore, very important to her.

Charlotte: “That was the worst lunch.”

Bob: “What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?” harlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, and Bob, played by Bill Murray, are sitting opposite each other in a Japanese restaurant, in Japan, eating Japanese BBQ food that they have to momentarily hold over a BBQ plate before eating. Yes, they are essentially cooking their restaurant meal themselves and no, Bob’s realisation is not profound in and of itself. While restaurant self-cooking isn’t the norm, it’s also not that weird; some people even want to dine-out self-cook (although I do not understand this at all).

In a less subtle film this moment probably would have ended up on the cutting room floor. But in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation this moment is not only included in the final cut, but is crucial to the final cut. This moment is crucial because Charlotte and Bob (and I’m sure that, if you’ve seen this film, you’re already well aware of this) aren’t really cooking raw Japanese food here. Oh sure, they are physically cooking raw Japanese food, but what they’re really doing is noting aloud, and bonding over, the absurdity of everyday life.

They are not cooking food, they are existentially philosophising, and in this moment I utterly agree with them: what kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food indeed! By which Bob is actually asking: why are we, in our separate lives, that are now together, in Japan, in this Japanese restaurant, at this moment – cooking our own Japanese food, and what does it all mean, if anything?

Probably nothing. But then nothing still means something, right? Because if nothing actually means nothing, then why are we alive? And down into the K-hole we go.

Sofia Coppola is a profound existential auteur. Her plots are scaffolds – lean and supportive – into which she effortlessly weaves her characters and soundtracks to create

PHOTOGRAPH: ZUMA PRESS INC/ALAMY

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Moments. It doesn’t matter that the scaffolding is never replaced with anything concrete because the point of a Sofia Coppola film is to create a whole lot of perfect little Moments that are much, much more than the sum of their parts. She’s explaining our world rather than describing it. Take Marie Antoinette, her 2006 biographical film about the ill-fated last Queen of France. If there’s one of her films in which the plot should be kinda important, it’s probably this historical biography, right? And yet, we don’t learn about the intricate political and economic circumstances of 18th Century France that led to Marie Antoinette’s eventual beheading and the destruction of the French Monarchy. However, when Coppola pairs The Strokes’ ode to 21st Century alienation and futility, Whatever Happened, to a rare moment that Kirsten Dunst’s Antoinette has stolen for herself to dream about who she could be if she were free from the many constraints in her life, we all totally get that it fucking sucks to be trapped and lost, regardless of how young, beautiful and rich you are.

Marie Antoinette will never be played on the History Channel, but her zeitgeist-fuelled Moments give events that do appear on the History Channel meaning.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides so brilliantly captures the extreme emotions of teenage hood that Coppola’s job was almost done for her here. Alas, when the desirous and central Lisbon daughter Lux (Dunst) runs to and engulfs Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) in a pink nightgown, outside her suburban house, in a suburban street, in his car, to Heart’s Crazy on You, Coppola succinctly captures both the lust and heathenism of youth and the paranoia of post-Reagan America that intertwine throughout the novel toward a tragic conclusion.

Near the end of Lost of Translation Coppola provides the perfect non-answer to that question “What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?” when Bob – melancholically and self-assuredly – says to Charlotte: “The more you know who you are and what you want, the less things upset you”.

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YOU’LL NEVER FAIL LIKE COMMON PEOPLE JARVIS COCKER BY MAX LAVERGNE

Jarvis Cocker, as frontman of Pulp, convinced everybody that it was OK to be a bit lame and that, in fact, people who are a bit lame are actually pretty cool. They also get the girl.

Max Lavergne is a Triple J presenter and the publisher of a blog (Really Really Really Trying) that he describes as “unlike anything ever written before”.

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here are things everyone wants to writes songs about. Love, heartache, rage, sex, getting drunk, getting angry at having to do things that you don’t want to do: they’re themes that recur across the spectrum of music. The Dead Kennedys sing about them; Taylor Swift sings about them. It’s easy to understand why: at some point, almost all of us feel those feelings. When we do they make us excited and crazy and spontaneous; all the kinds of things that make a person want to make music. We feel creatively inspired, and it’s easy to rhyme “kiss” with “miss” or whatever, so we sit down and the world gets a new song. It’s the musical path of least resistance.

Some artists go their whole careers exploring those less resistant paths, and that’s fine. But love and anger and heartache don’t always exist in their simplest form; they’re easier to find in people and events that are complex and unpleasant. They’re found in the gaps between people and their desires; in the discrepancy between human drama and the bigness of the universe; in the details that frame the emotional blast of a break-up. It’s in this territory we find Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, singing about the worlds that contextualise the feelings.

On 1998’s Help The Aged he asks, without ever actually asking, how does it feel to know that your parents are getting older? What will you do to stop them ending up feeble and lonely, because once they were young and fun, just like you are now? “Help the aged,” he sings. “One time they were just like you: drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing

glue.” It seems esoteric, as does The Trees – from 2001’s We Love Life album – on which he laments: “The trees, those useless trees / Produce the air that I am breathing / Yeah, the trees, those useless trees / They never said that you were leaving”. But in these songs, and many others, Cocker’s attention to the things that are peripheral to core truths and experiences expresses in new ways the same old feelings that have been expressed by songwriters since the dawn of lyrical music.

The mid-’90s Britpop explosion gave us a lot of excellent songs and some truly great bands and frontmen, but none of them – not even Blur’s Damon Albarn – were as eccentrically brilliant as Jarvis Cocker, the poster boy for British middle-class lads uncomfortable in their own skin. Over Pulp’s seven albums he sang about subjects both plain and achingly oblique. Pulp may or may not be the only band ever to tackle the issue of class tourism, but if one thing’s for sure, it’s that they’re the only one to do so with the eloquent rage Cocker displays on Common People, as he leads a clueless Greek heiress around a supermarket to gawk at the plebs.

Like other great mavericks, he ignores the rules of popular culture while creating art that slots effortlessly into it.

He doesn’t write songs that evoke the emotional responses that people think they want to feel or attach nonsense lyrics to catchy hooks; he presents intricate, fully explored ideas that somehow sit neatly in the three-minute pop song format.

That’s not to say Jarvis Cocker is the first angry young man to sing angrily

about hypocrites and class struggle – that’s been a constant in rock n’ roll – but it’s another way he cast a new mold.

Unlike a lot of ‘90s British punks who were still sporting the same green hair and safety pins that Johnny Rotten worked at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Jarvis Cocker wore a suit and thickrimmed spectacles. He was lanky and erudite. He proved that you could be sexy while you were singing about hypocrites and class struggle, and that spectacles and floppy hair were a reasonable definition of sexy.

He spoke to a generation of university students with words about lying in bed and watching roaches climb the wall.

But perhaps most importantly he proved that you could be angry and funny and sad, all at the same time.

There’s a thick streak of black humour and human tragedy that runs through Cocker’s lyrics: on Common People he sings: “You’ll never fail like common people / You’ll never watch your life slide out of view / And dance and drink and screw / Because there’s nothing else to do”.

As with so much of Pulp’s music, the words aren’t words we’re used to singing along to, but his meaning feels instinctively true. It’s not music you’ll need when you’re making a mix tape for your sweetheart, but chances are you’ll need it sometime. And when you do, you’ll be grateful for Jarvis Cocker.

New Zealand filmmaker Florian Habicht has just finished a documentary film about Pulp and their farewell concert in Sheffield – Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets – will screen at the Sydney Film Festival, between 4-15th June, 2014.

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GOLD DUST AND BLOOD FRIDA KAHLO BY HANNAH COOKE

SELF PORTRAIT: ME AND MY PARROTS (1941) IMAGE: ALAMY. PHOTOGRAPH: PICTORIAL PRESS/ALAMY

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, best known for her monobrow and floral headdresses, who was one hell of a subversive feminist. She had All Of The Things to say, which she did through her often grotesque and confronting work.

Hannah Cooke mostly writes about popular culture (and by “popular culture” we mean Amazing Things Celebrities Do). Don’t let that fool you though, because she once worked for the New Zealand Opera – a fitting environment considering she speaks fluent Italian.

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t’s not surprising to learn that Madonna collects the work of Frida Kahlo. When she loaned the artist’s Self Portrait with Monkey to the Tate Modern in 2001 she compared it to “letting go of one of my precious children”. Madonna – famed for her seamless shrugging on and off of feminine identities; for her performance of womanhoods – perhaps sees something of herself in Frida Kahlo. Frida’s self portraits lay the multiple facets of womanhood bare, and Madonna took on a similar responsibility in the early ‘90s.

We think we know a lot about Frida Kahlo.

Frida. We know her gruesome origin story, the tram accident that impaled her, shattered her spine and leg and left her covered in blood and gold dust, in pain for the rest of her life. We know about her great love, Diego Rivera, the famously large philandering artist whose work lacks the gut punch of his wife’s. We know about her

other lovers (Trotsky! Tina Modotti!); her sharp wit; colourful skirts; monobrow; moustache.

We’re drawn to her tragedies and don’t always see what we’re really looking at when we’re face to face with Frida Kahlo at the gallery gift shop. She’s the dark flipside to Mexico’s other great female icon, the Madonna, but the popular culture overshadows a few weird truths.

She painted herself, she said, “because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best”, and one can’t help but imagine her eyes boring into the mirror as she painted lying on her back, encased in a thick plaster corset. In these portraits her expression rarely changes but her costume and settings do.

She’s sometimes visited by animals, or adds Rivera’s face to her forehead as a third eye. In Self Portrait with Cropped Hair she’s in drag, dangling a gaping pair of scissors dangerously close to her crotch. She’s naked, in traditional

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Mexican costume or with the body of a wounded deer.

She has cut herself open to display her flayed stomach and heart, her shattered spine. Looking at photographs we can see that she exaggerated the thickness of her eyebrows and moustache.

The self-portraits and the myth combined to create an icon. Her gaze, cool and confident in those self-portraits, does not show us as much as we think. In our consumption of Frida Kahlo we elide over inconvenient truths – Stalinism, addiction, the 30 operations (not all, apparently, necessary), miscarriages and eventual leg amputation – in order to keep her as an icon of female strength and pain.

Hiding in plain sight, behind the hype, we find a more complex Frida. Although she called herself la gran ocultadora – the great concealer – Frida’s paintings, diaries, decorated corsets, photos, letters, even her home, show us a radical and proud weirdo, an iconoclast who cross-dressed as a teen, kept monkeys and parrots, called the hollow of Rivera’s armpits her “shelter”. She never shied away from the grotesque – painting a suicide’s feet hanging off the picture frame, along with countless images of gory uteri, ripped stomachs and bloody foetuses. She painted her crowning head bursting out of a front-on vagina in a work called, simply, My Birth. That one doesn’t work very well on a tote bag.

Like a distress flare shooting from a life raft, Frida’s paintings tell us: “I’m here, it’s weird. I’m dealing with it”.

She relished pushing against social norms, expressing her strange yet intensely relatable imaginative world. André Breton called the artist “a ribbon around a bomb” and claimed her as a Surrealist – a label which, decades later, Tracey Emin rejected: “There were many people around her… trying to be weird, when she genuinely was”. Works such as Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick and Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States show us her political concern for indigenous rights and socialism. That she’s now, as Germaine Greer writes, the “patron saint of lipstick and lavender feminism” might have come as a surprise to Frida Kahlo. But if the personal is political, she made the personal universal.

Madonna owns My Birth; in 1990 she told Vanity Fair that she used it as a test to see who was on her level. If you don’t get My Birth, you don’t get Madonna. For someone celebrated for her glossy exterior, Madonna’s identification with Kahlo speaks to her own inner weirdness. She admired Kahlo’s “courage to reveal what a lot of people choose to hide in feelings of being unworthy or in pain” and identified with “her sadness”. While their advocacies might have differed, both women were notorious for their private lives made public and their refusal to live on anyone else’s terms.

For both, the personal became public – and iconic.

Clockwise from top left: Self Portrait With Braid (1941); Self Portrait As Wounded Deer (1946); Henry Ford Hospital (1932); Self Portrait: Diego y yo (1949).

All images: Alamy

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THE HEART BEATS IN ITS CAGE

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN BY CHIP LAMBERT

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hey shine, like light on water. They’re red – holographically red – like freshly spilled blood.

And they’re plump, like that freshly spilled blood has been licked right up. With her lips painted like this, a deathly pale model, Sigrid Agren, floats down a slick, black marble runway – in a cage. Her cage is constricting – it’s narrow from well above her head down to her ankles, and it cuts in at her waist so her arms can only be folded awkwardly below her breasts. It’s also beautiful – lush white feathers are layered to form an angelic pelt across the whole thing. Comparisons obviously abound to actual birds, trapped in actual cages, and that contradiction – the “beautiful tragedy” of it all – is inherent. But all I can think about when I see this look, from Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2009 collection, is Heart in a Cage by The Strokes; a song that aggressively declares: “All our friends they’re laughing at us / All of those you love you mistrust / Help me I’m just not quite myself / Look around there’s no-one else there” before helplessly repeating: “We get to live, live, live, live, live / The heart beats in its cage”.

In an interview undertaken by David Bowie for Dazed and Confused, Alexander McQueen stated: “One side of me is kind of really sombre, and the other side of my brain is very erratic and it’s always this fight against the other… this is why my shows always throw people completely: one minute I see a lovely chiffon dress and the next minute I see a girl in this cage that makes her walk like a puppet and, you know, they can’t understand where it’s coming from because there are so many sides of me in conflict”. McQueen’s Fall 2009 show also included literal pieces of rubbish, in both the set and the head pieces (Coca Cola cans-cum-hair rollers), and insisted – through the repetition of iconic fashion moments including Christian Dior’s houndstooth and the Chanel suit – that both financially and creatively, the fashion industry was recessing.

McQueen’s Fall 2009 show was theatrical (despite McQueen saying: “I hate the theatre, I hate it…I hate going to the theatre, it bores me shitless”) but it was also superbly,

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politically real.

In 2011 The Met held an Alexander McQueen retrospective exhibition, Savage Beauty. It was one of their most successful exhibitions ever and portrayed the obsession with tradition that made McQueen’s work theatrical.

As the catalogue for the exhibition explains: “One of the defining features of McQueen’s collections is their historicism.

While McQueen’s historical references are far-reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian Gothic. As McQueen stated: ‘There’s something... kind of Edgar Allan Poe, kind of deep and kind of melancholic about my collections’.” The exhibition included work from throughout his career: his very last collection, “Plato’s Atlantis”, evoked Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species – with super-organic prints and those alien, hoof-like boots – and it sat next to “Highland Rape”, an upsettingly romantic collection that depicted Scotland’s savage history and was presented on blood-splattered models.

“I think you understand that Britain always led the way in every field possible in the world from art to pop music. Even from the days of Henry VIII. It’s a nation where people come and gloat at what we have as a valuable heritage, be it some good, some bad, but there’s no place like it on earth,” explained McQueen to David Bowie in that aforementioned interview. Beneath British romance there’s British humour, and McQueen had both, and used both, in spades. One of his collections was apparently inspired by a green sweater worn

by Joey on Friends. As an apprentice at Anderson and Sheppard on Savile Row he stitched “I am a cunt” into a suit for Prince Charles. He even invented “bumsters”.

“There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do – but that part is for me. It’s my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There’s a sadness to it, but there’s romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person,” he stated about himself, and about his work. The Heart beats in its cage.

PHOTOGRAPH: FRANCOIS GUILLOT/GETTY IMAGES

Alexander McQueen was the most important fashion designer of his generation.

Chip Lambert is an unemployed academic/freelance writer who enjoys musing on deeply tragic events.

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UNTOUCHABLE SHEEN SYLVIA PLATH BY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

Sylvia Plath was a beautiful, confessional writer and poet who, via both her tragic life and her piéce de résistance, The Bell Jar, discussed the fragility of the Human Condition.

Sarah Nicole Prickett is a New York-based writer and contributing editor at The New Inquiry who recently founded Adult, an erotic magazine by women, for women.

PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

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ugust 1950. Sylvia Plath, a Smith College freshman, went to get her wisdom teeth out. Her journals – which she kept from age 11, in a constant rush, until the coldest month of 1963 – tell us that the doctor asked: gas or novocaine? “Gas,” said Sylvia, firmly. All her life she would resent not the choices she made but the fact of having to choose, coupled with the impossibility of knowing her own mind. On this point, though, she never trembled. She’d rather be knocked out altogether than numbed and awake for one breath.

Feeling it all is rarely compatible with doing much of anything, but aside from her first big breakdown, in ’53, and the half-year of treatment that followed, Sylvia Plath was a model of productivity.

At Smith, she edited The Smith Review and published her poems in the Varsity, and in her junior year she did a prestigious, June-long internship at Mademoiselle. This spell of “pain, parties, and work” in Manhattan became The Bell Jar, which she wrote over the spring and summer of 1961, the year she turned 28. At 30, one month after the novel came out and eight months after discovering her husband, Ted Hughes, was two-timing, Sylvia sealed off the rooms between the kitchen and her sleeping children, then kneeled before the oven, put her head inside, and waited. Gas. “I / am a pure acetylene / virgin,” pleads the narrator in “Fever 103,” my favourite among the dozens of dizzyingly ascendant poems Sylvia

wrote in the rip of time between leaving Hughes and leaving everything.

Acetylene, too, is a gas – transparent and, in its purest form, unstable. The smell it lets is sweet. Bipolarity, the thing with which Sylvia is most often, retroactively diagnosed, tends not to make its sufferers ugly: somehow they shine on no sleep, and can seem much lovelier than they actually are.

In the weeks before she died – if you believe her friends – Sylvia was busy, and content. She wrote – like no one was writing; like hell – every day. It is historically difficult to feel sorry for someone who never looks sick. Who never even looked like she’d get old, and because she didn’t Sylvia assured her Mary Mother status in the Church of Manic Depressive Nightmare Girls.

In truth I think Anne Sexton was a braver, better poet than Sylvia was, but Anne got to be a woman; she turned 40, then 45; she showed the care around her eyes. She too did it with gas, in the garage. Invisible, intractable, no trace on the body: gas is the thing that kills that is most like what made you want to die. Plus, it leaves a pretty corpse.

Sylvia was pretty when she died, like Marilyn, and sometimes I think that’s it: we worship girls who stay beautiful.

“The Fearful”, another of Sylvia’s last poems, goes: “She would rather be dead than fat / Dead and perfect, like Nefertiti”.

Had Sylvia left behind only Ariel, and Other Poems and The Bell Jar, she would indeed be dead and (very near) perfect, her final work a blast of the damnable purity that exists only in

the young, the mad, and the futureless.

She also, however, left a whole stack of those journals. If in her work – as in her desperate, stellar performances of life as a student, a daughter, a wife, an all-American girl – Sylvia had always been a perfectionist (so that even the tripiest of her early poems and stories had a certain untouchable sheen), it is in her diaries where she misspelled, misspoke, and generally made a mess of her self-presentation. For every flight of wild, early ingenuity, there is a passage that reads like late Thought Catalog (you know, comparing her summer job as a nursemaid to “slavery”).

In her diaries you can see all the crude elements – talent, self-interest, drive, loss, and super-ability to feel – that would eventually form a pure, unstable compound, but they rarely come together on the page. You also see that the events of Sylvia’s life are the events of any pretty, smart, hardworking, lucky girl’s life in the ’50s.

What was extraordinary about her was only how she felt about, or dealt with, the ordinary – her every action was an over-reaction. But, god! In this anodyne age of “It Happened to Me” essays, I have to say, it’s a relief to re-read the reverse: The Bell Jar is above all else the story of a girl happening to the world and to life, and not life happening to a girl.

In the weeks before her death, a doctor put Sylvia on antidepressants. At last she’d chosen novocaine. It seems that for Sylvia, feeling less was a fate far worse than the other thing.

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MEGHAN COLLISON AS JANE BIRKIN

SHE’S IN A WORLD OF HER OWN For our All Our Heroes Are Weirdos issue, supermodel Meghan Collison turned stylist to evoke her outsider hero. She chose English actress, singer and muse to fancy handbag designers Jane Birkin, who became a style icon in the ‘60s and has remained one – nay, exploded as one – under the Tumblr generation. Not because of what she wore, but because of how she wore it.

Photographer

Stylist

Creative Director

Writer

NICK HUDSON

MEGHAN COLLISON

ELLE PACKHAM

COURTNEY SANDERS

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ashion isn’t real. Well, OK, obviously the fashion industry is real: clothing exists and is bought and worn by people. Obviously it’s also industrially real: the production of clothing has profound social and ecological impacts the world over. It’s sociologically real, too: trends are a reflection of the social and political climate of the day and people wear these trends in order to project who they are or who they want to be (or who the High Street has told them they have to be) back onto society. In fact, I love fashion precisely because it is so real in so many ways. As Coco Chanel said: “Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening”. But Fashion as an idea, as the thing that facilitates all of these real transactions, is a big, fantastical construction.

Fashion designers create collections and then hire art directors, hair and makeup artists and models to construct their world: an inspirational, desirable world. However, as street style and Tumblr become more pervasive (and, most importantly, more

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find people who reflected the diversity of the creative popular), and personalities replace celebrities (read Fiona community today, and not just the typical model. I wanted the Duncan’s column on page 144 for more) reality is starting to campaign to showcase a variety of characters – people who are enter into the realm in which it was once forbidden. beautiful in their own unique way”.

Meghan Collison knows fantasy, and you’ll know her. She’s The Queens and Kings of Tumblr have ascended to their spent the past seven years working with some of fashion’s most thrones because they represent their personalities with what prestigious creators to construct their realities. She’s featured they wear, which is about being more than fashionable – it’s in campaigns for Prada and Mulberry, on the cover of i-D about being stylish. Yves Saint Laurent said that “over the years magazine and Vogue Italia (“The feeling when those came out I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman was totally incomparable to anything else,” says a giddy who is wearing it”. For our exclusive editorial we asked Meghan Collison) and on the runway for, well, pretty much everyone. to bring along her own clothes and collaborate with our fashion Pick a designer, any designer, and Meghan has walked for them director Elle Packham to evoke an outsider hero who best or worked with them because she can effortlessly morph into represents her. She chose someone who has become a Queen whatever character they require (she also has inexplicably long of Tumblr herself: Jane legs and unearthly, Birkin, the English actress brimstone-forged facial and singer who emerged in features, which probably the ‘60s – Breton t-shirt, has something to do with it slim pants and all – via her too). roles in avant-garde films, “My job is to be someone her duets with Serge else’s image, whatever that Gainsbourg (with whom may be,” explains Meghan. she was also involved “I think it’s really cool to be romantically) and her able to see yourself in so influence on one of the many different ways. I world’s most sought-after completely separate how I handbags: yes, the “Birkin” think I look best from how bag. someone else thinks I look “I feel like this shoot was best. That takes time to get how I like to see myself, as used to, but once you get opposed to how someone there you can be much else likes to see me,” more creative. You’re not explains Meghan. “It was a looking at the monitor nice opportunity because, going: ‘Oh, I don’t like how in seven years of modelling, I look’, you’re looking at it’s the first time I’ve been the monitor going: ‘OK, I able to channel myself see their vision’. I’m not rather than somebody else. afraid to look ugly or You can look at strange, or to go places photographs of Jane Birkin outside of the typical from the ‘60s today, and definition of beauty.” they stand the test of time: Contrarily to the you could put on what glamour she’s now she’s wearing, you could do surrounded by, Meghan your hair like she did, and was discovered in a very The original. Jane Birkin in the swinging ‘60s. it would still look modern.” real place: her local mall.

Birkin’s creative and sensual spirit combined to create the “My mother heard on the radio that a modelling agency was kind of effortless style that iconic dressers such as Alexa Chung hosting a model search at the mall and I fitted the height mimic today (only with far less panache, although Alexa also requirement. I went to the search and I ended up – much to my got a Mulberry bag in her honour: the “Alexa”). Meghan donned surprise – winning,” she explains modestly. little white lace rompers, casual double denim and a daisy or This issue of Catalogue celebrates the weirdos of the past two for this editorial and, while she certainly looks like a young who have shaped our cultural landscape: real people who Birkin (the resemblance is actually uncanny), there’s something achieved profound things. Fashion imagery is still largely indefinable in these images that suggests similarities in fantastical (we need only look at the Photoshop work on glossy temperament, attitude and outlook, too: an X-Factor created magazine covers – highlighted by the Fourth Estate of fashion, by who these two are, and not what they’re wearing.

Jezebel – to prove this), but the advent and subsequent It’s high time we started celebrating the people who wear the overwhelming popularity of street style has meant that the clothes as much as the clothes they’re wearing. Not only is it fashion industry is adopting real people to propel their visions more interesting to look at, but, as Diana Vreeland (who was forward (and onto millions of digital screens). In his first recently immortalised in the excellent documentary Diana campaign as art director for Diesel, Nicola Formichetti (former Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel) said: “The only real elegance fashion editor at Dazed and Confused and Lady Gaga’s stylist) is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it”. “street” cast his models from Tumblr because he “wanted to

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The Vintage Clothing Shop blouse

The Vintage Clothing Shop blouse

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Karla Spetic top

ACNE sweater

Skirt from The Vintage Clothing Shop

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Scanlan and Theodore top and cardigan Photographer NICK HUDSON at 1+1 Mgmt/Stylist and Model MEGHAN COLLISON at NEXT Creative Director ELLE PACKHAM/Hair TAICHI SAITO/Makeup CHRISTINE CHERBONNIER at Art Department Photographer’s Assistants DEAN PODMORE, BILLY YUAN

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THE AQUARIANS Because not all weirdos are good weirdos, we explore the psychopathic nature of Source Family cult leader Jim Baker.

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Writer

Photographer

Fashion Director

COURTNEY SANDERS

JO DUCK

ELLE PACKHAM

really dislike people who re-tell stories. People who repeat stories to those who have already heard them are the conversational equivalent of people who meander down the middle of a footpath without concern for anyone who wants to reach their destination: they’re slow, selfish and unaware. However, for one story in particular, I am this person. Maybe it’s because I just like hearing the sound of my own voice, or maybe it’s because this story is awesome. But considering my story is actually from Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times’ “Best Seller list”, I like to think it’s a healthy combination of the two.

In his book, Ronson (who also wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats) attempts to answer the questions: “Who are psychopaths?” and “What are psychopaths capable of?” He

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interviews psychiatrists and psychopaths in equal measure and traces the history of the study of psychopathy to Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, who invented the Hare Psychopathic Checklist, a 20 point checklist still used to diagnose psychopathy today. As this checklist confirms (it includes characteristics like “grandiosity” and “inability to accept responsibility for own actions”), the reason that we are so fascinated by psychopaths is their ability to be simultaneously charismatic as hell and dangerous. How can someone so nice be so evil?

Consider the above, and now consider cult leaders. Charles Manson, Jim Jones and Joseph Smith all charmed and manipulated people into performing their bat-shit-crazy, selfserving visions. Christopher Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great, describes Smith (the founder of Mormonism) as

Left: Ellis wears linen suit from Skin Deep. Clodelle wears Dolly Up Vintage Emporium Dress

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charismatic, while also noting that Smith believed he had supernatural powers, because: of course. For our All Our Heroes Are Weirdos issue, our fashion director Elle Packham researched cult leaders (who are heroes to both a small but devout group of people and, I imagine, themselves in their own minds), and became obsessed with Jim Baker, leader of the Source Family cult. Complete with long, grey hair and beard (and bearing a striking resemblance to modern super-producer Rick Rubin), Jim Baker killed a couple of dudes, robbed a couple of banks, then started a successful vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood frequented by John Lennon, then coerced a bunch of hippies into living with him in his mansion in order to find enlightenment. It was the ‘70s, man. The members of this new “family” had surnames: Aquarius, middle names: The, leader: Father Yod. Yod demonstrated his “wisdom” to these followers by taking 12 wives and rejecting modern medicine (the authorities became involved when a baby nearly died from a rudimentary Staph infection). In the trailer for

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Clockwise from left: Annabel wears The Vintage Clothing Shop dress, Marysia swimmer bottoms, Four Winds Gallery cuffs; Eden wears: Jac + Jack poncho, Acne pants; Clodelle wears: Purl Harbour jumpsuit, Dolly Up Vintage Emporium blouse; Ellis wears: Skin Deep shirt and pants

the 2012 documentary film The Source Family, a former follower states: “I know this sounds insane, but I saw lightning bolts coming out of his ears”. Well, if that isn’t charisma, I really don’t know what is.

When Yod (who had actually renamed himself Ya Ho Wa 13 by this point in order to properly reflect his godliness), without any previous hang-gliding experience, attempted to hang-glide off a 400m cliff in Oahu, Hawaii, his rejection of modern medicine really bit him in the ass: he crash-landed and lay dying for nine hours. At this point his followers, like the protagonist Larry in Nick Cave’s song Dig, Lazarus, Dig (which I imagine is based, if not on the Source Family themselves, then on some other, similar incarnation of a godly leader and his disciples) arguably “went back to their homes and their husbands, with secret smiles in the corners of their mouths”.

On these pages you’ll find Elle Packham’s and photographer Jo Duck’s brilliant interpretation of the Source Family cult, because an awesome story deserves re-telling.

Annabel wears The Vintage Clothing Shop top

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Clodelle wears Lover top, Purl Harbour jumpsuit

Above from left: Eden wears Dion Lee top, Four Winds Gallery earrings; Annabel wears Dion Lee top, Four Winds Gallery cuffs and hair pins; Clodelle wears Dolly Up Vintage Emporium dress, Four Winds Gallery earrings Right: Annabel wears Lover shirt and dress

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Left: Ellis wears Skin Deep linen suit, Saba shirt, Strand Hatters hat, cane and gloves. This page: Clodelle (top) wears Jac + Jack jumper, Nanushka skirt; Annabel (bottom left) wear Lover shirt and dress; hand (bottom right) wears Four Winds Gallery cuff

From left: Ellis wears Skin Deep shirt and pants; Clodelle wears Dolly Up Vintage Emporium dress; Eden wears The Vintage Clothing Shop dress; Annabel wears The Vintage Clothing Shop top and pants, Four Winds Gallery cuffs

Above: Eden wears Zimmermann Dress Right: Annabel wears Haider Ackermann top from Poepke, Four Winds Gallery choker

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Above from left: Annabel wears Inès De La Fressange cardigan, Tome skirt, Four Winds Gallery cuffs; Eden wears Ann Demeulemeester blouse from Poepke, 3.1 Phillip Lim pants from Robby Ingham; Ellis wears Jac + Jack shirt, Skin Deep pants

Photographer JO DUCK Creative Director ELLE PACKHAM Fashion Assistant RACHEL COLLESS Hair DALE DELAPORTE at Names Agency using TIGI Hair Assistant FRANCES FRAISER Makeup JACLYN HNITKO at Artist Group using MAC Models ANNABEL at Chic, EDEN at Chic, CLODELLE at IMG, ELLIS SILVERMAN Very special thanks to Menabillie Manor

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3.1 Phillip Lim robbyingham.com APC apc.fr Acne acnestudios.com Alice Lee alicelee.co.uk Anna Quan annaquan.com Ann Demeulemeester poepke.com ASOS asos.com/au Bernard Delettrez bernarddelettrez.com Bijules bijulesnyc.com Bliss Lau blisslau.com by johnny byjohnny.com.au Camilla and Marc camillaandmarc.com Carolina Amato carolinaamato.com Carly Hunter carly-hunter.com Carven carven.com Christian Louboutin christianlouboutin.com Dion Lee dionlee.com Dolly Up Vintage Emporium dollyupvintageemporium.com Dries Van Noten poepke.com Ellery elleryland.com Equipment equipmentfr.com Eugenia Kim eugeniakim.com Falke falke.com Four Winds Gallery fourwindsgallery.com Giuseppe Zanotti giuseppezanottidesign.com Grant grantfashion.wordpress.com Guy Laroche guylaroche.com Haider Ackermann poepke.com I Love Mr. Mittens ilovemrmittens.com

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Inès de La Fressange uniqlo.com/uk Issey Miyake isseymiyake.com Jac + Jack jacandjack.com Junko Shimada junkoshimada.com Kaelen kaelennyc.com Karla Spetic karlaspetic.com Karen Walker karenwalker.com Kaylene Milner kaylenemilner.com LaCoste lacoste.com.au Lea Peckre leapeckre.com Levi’s levis.com.au Lover loverthelabel.com Maison Martin Margiela maisonmartinmargiela.com Marc Jacobs marcjacobs.com Marissa Webb shop.marissa-webb.com Martina Spetlova martinaspetlova.com Marysia marysiaswim.com Masha Ma masha-ma.com MAWI mawi.co.uk Metalicious metalicious.com MM6 maisonmartinmargiela.com Monki monki.com Nanushka nanushka.hu NLP nlpwomen.com Novis novisnyc.com Penny Sage pennysage.com Piece d’Anarchive piecedanarchive.com PLUMA pluma-italia.com Ports 1961 ports1961.com

Purl Harbour purlharbour.com.au Richard Chai facebook.com/richardchainy Rxmance rxmance.com Saba saba.com.au Sacai sacai.jp Sara Phillips saraphillips.com.au Scanlan Theodore scanlantheodore.com Skin and Threads skinandthreads.com Skin Deep skindeep.com.au Sonia Rykiel soniarykiel.com South West Traders southwesttraders.com.au Sportmax sportmax.com Stuart Weitzman stuartweitzman.com Stolen Girlfriends Club stolengirlfriendsclub.com Strand Hatters strandhatters.com.au Suecomma Bonnie suecommabonnie.com Suzanne Rae suzannerae.com Talbot Runhof talbotrunhof.com TOME tomenyc.com The Vintage Clothing Shop 02 9238 0090 Shop 7, St James Arcade, 80 Castlereagh Street This is The Uniform thisistheuniform.com Thursday Sunday thursdaysunday.com Ungaro ungaro.com Vanishing Elephant vanishingelephant.com Voodoo voodoohosiery.com.au Zimmermann zimmermannwear.com

Photograph by Bobby Whigham

STOCKISTS

FIONA DUNCAN

Fiona Duncan is a NY writer who contributes to Adult magazine, All Day Everyday and The New York Times’ The Cut. Here she opines about how, as celebrities become more accessible, we expect more from them, and rightly so.

HDTV Killed the Movie Star

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efore HD, the movie star was an icon. A pin-up.

From Marilyn Monroe and James Dean through Edie Sedgwick, Warren Beatty, Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, their character was their image and this was their power. As a character, flat and controlled, the celebrity acted as a symbol. They were a totem: a doll we could dress up, narrate stories with, seduce ourselves through. They were a figure our imaginations could play with. The games were ‘Action Hero’, ‘Romantic Heroine’, ‘Hot or Not’, ‘In or Out’, ‘Who Wore It Better’, ‘And the Award Goes To…’ Watching the Oscars pre-show this year, I sensed the stars were nervous. There was a quake in their eyes, a performance anxiety; this was new. I noticed a difference because I’ve known different. I’ve watched the Oscar Awards ceremonies every year since I was a babe – first on a 13-inch cathode ray tube TV, then on a 20-inch flat screen, then on miscellaneous mediocre monitors, and this year: 59-inches of HDTV. In live HD we see celebrities for what they are: made up.

Literally, covered in makeup. Hollywood’s faces are contoured and surgically enhanced. Primer, concealer, foundation, highlighter, blush, bronzer, liner, mascara, Botox, collagen, lifts, fillers and dermabrasion all function, beyond preserving youth, to shape faces into icons. The look is 2D. Smooth. Flat.

Static. Such image control worked on film and in the grainy broadcast of TV. Not, though, in HD. In HD, we see cakey makeup and it makes us question what else is made up. Why do we worship Sandra Bullock? Brad Pitt? Jared Leto?

As high-def has proliferated, so too has the low-res image.

The low-res image – or, as artist/theorist Hito Steyerl calls it, the “poor image” – is your smart phone snap, your YouTube rip, your four-frame gif, a “copy in motion”. The poor image is Ellen’s Oscars selfie. The highlight of the ceremonies this year: halfway through, host Ellen Degeneres turned her Samsung Galaxy smartphone on herself and 10 of Hollywood’s elite for an “impromptu” selfie. She then tweeted the image to @TheEllenShow’s 28 million followers, breaking the record for most retweeted tweet. It’s been shared over 3.4 million times at the last count.

Poor images, Steyerl writes, are “popular images… they express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: it’s opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission”.

Contemporary celebrity culture is defined by these two modes: HD and the poor image. On the one hand, we have a medium that’s grand and revealing: the enhanced resolution

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of HD is, in a way, too real – it can trigger an uncanny repulsion when turned on subjects we’re used to seeing under a more flattering gloss. The poor image, on the other hand, is pure iconography: an infinitely reproducible, crowd surfing bit of information.

Before HD and the poor image (that is, before the Internet), celebrities could present themselves to the public as their management team wished – it was a one-way broadcast that they controlled. A one-way broadcast through a one-way mirror: we could see and hear the stars but they couldn’t see or hear us. Now, with the resolution turned up, with viewers speaking up, it’s like the light has been turned on, on our side of the glass. The stars can see and hear us.

And we are calling them out. One by one. In the last year, the public has tweeted to take down such canonised celebs as Alec Baldwin, Woody Allen, Terry Richardson and Bill Cosby.

This, I think, is why the stars’ eyes quaked at the Oscars.

Celebrities are facing scrutiny like never before: not only are they filmed in HD but those stark recordings are now immediately available to be shared, edited and analysed.

The death of the movie star has wrought new life – true-tolife. The latest celebrity set is composed of those who give in to new media, who use poor images to connect with audiences and who are comfortable enough in their “stars... they’re just like us!” humanity to be seen in HD. Celebrities – like Rihanna, James Franco, Lena Dunham, Marina Abramovic, Kanye West, Azealia Banks and Tavi Gevinson – who boast “realness”.

Humanity doesn’t need people as icons, but we do need them as role models. We need precedents of how to live because living is hard. As a lover of spectacle and of ethics I wish to see celebrated those individuals who are not only “real” but good. Three weeks ago I took a portrait of Woody Allen down from my wall. He was tacked above my desk for six years: a black and white Annie Hall-era Woody watching down on me. I couldn’t take his stare anymore; the allegations of child abuse were too confusing.

Since Woody, I’ve become obsessed with researching the biographies of my heroes. I want to know how those who made things I love made them. At whose expense? If “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, as Joan Didion wrote, then the celebrities I want to tell me stories are those who’ve lead lives worth repeating. Patti Smith, William Burroughs, Chris Kraus, Angela Davis, Catherine Breillat, David Foster Wallace, Daniel Clowes, Tilda Swinton and Miuccia Prada all passsed the test. My A-list is a party of freaks, perverts and fuck-ups, all also good, giving and game.

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ELSIE STONE

A column about all the ways in which the world is sucky plus a few ways in which it’s not sucky at all

Lost Kids

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hen I was growing up, my brother and I used to play a game called Lost Kids. We would pretend that we were marooned somewhere with no adults and had to fight for our own survival. We made food from smashed walnuts and petals we found on our grandparents’ lawn, and made the best forts in the world. Although our ideas of (pretend) fighting to survive were pretty different (Ed focused on hunting and gathering, I focused on befriending dolphins), there was always a happy ending. We were our own heroes.

I can’t remember my first hero, but I don’t remember not loving one. I remember telling everyone that Harry Potter lived on the tops of clouds where we couldn’t see him, and that David Attenborough was probably my long lost uncle. I loved Pippi Longstocking, and audacious Alice when she stepped through the Looking Glass – I was obsessed with the idea of ordinary people, kids, who ended up becoming extraordinary.

Whether they wore capes or cloaks, used wands or read books, they had still started out just like me – and while that was true, it remained true that anyone could be a hero.

Because they seemed so natural to me, it was a long time before I realised that a hero is a choice. Just like shoes, friends and food, we pick the people who we want to revere. And because it is amazingly fun (BAD AND IMMORAL) to judge people based on absolutely zero background knowledge, I firmly believe that a person’s choice of hero is wildly reflective of their character, and I use it as the basis of whether or not I would be their friend. For example, my friend told me that her current hero is “Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat’s gay relationship”, which is why she is so cool. It’s also why all of the people who choose Marilyn Monroe as a heroine seem well-meaning in their body positivity, but ultimately a bit silly.

Even though some choices seem a bit silly, it gets much worse – unfathomable, or even just really fucking wrong.

These are very bad kinds of people, and I don’t want to be their friend. Obviously I am talking about the throngs of girls in the world who still somehow, quite unbelievably, think that Justin Bieber is cute. The relationship between Justin and his fans transcends one of admiration, or even reverence. It’s something entirely different, a sort of worship that renders Bieber god-like and infallible, regardless of the new levels of fuckheadedness that he achieves regularly. It seems much less like a fandom and more like a cult.

It’s also just really fucking weird to me that these supposed

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heroes don’t really need to do anything to earn the admiration they receive; all they really do is exist. I feel this way about people who love Kate Middleton because, literally, when has she ever actually done anything? She’s classy and nice and a beautiful princess, but she never says much. Her presence and existence alone has awarded her legions of admirers. It’s oddly the same with the thousands of people who seem to idolise Lorde without ever having understood what exactly her songs are trying to say. They don’t really care about who Lorde is or what she does, they only care about what she is.

The sense of superiority that these fans feel about their heroes worries me because it completely ruins the point of heroes. It doesn’t make sense that heroes are idolised as better than the rest of us if the whole point of heroes is that anyone could be one. We’re meant to all be able to throw on a mask and cape and save the world.

This new kind of hero-worship is already taking its toll on the most important source of heroes in the universe: books.

The hunger for heroes, and complete lack of care about what they’re actually doing, means that the standard of writing and plotlines in recent history has been pretty fucking bad. All readers care about is the hero – what they’re wearing and eating, who they’re banging – which is why stupid idiots worldwide actually read all four Twilight books and why fanfiction from the most creepy and depressing corners of the internet can be copy and pasted into e-book format and called literature.

The heroines of those books aren’t even colourful – they have no depth or complexity – but yet they’re adored. Writers aren’t taking risks with their heroes anymore, and people have stopped noticing. In a world where there are countless heroines actually worth caring about (Lyra Silvertongue, Elizabeth Bennett, Hermione Granger) I feel rather Kanye West circa the 2009 VMAs about all this. Because recognition is important, and it matters when it’s not directed towards the right people.

It matters because our heroes do more than reveal what type of person we are. They define our daydreams, inform our goals and shape our wishes. We are the people we are today because of who we wanted to be when we were younger, even if we never actually end up as brave warriors or famous explorers. We don’t become our heroes, but they do become a part of us. We need to be more careful about the people who we choose to carry inside us or else the world is going to be brimming with exactly the wrong type of Lost Kids.

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