GLAMCULT 2014 / ISSUE 6 / #105

“I must pray, baby.”

FREE 2014—Issue 6 #105

Glamcult Independent Style Paper

Issue 6 #105 Update

Cult 10 Autumn/Winter 2014 20

Alex Mullins 48 Jungle 54 Beaty Heart 56

Platform

Report

Matthew Plummer- Fernandez 14 Interviews

FKA twigs Meadham Kirchhoff Eva & Adele

34 38 44

ITS 2014

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Visual Essays

You can’t know... 62 We live by faith... 68

Colophon Editor-in-Chief Joline Platje joline@glamcult.com

Art Director Marline Bakker marline@glamcultstudio.com

Creative Director Rogier Vlaming rogier@glamcultstudio.com

Graphic Design Glamcult Studio: Beau Bertens Rutger de Vries

Fashion Editor Leendert Sonnevelt leendert@glamcultstudio.com Copy Editor Megan Roberts Editorial intern Kelsey Lee Jones kelsey@glamcult.com

Sales sales@glamcult.com Contributors: Britte Kramer, Daniëlle van Dongen, Fay Breeman, Jean-François Adjabahoué, Julie Barnasconi, Justinas Vilutis, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Maricke Nieuwdorp, Marlo Saalmink, Matthijs van Burg, Sander van Dalsum Photographers: Brendan Baker & Daniel Evans, Dan Wilton, Dominic Sheldon, Duy Vo, Jeroen W. Mantel, Michiel Meewis, Stef Van Looveren, Taufiq Hosen

Cover Photography: Dominic Sheldon

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Quotes I must pray, baby.

—FKA twigs

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Cult 2 New York New York Happy Happy (NY NY HP HP), 2014, performance (in association with Rhizome), New Museum, New York

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Actress

Ed Fornieles

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De Haperende Mens Festival

A/W 2014 collection C*NT, photography: Danny Baldwin

Sara VanDerBeek, Ancient Solstice, 2014, Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures NY and The Approach London

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James Pilcher

Under Construction 1

“Remember, as far as anyone knows we are a nice normal family k” tweets London / LA-based artist Ed Fornieles during the run-up to his first UK exhibition.

A body of online work presented alongside sculpture and performance art forms the basis of Modern Family, which will run this autumn at the Chisenhale Gallery. Fornieles is most widely known for works that enact a collapse between online and office spaces. He’s obsessed with the Internet, because, you know, “on the Internet we all hold hands”. This new show skews the picture of archetypal American middle-class family life. Through a journey to a distant yet familiar suburban landscape, we witness a distorted “Pinterest reality” where those aspirational JPEGs you collect become reality. We are also invited to join a family BBQ as an artificial Californian sun sets over the gallery.

Get a sneak peek of what to expect via the Chisenhale Instagram, as Fornieles takes over. By Kelsey Lee Jones 19 September until 9 November, Chisenhale Gallery, London www.edfornieles.com/front2.html www.chisenhale.org.uk

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It’s a cruel world. The emotions evoked by natural disasters and wars are relentless, and strike when least expected. With some dozen noise, industrial and psych bands, plus a range of visual artists, De Haperende Mens Festival (‘The Faltering Man Festival’) addresses these uncontrollable emotional states, while celebrating the artists whose work tackles the theme. There’s the noise-turned-pop anthems of Lust For Youth, who channel the spirit of New Order’s disco without losing track of their industrial roots. The visceral club compositions of Actress, meanwhile, turn every room into an urban twilight zone, full of synthesizing house beats with muddy ambient undertones.

Together with a film programme curated

by Imagine Film Festival artistic director Chris Oosterom and an exhibition featuring the work of true crime-obsessed Belgian artist Danny Devos and Zeger Reyers, who’s known for his installations covered in fungi, this cornucopia of interrelated disciplines will surely evoke some deeply supressed emotions.

By Sander van Dalsum

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He never takes himself too seriously— and we like that in a guy. Escapism is an element James Pilcher misses in contemporary fashion shows, and consequently the London-based menswear designer strives to tell stories with his garments and collections. Through conceptual designs, masculine silhouettes and a playful yet dark undertone, Pilcher welcomes the audience into his world, which is a breath of fresh air in the static scene of menswear. Pilcher graduated from the MA Menswear programme at London’s Royal College of Art, having assisted Gareth Pugh and Stefán Orschel-Read during his studies. Despite the conspicuous presence of a ’90s darling (the leggings), his graduate collection, C*NT, has a futuristic feel to it. The geometric patterns are beautiful and dazzling. Pilcher describes his designs as bold and brash; we would add an extra adjective: bold, brash and delicate. His knitted sweater shows the love and care that’s been put into all his garments.

By Daniëlle van Dongen

12 September, De Melkweg, Amsterdam www.haperendemens.nl www.melkweg.nl

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Anyone interested in photography has probably already laid eyes on Foam Magazine. For some 12 years, the Amsterdam-based publication affiliated with the eponymous museum has showcased the best of international photography to a discerning, aestheticsavvy audience. This autumn, to coincide with a redesign and name change to Foam, the magazine presents the exhibition Under Construction—New Positions in American Photography in the mother museum. As new formalism becomes the dominant aesthetic in contemporary photography, Under Construction presents a selection of young visual artists for whom the process of creating an image is just as important as the image itself. This new guard explores and manipulates the bases of the photographic process, prompting the audience to reflect on the boundaries and the rules of the medium, broadening our ideas of how to approach a photographic object and setting us free from preconceived ideas on the subject in the process. Their output may be varied, but these artists are bound by the same intention: revealing the construction of an image. Ultimately, this exhibition helps answer some of the questions

raised by the use of photography as a tool to express more than the visible. By Jean-François Adjabahoué 17 September until 10 December, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam www.foam.org

Gc Update

Cult 6

Kingdom, photography: Davis Kirkland

Still from the video The Future Queen of the Screen, 2011

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Helen Carmel Benigson

Stargayzer Festival

Stills from Item Falls, 2013, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

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A/W14 collection, photography: Greta Ilieva

A/W14 collection 3, 2, 1, 0, photography: Kasia Zacharko

Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin

Sam Mc London

Ewa Stepnowska 5

Austin, Texas is probably not the first place that comes to mind when somebody mentions the next big thing in queer arts—but the times are a-changin’.

This autumn’s most exciting (LGBTQI) festival is, in fact, taking place in the very heart of the Lone Star State. Between the 12th and 14th of September, more than a hundred acts are set to perform during Stargayzer Festival across three stages at Carson Creek Ranch, including a breath-taking amphitheatre on the banks of the Colorado River.

Soundtracking the festival are synth-pop Torontonians Trust, rapper Cakes Da Killa, drag queen-cum-rapper Christeene, JD Samson, who operates at the intersection of music, art, activism and fashion, LA producer Kingdom and a host of our favourite drag queens. See you shortly, USA! We’re on our way to keep Austin weird… By Leendert Sonnevelt

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“BUFFTING AND FIT” says her CV; “video artist, rapper and wife”. Helen Carmel Benigson, aka rapper Princess Belsize Dollar, is a multidisciplinary artist and performer from London, and lover of sushi, poker and pink palm trees. With her highly visceral work, Benigson invites us into a frenzied, hyper-saturated world where her performances explore the space of the screen and the negotiation of intimacy, territory and body within cyberspace. She creates immersive environments—messy, awkward, digital carnivals where she seeks to contrast ideas of modern-day utopia and dystopia. Obsessed with the concept of identity—or rather, multiple identities— Benigson presents various versions of herself “in different times and spaces”, always playing the protagonist in her own work. By Kelsey Lee Jones www.helenbenigson.com

12 until 14 September, Pine Street Station, Austin www.stargayzerfest.com

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Even though Ewa Stepnowska’s gradu­ ation collection, 3, 2, 1, 0, was inspired by playgrounds, kids and more specifically the digitally manipulated, mysterious photographs of children by both Loretta Lux and Ruud van Empel, her pieces are anything but fluffy and cute—playful, perhaps, but that has more to do with her penchant for 1930s Polish football kits than anything else. Anyway, this girl certainly knows how to tie her own laces.

While studying for a BA at the Fashion Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Stepnowska developed her own techniques of weaving and braiding various sheer, light and textured materials. Oh, and she designed her own footwear. The latter experiment has proven to be very fruitful for the Chicago-born, Warsaw-based designer who interned at Marc Jacobs in New York. We’re intrigued to see where she’s headed next. By Joline Platje

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Absurd, gregarious, gaudy psychodramas—all played out in film. American artist Ryan Trecartin’s work depicts an intensely disorientated yet familiar world.

Fair warning: watching these videos may leave your brain feeling somewhat bent, as you’re confronted with the identity flux of modern-day existence.

Trecartin’s latest project, in collaboration with long-term creative partner Lizzie Fitch, is soon to take over London’s Zabludowicz Collection gallery. Viewers are invited to experience four separate films, all within a constructed and sealed environment—reflective of a shifting state in collective consciousness.

A reconfiguration of the installation Priority Innfield, it was commissioned for the 55th Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, busy boy Trecartin will also present another section of his oeuvre in Germany, with a zany two-dimensional display at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. By Kelsey Lee Jones

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This autumn/winter, Sam McWilliams of Sam Mc London is giving his trademark manga-esque characters a much-needed day off. The result is print-infused street wear with high-end fashion sens­ ibilities. The label’s A/W14 (unisex) collection mixes McWilliams’s background in graphic design with a surprisingly restrained, beige-dominated colour palette. Since the launch of Sam Mc London in 2010, the creative director’s unique translation of what he calls “Anglo-Asian inspiration” has gotten stronger by the season. Not only does this collection remind us of 2000s Gaultier and Lang, it also contains that touch of early sci-fi robotics that makes it the perfect attire for our next winter rave. By Leendert Sonnevelt www.sammclondon.com

www.ewastepnowska.com 2 October until 21 December, Zabludowicz Collection, London www.zabludowiczcollection.com 14 September until 11 January 2015, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin www.kw-berlin.de

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Gc Update

TURN OFF THE LIGHTS THE CHOICE IS YOURS

SWING FROM THE CHANDELIER #SNEAKERSWOULD

Cult 10

By Kelsey Lee Jones

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Menswear designer Devon Halfnight LeFlufy is riding waves right now—waves of coconut water, if the name of his second collection is anything to go by.

Not only is the Canadian designer’s aesthetic super fresh, he’s fresh in the game too, having only recently graduated from Antwerp’s prestigious Royal Academy of Arts. But this newbie is already punching above his weight: his first collection, True Believer, was snapped up by Carol Lim and Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony at his graduate show. Halfnight LeFlufy’s clothes are the product of a stylistic game of dot-todot between LA, Antwerp and London, resulting in luxurious menswear shaped from eclectic materials—rubber and faux fur sit side by side—that retains the subtleties of street wear.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Halfnight LeFlufy was an elaborately

conceived designer moniker; but it is in fact the designer’s brilliantly surreal birth name. With such a name and a far-out design aesthetic, it’d be natural to expect a wacky designer facade to match. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Although his designs are playful, Halfnight LeFlufy himself is much more conservative: “I don’t think my appearance meets people’s expect­ ations when they meet me. I almost always wear a white T-shirt and jeans,” he confesses. He takes his job as a designer seriously too: “I love the restrictions and structure of fashion. Even though I work in a creative medium, it is not art; it is applied art and there are rules. That’s what makes it exciting.”

Perhaps it’s Halfnight LeFlufy’s clarity of vision that has brought him such early success. Paradoxically, his interest in fashion came to him later in

A/W14 collection Coconut Water, photography: Alex Salinas

Devon Halfnight LeFlufy

his life, but he quickly found his own style: “As I discovered fashion, it was the Antwerp designers that had a visceral attraction to me,” he says. Understandable, then, that he set his heart on studying in Belgium. “I came to Antwerp just for the school. It just seemed like the only place to go. I didn’t apply any­ where else.” And who could blame him for wanting to tread in the footsteps of illustrious designers such as Bernhard Willhelm, Haider Ackermann, Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela? But the Canadian has also always had an eye on the US, demonstrating an obsession with American iconography.

Teeming with teenage sensuality, Halfnight LeFlufy’s collections visualize dreamscapes inspired by his fascination with escapism and psychedelia, and much like the underground hip hop he listens to, it’s surreal, colourful, intelligent

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stuff. His A/W14 collection is Coconut Water—“The name was a joke,” he explains, “the names always end up being an joke”—confronts what he terms “Tumblr ADHD”: the super-satur­ ation of branding and logos, image overload and the miasma of the big wide Internet. “This collection was about the way the Internet changes our collective unconscious and the visual vocabulary of our time,” he says, the layered illustrations referencing the fact that “you have to see ten things before you see the one thing you’re actually interested in.”

Halfnight LeFlufy taps into this collective unconscious with a lexicon of appropriated signs and symbols that are instantly recognizable. He’s taken, for example, the Pepsi logo and the Japanese Yen symbol and worked them into a mixed-up digital print.

“To me,” he says, “Coconut Water is a strange cultural symbol phenomenon.”

To us, it is also a reflection of youth and excitement, captured through an irreg­ ular selection of materials, including a transparent rubber jacket next to faux mohair vests and coats. We also see statement knitwear, printed dress pants, jerseys and velvet tracksuits— all in vivid reds, greens and yellows.

Clever detailing adds the LeFlufy magic, with blue iridescent foiling and digital print work. Headbands bring it all back to the street, while Hawaiian ritualistic garlands worn as accessories are just another appropriation of image from context—and perhaps the inspiration for the collection’s name… www.dhalfnight.com

Gc Update

HOP INTO BED THE CHOICE IS YOURS

DIVE INTO MADNESS #SNEAKERSWOULD

Cult 12

By Maricke Nieuwdorp

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Maps to the Stars 13

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For What If

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Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is far removed from superheroes dressed in tights with fluttering capes. You know, those robosuited geniuses and alien beings with conveniently all-American values who save humanity and seem to be tip-top blockbuster material time and time again. You won’t find ’em here. Personally, we prefer our graphic-novel adaptations a little more like Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s sequel. Or like other more obscure, sometimes cynical but always mature and beautifully made films written in the ’90s.

Frank Miller, creator of the neonoir graphic novel series Sin City first published in 1991, is not afraid of bloated black and bright white. His artwork shows obvious inspiration from classic film noir of the Fifties and Sixties—his shadow work, for instance, or his bright contrasts and styling (trench coats! lit cigarettes!). He also evokes that era’s best pulp, detective and genre fiction.

Basin City, popularly dubbed Sin City, is Miller’s fictional American locale, a decaying city with a seedy underbelly where crime and prostitution are rife.

Arriving nine years after the original film, for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For Miller once again teams up with Robert Rodriguez for another dose of neo-noir, sexploitat­ ion and videogame violence that does the original paper version proud.

Just like Daniel Clowes’ super-cool graphic novel about Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer. The first serialized instalment of Ghost World was in 1993 before appearing in book form

in 1997. Enid and Rebecca are cynical, nerdy and intelligent teenagers on their way to adulthood. They’re drifting in their hometown, relieving their boredom by unleashing their acid tongues on everyone and everything. A wonderful story about growing up and friendship, and with a smart take on modern life, the 2001 film version, starring Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch, is just as cool. Nice detail: Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff previously made a documentary about underground cartoonist Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1994).

Max Allan Collins published the first instalment of his graphic novel Road to Perdition in 1998, inspired by the Japanese manga Lone Wolf and Cub. Collins’ stylish crime story is set during the Great Depression. The life of a cold-blooded assassin takes a dramatic turn when his son discovers the truth about his profession. In a nice twist, Collins’ fictional characters interact with historical gangsters from the 1930s.

Sam Mendes’ 2002 film version, with Tom Hanks and his classic gangster hat in the lead, fell on good soil. The filmmakers didn’t just rely on the graphic novel; stylistically, they looked closely at Edward Hopper’s paintings as well.

Release: 28/8 (NL), 29/8 (UK), 17/9 (BE)

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David Cronenberg’s representation of Hollywood is downright perverse, and way more gloomy and rotten than most. Behind the thin veneer of wealth, glitz, glamour and celebrity lies a pitchblack world where drug abuse, sloppy sex, incest, deep-seated insecurity and all sorts of mental shit are commonplace for everyone. In this ensemble drama about Tinseltown, we meet vari­ ous characters in the heart of or on the periphery of the entertainment world.

Think they’re the lucky few? Think again.

Agatha (Mia Wasikowska; scarily intense) arrives by bus in Hollywood.

And that’s straight up the last we see of the world as we know it. Agatha, still weighed down by a mysterious fire during her youth, gets a job as the personal assistant to Havana (Julianne Moore). This famous actress, whose star is on the wane, is facing her own demons.

Haunted by the ghost of her A-lister mother who died in a fire, Havana tries to assuage her ​​m isery with the help of star psychiatrist Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack). Weiss—who, in all seriousness, wears black eyeliner—is also dealing with several problems inside the privacy of his own mansion. And that’s quite annoying, since he’s about to start a book tour and doesn’t want to miss a single cent on account of bad publicity. The issue is his son, a 13-year-old child star with a drug addiction and a Justin Bieber-esque sense of entitlement.

Meanwhile, his ‘mommie dearest’ works the scene, Kris Jenner-style. All those haves and have-nots compete

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side by side against their (self) destruction. Because demolition is heading mercilessly for them in this version of Hollywood. Cronenberg, traditionally considered to be a horror man, is by no means a stranger to grim atmospheres—see Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) and Crash (1996)—and his jetblack rendering of this so-called magic­ al world of fame and fortune is prob­ ably painfully accurate. Drama.

Director: David Cronenberg Actors: Julianne Moore, Robert Patterson and others Release: 30/7 (BE), 28/8 (NL), 26/9 (UK)

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What if the very British Harry Potter suddenly popped up in a Canadian romcom as a dropout student, looking for a little affection? Believe it or not, it pans out surprisingly nice. Radcliffe’s Wallace is somewhat quirky but has the gift of the gab; intelligent, witty and full of self-mockery. Plus, his chemistry with co-star Kazan is outright cute. When Wallace meets Chantry at a party, he’s still mourning his ex-girlfriend but he falls instantly in love with the charming illustrator. Unfortunately, she already has a steady boyfriend, a shared cat and a house. There’s only room left for a good friend. Wallace takes his chances and decides to be her buddy. Then it is, of course, all about the pressing question: can heterosexual men and women actually have a platonic relationship? Although the scenario is written according to the classic rules of romantic comedy, it surpasses mediocrity with its poignant, painful moments, adorable animations and especially the comic dialogue. Romcom.

Director: Michael Dowse Actors: Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan and others Release: 20/8 (UK), 04/9 (NL), 17/9 (BE)

Gc Update

TAKE OUT THE TRASH THE CHOICE IS YOURS

TRASH THE HOTEL ROOM #SNEAKERSWOULD

Cult Dark Sky

Ballet School

Childhood

Imagin

The Dew Lasts an Hour

Lacuna

Monkeytown Records

Bella Union

House Anxiety/Marathon Artists

Following previous releases on 50Weapons and Mister Saturday Night Records, Dark Sky release their first fulllength album. While name-checking post-rock, ambient and ’80s pop as a starting point, the album successfully avoids pastiche. Opening with the drifting arpeggios of Imagin, reminiscent of Berlin School, we abruptly move on to thick and organic drum sequences, followed by masterfully combined subdued and twinkling melodies that do not overcrowd the arrangement.

Highlight tracks such as Rainkist and Silent Fall feature silky male vocals and reveal a crossover pop sensibility, while Manuka, full of the hypnotic synergy of low-pitched voice and gliding bass line, is perfectly crafted for a euphoric late-night rush. Musically, Imagin may not offer anything genre defying or ground-breaking, but it doesn’t have to: you’ll keep its fluttering melodies and sultry voices spinning on repeat during hazy late summer days and nights between dusk and dawn.

By Justinas Vilutis

Without getting all sentimental about it, The Dew Lasts an Hour flirts with ’80s melancholy as much as it teases with the eclectic joy of modern pop culture.

Ballet School’s debut tiptoes through 12 elegantly structured songs, taking the gloom of shoegaze on a date with the upbeat doldrums of electronics. Like preceding EPs from this Berlin-based threesome, Irish-born Rosie Blair’s urgent, flutteringly ecstatic lyrics continue to be the main ingredient, keeping the effect-laden guitars and throbbing synthesizers in check. While the record never really veers from the path of well-behaving pop music, there are enough cheeky highlights—like standout tracks Pale Saint and LUX, and the melodically rich Heartbeat Overdrive— to intrigue. And if that’s not reason enough to give this dreamy trio a listen, then maybe the recommendation of a well-known celebrity will make the difference: Grimes is a big fan.

By Sander van Dalsum

If you’re an avid festivalgoer, you’ve probably already encountered Londonbased guitar-rock four-piece Childhood during one of their many European tours.

Much like the group’s festival presence, their debut album is a warm and fuzzy affair, quite accurately titled Lacuna.

Perhaps the origin of Childhood—why in the world do musicians insist on adopting ungooglable names like this?—is even more telling: singer and guitarist Ben Romans-Hopcraft and fellow guitarist and songwriter Leo Dobsen decided to start a band after “getting drunk together” at Nottingham University. Ever since, that induced state of mind has blurred into a mix of indie rock, guitar pop and sunny shoegaze. Childhood is the soundtrack to your next hazy house party, as well as the good-looking posse who can’t resist playing an occasional Bob Marley cover. Summer might be over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep ourselves warm.

By Leendert Sonnevelt

Lydia Ainsworth

According to her label, Arbutus Records, triple threat composer, producer and singer Lydia Ainsworth has been “secretly writing and recording her experi­ mental songs over the past three years from bedrooms and basements between Toronto and Brooklyn”. She initially started out composing music for film, but presented us with her intriguing collection of haunting pop songs last month in the form of her debut album Right From Real, blurring the boundaries between indie music and cinematic orchestration. By Britte Kramer here and when should W one listen to your album?

While taking a walk with headphones through a valley at dawn or dusk.

Were you inspired by Kate Bush as some presume?

I love Kate Bush! The Kick Inside and Hounds of Love are inspiring albums to me. Upon every listen her music gives me courage to trust my own musical instincts.

Which song is extra special for you?

PSI is my favourite. It went through many different versions until I landed on the final one on the album. The name of the album, Right From Real, is a line from the chorus, which to me represents the vibe of the entire record.

If music was a form of medication, who would benefit from this record?

It could be prescribed for people who have trouble remembering their dreams.

Woman’s Hour

Together with Josh Hunnisett, Nicolas Graves and her brother Will, Fiona Burgess makes up pristine indie-soul quartet Woman’s Hour. Hailing from Kendal in the Lake District and currently residing in London, they’ve just released Conversations, their marvellous, swoonpoppy debut on Secretly Canadian.

By Britte Kramer What’s the best possible setting for a proper listen to your album?

Good question. I’d suggest a late-night cocktail bar with a whisky in hand. Or for the more sober listener, a Saturday morning in bed.

What’s the best compliment you could receive about it?

That it’s a record to make love to.

What’s the most interesting “conversation” you had as a band regarding this record?

Probably deciding what to call it! We talked about it for so long and had all these elaborate discussions about what the album should be titled.

In the end, Conversations felt very appropriate.

FKA twigs

TOPS

Your voice is kind of hypnotic.

Are you as calm as you sound?

That’s funny. I’m not sure how much inner peace I have. I actually feel like there’s a lot of tension that I try to release when I’m singing. The studio was like a home for a long time, I guess. And I always did vocal takes at night when no one else was in the studio so that I could connect properly and feel somehow detached from the distractions of every­ day life.

Which songs basically wrote themselves—and why, do you think?

Darkest Place and Our Love Has No Rhythm were both songs that came together very quickly. I think that when the structure of a song is clear from the beginning, it makes the rest of the process much easier.

Which song do you think has the strongest lyrics?

Two Sides of You is a song that I feel particularly connected to. It’s def­ initely the most stripped back and vocally lead track. There’s an intimacy about it that feels very powerful.

Wildest Dreams

LP1

Picture You Staring

Wildest Dreams

Young Turks

Arbutus Records

Smalltown Supersound

Much like dark matter, the lullabies of Fka twigs remain an unfathomable mystery. Buried in black masses of abstract twists and turns, the London-based songstress still manages to embody the essence of pop music without compromise. The artist also known as Tahliah Barnett seductively orchestrates that on LP1, her debut, on which the sexual energy of R&B softly cuddles with electronic melodrama and otherworldly vibrations, making you question the human origins of the artist. Kicks, for example, is a weirdly romantic ballad that combines distant whispers with a clubby chorus.

The brilliant oppositions we hear in tracks like this are sometimes taken over by powerful serenades such as in the intense Video Girl. Barnett is a step ahead of her contemporaries, and only a bright shining icon like Aaliyah would be an appropriate comparison. These alien-shaped sounds might take some getting used to, but it will only take minutes before you get caught up in a love affair with FKA twigs’ mesmerizing voice.

By Sander van Dalsum

What if Audrey Horne and Laura Palmer where teleported from Twin Peaks, Washington in 1989 to the here and now?

What if they formed a pop band with two indie guys? They would probably look like Montréalais four-piece Tops, and they would probably sound like that band’s sophomore album, Picture You Staring: hazy, girly voices singing over mellow-but-rhythmic guitars and smooth ’80s synths. In real life, TOPS was formed in 2011 and comprises Jane Penny (vocals, keyboard), David Carriere (guitar), Riley Fleck (drums) and Madeline Glowicki (bass), who joined the band in 2013. Single Change of Heart and album opener Way To Be Loved sound a bit like an experimental Saint Etienne—or even a lo-fi Portland—while down-tempo songs like Outside and Driverless Passenger take us straight to David Lynch’s fictitious village. And that’s a place we’re happy to go. By Fay Breeman

How retro can you go? Well, Harvey Bassett, aka legendary spinner DJ Harvey, takes a giant step back in time and leaves us with some do-over perfection. Wildest Dreams is Bassett’s side project, which sees him on guitar, drums and vintage-sounding vocals. It’s also his very own musical time machine, transporting listeners to psychedelic rock’s pinnacle at the end of the ’60s.

This is the sound of doped-out West Coasters and it resembles groups like Fever Tree, Iron Butterfly, Spirit, The Electric Prunes and—less Nuggets era, perhaps, but still far out—The Doors.

Perfect Swell, with its Ray Manzarakesque jingle-jangling organ intro, is Riders on the Storm rewritten. 405 is the perfect soundtrack for a road trip; Yes We Can Can a superb seven-minute acid trip. Wildest Dreams is a record made by musicians, jammin’ like it’s 1969. Wildest Dreams is an ode to— and well-crafted replica of—one of the most enthralling chapters in rock music. By Matthijs van Burg

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Gc Update

WEB SURFING THE CHOICE IS YOURS

CROWD SURFING #SNEAKERSWOULD

We’re guessing Hwan Heo consulted his crystal ball when he figured that an unravelling, keffiyeh-like print would— once again—make a return this season.

Considering its political connotations, giving this look from Heohwan Simulation’s A/W14 collection our approval events aside, however, this dazzling combination of op art with op art is something Glamcult wholeheartedly endorses. As well as the wonderful high-low dichotomy of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning album and Immanuel Kant’s theory on finding beauty in the sublime of nature, which inspired the catwalk spectacle. Oh—and peace in the Middle East, of course.

Not only did 2014 mark Maleficent’s grand return to the big screen, she also marched the catwalk as the centrepiece of Bobby Abley’s dark Disney parade.

The young British designer opened his show at MAN (an initiative by Topman and Fashion East) to The Mickey Mouse Club theme tune, soon to be interrupted

by M.I.A.’s Meds and Feds. Abley could very well be described as the master of mixed signals; while letting his models clasp cuddly teddy bears, he cracked open their mouths with delightfully cruel mouthpieces crafted by Alan Crocetti.

As might be expected from a style paper in love with graphic elements, Glamcult couldn’t resist Abley’s twisted use of the Disney font, as well as the darkness of Mickey’s eyes, to spell out his dark dogmas: “Hocus pocus, you can’t take away our focus!”

It was sort of impossible to miss the social media buzz preceding and succeeding the much-awaited Raf and Ruby show.

The Parisien (or should we say: American?) reveal of their joint venture soared in terms of news value, and justly so.

Combining Sterling’s urgency with Simons’ monumental silhouettes, the collagelike collection marked a highlight in the relationship between fashion and art.

The collaboration, aptly presented to the sounds of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, celebrated nine years of friendship between the designer and the artist. For Simons it also functioned as yet another first: a refreshed questioning of his position in the fashion system.

Much could be said for selecting one of the patched tops, elevating the DIY aesthetic to a whole new level, as our favourite. Instead, we’d like you to ponder the teenage angst so perfectly captured by this action-bleached look.

Orange is the new black!

Raf Simons & Ruby Sterling

Heohwan Simulation

By Joline Platje and Leendert Sonnevelt

And again a new fashion season ahead of us. Glamcult is as excited as always: after a summer of sheer sobriety, designers proved to be playful and audacious again, eschewing neither the experiment nor conceptual thinking. Crisis? What crisis? It’s creativity and luxury that dictate our fall favs!

Bobby Abley

Autumn/Winter 2014

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Marques’ Almeida

The Row

Whether you grew up with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen or watched them evolve before the camera from the cutest toddler twins in television history to semi-flamboyant design duo, there’s no way of not knowing (or judging) them.

Unfortunately, most of their fashion adventures have been feeding the big boho trend that started some seven years ago and refuses to die (think: big shades, embroidery and lots of beads).

Double trouble. Luckily their couture label, The Row, actually lives up to the reference made to Savile Row: their voluminous asymmetric hand-knitted cashmere skirts are unaffordable, sought-after and of the highest quality in tailoring. Well done, girls!

Craig Green

Autumn/Winter 2014

Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida, nominees for this year’s coveted LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize, have quickly trademarked their young label with a laid-back, ’90s approach to denim. This season they’re going even further back in time, taking their work on a trip to the ’70s with Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Just Kids as the ultimate inspiration. So what landed Marques and Almeida on these pages?

Well, this A/W the duo doesn’t just limit itself to jeans, but manages to successfully apply its shaggy denim aesthetic to other fabrics. The resulting mash-up pays tribute to the acid-washed glam of the Chelsea Hotel, as well as to the frilled and fast-paced fun of the rave millennium. Now that’s what we like to call an effective love-hate relationship.

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For his last run of MAN, Craig Green sought sanctuary in what he described as “low-fi opulence clashing with functional workwear”. Rigid silhouettes came together with harness-like leather details and the graceful touch of skirts and overcoats, resulting in a strangely structured romanticism. Green’s biggest surprise came with the exclusion of his plank headpieces and the introduction of Persian-inspired, all-embracing patterns. Every hand-painted look followed a much darker (monochrome) ensemble, constructing a bipolar call-and-response pattern. In a recent conversation with Dazed, Green commented: “In terms of fashion, I feel like there’s no mystery any more. Everything feels so accessible and that’s a shame.” If practice what you preach applies to anyone, it’s unquestionably this British fashion favourite.

Take heed!

Gc Update

Autumn/Winter 2014

Jacquemus

Gareth Pugh

Diesel

Nicola Formichetti, fashion director of Dazed and Confused, former creative director at Mugler and Uniqlo and Diesel’s first artistic director, loves “embracing new things”. Well, yeah, sure— what else would the world’s styling frontrunner possibly say? “I love old things”?

Earlier this year in Venice, the cute Italian/Japanese designer brought his first complete collection for Diesel to light—and the brand back to life, so it seemed. Formichetti proved to be a nostalgic soul, paying homage to the bold and rebellious heritage of the brand the way we all like to remember it. Glamcult just loves this modern-day renaissance: in a fast-paced fashion world, who dares to look back? Only the brave!

Glamcult loves the idea of acting basic.

Yes, we’re talking unflattering T-shirts, fleece sweaters and ungainly mom jeans. Even though Bob Saget is funny as duck, we don’t necessarily want to look like him. We prefer our normcore a little more stylish. Normcore chic?

For us, there’s no such thing as fashion oversaturation. Sorry for that. And thank you Simon Porte Jacquemus for providing us with the perfect oversizedsweater-white-sneakers combination for this season. Adidas Superstars, white pop socks, frivolous yellow neoprene and a cartoonlike cardboard-box cut—we can’t stop fantasizing about wearing it while encountering Obama in the park. Or Jerry Seinfeld in the Comic Strip.

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According to the established fashion press, capes and ponchos will be very much en vogue this coming autumn. Who are we to deny it? We’ve immediately chosen our own favourite: Gareth Pugh’s sheepskin cloak. In place of his trademark dark Tim Burton-esque dolls, the Londoner has created a frosted fairy tale, wherein germinating snowdrops— a little like the Russian flowers in Disney’s Fantasia—revolve around the pristine queen of this winter wonderland: Little White Riding Hood. Pugh claims to have been working intuitively to shape this magical Siberian world, and it looked like he went back to his enchanted roots. We definitely want Pugh to help us keep warm and look cool.

Moschino

Conjuring up spirits of the past is not something we’d offhandedly endorse— unless your name is Sarah Burton. During the Alexander McQueen A/W14 presentation, all one could do was shut up, mouth an unspoken “amen” and softly let all things nostalgic tingle down your spine. London’s Welsh Chapel— former residence of God and nightclub The Limelight—saw hollow-eyed models adorned with crow feathers walk the runway like shadows of a beautiful past. Their monochrome McQueen kilts and villain coats swayed to the unsettling sound of Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead. Burton’s pink interpretation of the ultimate punk threepiece is what brought this collection to its melancholic climax. Undead, undead, undead.

Embryos and butterflies were (probably not) happily floating in Yohji Yamamoto’s never-ending deep black manga universe during his women’s show. Bloody crosses, Cyclops, astronauts, hovering doughnuts, gems and pills were printed and hand-painted on giant “sleeping bags”. Pretty spacey! Glamcult especially liked the emo Powerpuff Girl with the two small acid-coloured plasma lamps made out of hair on her head.

Oh, how we wish extraterrestrial beings looked like this: all gothic and padded.

They would curl up next to you while vegging on the couch in their fashionable Snuggies. Whoa, dude—stop trippin’!

Yohji Yamamoto

Alexander McQueen

Autumn/Winter 2014

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Oh, oh, Franco Moschino, how you would’ve loved this so! We know you’ve all seen this outfit a zillion time, but not to write about it wouldn’t do justice to Jeremy Scott, brand new head designer at Moschino and cherished ex-cover model of Glamcult. All along we’ve admired Scott—or Maccie D Chanel, as we’ll call him from now on—for his noisy designs and shameless adoration of trash. His first collection for Moschino is an idolization of consumer culture and fits neatly in the history of the le­ gendary brand: Franco Moschino himself was a big advocate of, let’s say, “Italian class”. Snack attack! We can’t wait for another bite.

Gc Update

Autumn/Winter 2014 Acne Studios

Autumn/Winter 2014 Kenzo

Autumn/Winter 2014 Chanel

Autumn/Winter 2014 Bastian Visch

Autumn/Winter 2014 Diesel

Autumn/Winter 2014 Diesel Black Gold

Shoes Asos

Autumn/Winter 2014 Costume National

Photography and artwork: Stef Van Looveren Styling: Marleen de Jong—NCL Representation Hair and make-up: Sandra Govers for Ellis Faas—Angelique Hoorn Models: Naomi N.—Paparazzi Model Management and Jelle—Muskmodels Photography assistants: Lisa Rouchet and Alisa Duran

Cap stylists own

Autumn/Winter 2014 Hugo Boss

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez Bringing the visual elements of digital technology and the Internet into the physical world, artist Matthew PlummerFernandez uses scanning and digital fabrication techniques to create products that are both physical and digital, rendering the barriers between the two more porous and commenting on the digitalization of everyday life. He told Glamcult about the beauty of unwanted errors and why dating apps would make the perfect artistic subject matter.

By Jean-François Adjabahoué

Portrait of Putin, 2014 This portrait is part of a series on world leaders. It is made by an autonomous painting program that simulates brush strokes. The software, written by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez himself, takes google image results and then paints them.

sekuMoi Mecy 3; Smooth() Operator, 2013 A 3D printed Mickey Mouse club member has been processed using a mesh-smoothing technique pushed to the extreme to circumvent IP concerns.

Sound/Chair, 2007 Water-jet cut polyethylene foam chair made by a sound that, when plotted on a volume, frequency, time graph, resembles it.

In spite of being born and raised in London, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s greatest influence is perhaps his Colombian background. In the nine formative years that he lived there, PlummerFernandez says he was exposed to an extraordinarily vivid environment, colourful and culturally rich. That background is central to his artistic approach, enabling him to incorporate that flamboyancy into his production with conviction and confidence (not for him the ohso-English restraint). His 2012 series Digital Natives, in which everyday objects were scanned then altered by algorithm before being 3D printed in rich jewel tones, is perhaps a perfect case in point.

Another striking element of Plummer-Fernandez’s work—which can be perceived as remixed and sampled—is the sharp analytical thinking at play. It is perhaps, he suggests, a result of his complex upbringing: “I’m from a loving but complicated family split into two halves,” he says. “In Colombia I was a foreigner for a long time.

I was very shy and introverted, slightly mischievous and two years above my age group after doing really well in the admissions exams. But I never did my homework and failed a lot of subjects.

I liked music and drawing a lot, and played guitar.”

After FARC guerrillas kidnapped a number of Plummer-Fernandez’s schoolmates, the political situation in Columbia escalated and his family relocated to the UK. That turmoil triggered a pattern of social scrutiny that has informed his creative process ever since.

But it’s not just large-scale socio-cultural issues that interest him: “I think dating apps would be a great field to explore,” he says. “I’d make an alternative service that matches people based on more obscure data correlations, like the name of their first pet, their mother’s maiden name and their bank account number.”

An exploration of geo-fences as a physical boundary in the digital realm is also on the list of potential subjects.

When Glamcult asked the alumnus of London’s Royal College of Art—who also studied graphic design and computer-assisted engineering at King’s College and is now a research fellow at the prestigious Goldsmiths College— to describe a typical day, we discovered a home-loving kind of guy who spends his time listening to music, cooking, baking bread and hanging out with his girlfriend and cat. But he’s also

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developing software and 3D print files and working on algorithms (algo-pop, or the way algorithms appear in popular culture). About these last, he becomes quite animated: “An algorithm is quite an abstract thing; it is basically the instructions you give to a computer. The computer computes algorithms. It’s like how cooking requires a recipe to turn raw ingredients into a meal. You can achieve a lot with an algorithm: you can train a computer to take the words from an eBook and generate poetic tweets out of it, or train a computer to trade on the stock market based on how it’s been instructed to assess ongoing trading activity, in microseconds.”

Part of the “New Aesthetic”, an emerging movement, the basis of Plummer-Fernandez’s work is the critical and playful examination of how new social-cultural tendencies interact with emerging technologies such as 3D printing. As highly automated algorithmic services not fully understood by the general audience pave the way for a new digital infrastructure, they are financially exploitable by a small minority.

Plummer-Fernandez’s hope is that these resources will be freely accessible in the future, and these two sides of the renewal movement in technology are also what he’s getting at in his work— showing the role of algorithms and exploring how copyright and the privatization of these resources can be circumvented. “I stand in favour of opensource approaches to culture. It’s a shift that happened in the field of software that I’ve benefitted hugely from. I can take other people’s code and appropriate it for my own purposes. Most other coders do this. The whole field moves as one, supporting each other.

All coders get paid extremely well so I don’t think that protecting your intellectual property is necessary unless you want to get paid for hunting down IP infringement. Unfortunately, some culture shapers are very set in their ways and put legal barriers around everything, enforcing consumerism rather than participation.”

The bewildering thing about Plummer-Fernandez’s work is that it is as conceptually appealing as it is aesthetically beautiful. Full of contradiction, it is difficult to draw a line between art and design in his colourful productions, as he himself explains: “When you read something as art you examine it very differently than if you

read it as design. Each field is now supported by a complex social consensus of what makes ‘good’ art or ‘good’ design. I think it’s healthy to break out of these borders. The best way to think of it is to accept that design and art transcend into each other, two by-products of contemporary culture.” One could easily say his glitched reinterpretation of Mickey Mouse is halfway between the two. This reinvention of something established, something belonging to the public domain, is perhaps the ultimate personification of Plummer-Fernandez’s notions of copyright.

The range of Plummer-Fernandez’s inspiration is wide. Musicians like Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), admired for his prolific output and development of new aesthetics in music, sit alongside game developers like Darius Kazemi, the free-spirited coding community, the sculptures of Ken Price and Ron Nagle and artists Cory Arcangel and Mark Leckey. There’s also a contradiction between the new and the old that undercuts his creations: “I like the contradiction of advanced technology and primitive outcomes. I’m most comfortable when I treat new technology as a failure or forgivable for being in a prototype stage. I think you can really discover new aesthetic affordances not seen before in all those unwanted errors.” And those “unwanted errors”, it turns out, can be extraordinarily beautiful. www.plummerfernandez.com

Gc Platform

Interviews

y ” : h s … t n w i : i l 8 s l n h 4 4 Mu aso n 3 twig n wit x e o r e o A l d a A re’s ture rs.”

F K t g et a e s e e h u v f j T o I “ s i c “ m m i albu n e d any so m e c a f l f p o t h s h n e c r b w i o e K r h 4 u m T 8 m 5 “ is yo ” 3 dha k fro : e l . g r a m n n o e o u M to w ative s J teal fr inatio s l g s n e a p o o k i t m l i n te m m ot i l a u e o s vi a c t te o f t s . e h l a g p thou and o i r t t s i p a y : c d e s l e a 56 ical e is re 44 Ade we ar . t s & r r e u a a M y He com Ev ereve .” t o t h a m s e ’ t B “ W useu a h w m r a o f s i

By Leendert Sonnevelt Photography: Dominic Sheldon

A K F s g i w t

Truth be told, speaking to the woman whom many describe as “the future” is more than a little stressful—especially when she describes the preceding interview as “a nightmare”.

Chatting to Glamcult, Tahliah Barnett confirms that her current ascendancy to superstardom is just another step in an inevitably upwardly mobile career. She laughs, sings, ponders and lets go. And sometimes, FKA twigs has no answer at all, simply because the silence can’t be expressed in words. “I’d like to have an actual conversation with you. Does that make sense?”

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Gc Interview

FKA twigs

I love another, and thus I hate myself.

It is this well-known line from a poem by 16th-century lyrical poet Sir Thomas Wyatt that flutters through the first and highest registers of FKA twigs’ recently released debut EP. The vulnerability, as well as the beauty that lies hidden in the continuous battle to better oneself, is a recurring theme in the 26-year-old producer’s work. Yet when one speaks to twigs, whose pseudonym is a reference to the audible crackling of her limbs when she dances, the artist seems surprisingly down-to-earth. “I just get on with it” is one of the phrases she uses repeatedly, even when she speaks of revealing the depths of her soul through music. “I don’t think about it, I just get on with it!” twigs’ ethereal pop is not only characterized by an otherworldly sensitivity, it is also remarkably free from fear. “I’m not sure where that energy comes from,” she ponders. “I didn’t have loads of things growing up, so my mum basically always told me that I could do whatever I wanted to. I guess it’s difficult to look at things with hindsight.

I’ve always thought like this: if you want to do something, get on with it. You snooze, you lose.”

If LP1—quite possibly the most hotly anticipated album of 2014— proves anything besides exceptional talent, it is that hard work does indeed pay off. “For me it was a journey about learning to be a better producer, pushing myself sonically. It was a search to find new and unusual sounds, a sonic palette that I could call my own, and one that no one has used before. My album is about that constant struggle to improve yourself and to get better at things. Whether it’s your relationships, your art, your music—no matter what it is: ‘I love another, and thus I hate myself’.

This has kind of become the subtitle for the record.” Vis-à-vis the actual album title, twigs’ answer is short but sweet: “The name doesn’t really refer to any-

thing. I like letters and I like numbers in that way. Just like my name: FKA twigs.

I like how it is… very simple. I do like simple things.”

When twigs graced the cover of Dazed some months ago, editor-in-chief Tim Noakes characterized the swiftly rising artist with the words: “Her default volume is hushed.” In line with John Cage and Philip Glass, whose work she admires, twigs’ compositions repeatedly emphasize silence, bringing it together with the sweet structures of R&B and the dishevelled structures of avant-garde electronics. Apropos Noakes’ description, twigs leaves it up to her listeners to determine the veracity. “Sometimes people say something like that, and you don’t think about it until they say it.

I can see that there’s a lot of silence in my music, but sometimes I put really high wishy-washy sounds in the background to fill in space. Maybe sometimes I don’t hear the silence at all. Then I can still hear the twirling sounds going on in the highest frequencies, or I’m still thinking about the reverb that is delayed and pounding in the background. Different people hear different things, don’t they?”

Not only is quiet an important elem­ ent of twigs’ music, it also drives her powerfully subtle and intimate shows.

In London, her current hometown, the artist recently opened a show with a soundscaped rendition of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood. “I think sonically it’s really beautiful,” she explains. “I love that it’s really brave and almost 20 minutes long.

There are a lot of subtle differences going on throughout the piece. It’s bold and beautiful, and I find it really calming.” Not surprisingly, twigs got to know the song through the work of Glass.

“I like listening to radio stations on Spotify and Pandora. That’s how I found this beautiful Gavin Bryars piece. Listen to Philip Glass and you’ll come across really special things.” When twigs took the stage at Amsterdam’s PITCH festival last July, she didn’t hesitate to ask for

complete quiet. Looking back on it, she becomes animated. “Festivals are such unusual environments. People haven’t necessarily paid to see you and everyone’s really excited, talking about the next act that’s going to be on, and blah blah blah.” If you suppose jovial festival hubbub is unavoidable, you’re definitely in the room with the wrong person. “It’s important that the people who were there to see me, actually got to experience the show how it’s supposed to be experienced. And that’s not with people ordering drinks at bars in the background. I could see the people who were there to see me. I could spot them in the crowd a mile off, and I really appreciate that. I’d rather see the room half full with people who are going to be respectful. It’s my show, do you know what I mean? If you’ve gone into a tent to watch a show, watch the show!” Almost nonchalantly, she concludes: “I don’t mind if people leave—that’s cool.”

Shortly before twigs released the first single from EP1, she collaborated with LA boudoir’n’b band inc., aka siblings Daniel and Andrew Aged. Today, talk of the untitled audiovisual project they produced still makes twigs smile.

“Those guys are so cool! They used to have a house in the desert, so I went to live with them for three weeks. It was incredible!” Not only did twigs come together with the boys as FKA x inc., she also asked them to participate on her record. “They actually played strings on Lights On. Are you also familiar with Kicks? There’s a funky keyboard line that comes in near the end, which goes like this—” a clear voice flutters through the room, flawlessly reproducing the electronic frills of her closing track. “Amazing musicians, they are!” Yet twigs doesn’t embark on collaborations light-heartedly. “Sometimes when people are a bit more famous, they don’t even know why they’re reaching out to you,” she comments. “They’re just hitting you up, not at all knowing what they want from

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you. When I work with artists like inc. or LuckI3 Eck$, I know they’re actually coming with their own.”

It’s on her own that twigs seems to function best, and if there’s one place the artist considers sacred, it is the confinement of her room. “Yes, I stay there a lot. I find it very inspirational, just hanging out amongst my books, my little things, the life that I’ve built for myself.”

When, in the first stanza of the (twisted) hymn-like Closer she whispers, “Now I want to find you, and hurry to you,” twigs is actually referring to herself— but also to all things higher. “It’s about building a relationship with the better version of me,” she explains. “And it’s about building a relationship with God. Even if you’re not religious, if you don’t believe in God or you haven’t worked out what you believe in quite yet. I believe that being a good and kind person is some sort of higher energy within myself.” Perhaps just as easily, twigs’ heartfelt lyrics can be perceived in a hyper sensual or sexual way, as proven by uneducated critics and large numbers of YouTube commenters. The artist wholeheartedly counters such assumptions: “It doesn’t do justice to my work!

People could perceive ‘I want to be closer to you’ as ‘I want to have sex with you’, but that’s not what it is. On the rec­ ord there are maybe two or three songs that are that way inclined. I guess people make you into what they want to make you into. It doesn’t bother me. I also don’t think it downplays my music. It’s purely perception—and if anything, that’s really interesting.” www.wwwater.me 2 October, Dome, Brighton (UK) 8 October, Hackney Empire, London (UK) 9 October, Trinity, Bristol (UK) 15 October, Paradiso Noord, Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (NL)

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By Marlo Saalmink Photography: Michiel Meewis—Cake Film & Photography Styling: Tom Eerebout Set design: Danny Hyland Make-up: Marina Keri for MAC Cosmetics Hair: Maki Tanaka All clothing Meadham Kirchhoff A/W14

Assistant photography: Sami Havaluoto Assistant set design: Joshua Bowman Assistant make-up: Meena Bhella Models: India Tuersley and Sienna King—Tess Management Thanks to London College of Fashion Lime Grove and James Montgomery

m a h ff d o a h e h M Kirc There’s a hint of quiet, a sense of reserve on the other end of the line when Glamcult dials into the London studio of design duo Meadham Kirchhoff. Benjamin Kirchhoff and Edward Meadham are men who speak deliberately, carefully weighing their words, revealing their world with great composure and restraint.

Over the next hour and a half, we speak about their delicate universe, reactionary minds and the importance of honesty.

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Gc Interview

Meadham Kirchhoff

Every story has a beginning. For Benjamin Kirchhoff, that story begins in West Africa, where he spent his formative years before moving to France and ending up in London. Growing up, Kirchhoff felt perpetually underwhelmed—or, as he puts it, “slightly bored”. Creativity became a means to carve out his path, as he sought inspiration as a form of escapism. Documenting and drawing incessantly, he cur­ ated his world from within. While Kirchhoff was growing up in Africa, in England Edward Meadham spent the years from 11 to 16 gorging on pop culture, art and cinema. There was a crossover, he says, “between idolizing Kylie as a youngster and later on appreciating the punk allegories of Vivienne Westwood.” It’s a dichotomy that has permeated the duo’s womenswear collections since the label’s launch in 2002—at once theatrical, whimsical and intricately made.

Both Kirchhoff and Meadham reveal a clear understanding of the reactionary nature of their designs. Kirchhoff says he designs purely from instinct, embracing a state of “aborted happiness”, his path one of pensive reflection and the countering of forlorn identities. Both express distaste at the institutionalized paradox of fashion, an industry they feel is “based on a repetition of ideas, often aimed at product placement”.

Meadham Kirchhoff’s instinctive approach to fashion is refreshing, giving a novel edge to what constitutes interaction and development. This is clearly underlined when Benjamin says he wants people “to understand Meadham Kirchhoff right. The brand has a very profound connection with our first-hour followers.” Each show comes from a deep place, filled with sincerity, says Meadham: “Each show is about exchanging a full

sensory experience, with scent, visuals, light, music and garments uniting.” Highly personal and highly styled, their shows overwhelm the senses. Their A/W14 presentation slowly but steadily drew the audience into their escapist world, sensory, direct and emotive. Glamcult is reminded of a comment Meadham made last year: “The most important people you smell before you see them.” In explan­ ation, he says: “I was thinking about the world, a place of which I am not terribly fond, at times. Only two people had such a profound sensory impact on me, before encountering them. Both Maria Luisa and Courtney Love. For me, in a way this connects to a sense of domination. By perfuming oneself lavishly, one dictates any room one enters. Perhaps it is about leaving something profoundly tangible behind, whilst navigating the world.”

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Perhaps not surprising given that Meadham studied womenswear and Kirchhoff menswear—at Central Saint Martins, where they met—their eponymous line is known for presenting both, with each designer concentrating on his own speciality. The last menswear collection was S/S14. The designers describe the Meadham Kirchhoff man as “a little genteel, kind and even a little shy”; while they have previously said their ideal female is the aforementioned Courtney Love, and even went so far as to populate their S/S12 runway with Love lookalikes. Both mens- and womenswear pieces are extremely detailed in terms of fabric research, tailoring, colour contrasts and textural interplay.

There has always been something curiously obsessive about Meadham Kirchhoff garments. “If I am not obsessed with something, I frankly do not care,”

Meadham Kirchhoff

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Gc Interview

Meadham Kirchhoff

explains Meadham. He goes on to explain that it is key for him to extract a clear vision with each collection. It is a layered world we enter, one of sincere complexity. Kirchhoff describes the transformation of garments into something emotional: “We often use unconventional techniques through intense tailoring research and focus on precise craftsmanship. In a way this is obsessive, but we like to be thoroughly involved in what we develop.”

For Meadham, too, each collection is a personal reflection: “In many ways, what we do is forging a contradictory state, embracing our reactionary rebellion within the world.” For some, that contradiction would lead to anger or frustration—but not here. Meadham Kirchhoff work from a contemplative palette of emotions and thoughts,

making their work extremely dense.

Meadham explains: “Muses can be seen as part of a reductive state. I’ve always felt that feeding off such a premise is not actively creating; it is rather a passive movement. I am more interested in the activation of creativity, hence I prefer to focus on my own mind.”

All the diverse layers of meaning informing Meadham Kirchhoff’s work come together with the designers’ oftstated mantra that they do not exist solely to please others. It is part of their insular universe, crafted and perfected since 2002. They do not rush into things or appreciate being dictated to by the pace of the fashion industry. Kirchhoff concurs: for him, designing is about engaging in a sincere dialogue, with the brand’s loyal fans—who attend the shows and end up wearing the garments—

being their key audience. “Our process of design is very intricate and emotionally pensive. Each can have his own interpretation of what we create.”

As Central Saint Martins alumni, both designers have experienced the sometimes-painful process of working towards their own line. In relation to the climate for today’s graduating designers, Kirchhoff is quick to remark that young talents, before they graduate, should go against the grain of what is prescribed by their teachers. This is innate to developing as a designer, for Kirchhoff; it is essential to act as an individual by embracing “what you want to do”. To develop and thrive as a designer, there needs to be a sense of personal activation, achieved by always remaining open to what he calls “accidental finds”. Emotive design is all about losing oneself—and,

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at times, countering a sense of businesslike calculation.

As the conversation nears an end, we have been talking non-stop for over an hour. Meadham Kirchhoff have drawn us into their world, just as they do with each collection. As they get back to work on their new collection, Glamcult cannot help but feel more connected to their arcane world. These two individuals are bound by their process and their approach to irreverent creation. Deeply connected, their world is a moving display of what can exist when one turns towards what lies within instead of merely interacting with the world outside. www.meadhamkirchhoff.com

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Gc Interview

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CUM Polaroids, 1991-2011, courtesy VG Bildkunst, Bonn / EVA & ADELE, Berlin

By Kristian Vistrup Madsen

& a v E le e d A

“It’s funny!” laughed Adele when Glamcult met her and “living artwork” partner Eva in Italy earlier this year. We had asked them how they met, and in Adele’s laughter, between our question and their answer, was what must be a very familiar moment for them: the possibility of a kind of double thinking, asking the audience to believe in their story while obviously knowing it to be untrue. “A giant time-travelling machine,” Eva quipped, playfully unimpressed.

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Gc Interview

Installation shots of FUTURING AUF Bﾃ傍ZOW, photo: Lea Gryze

Eva & Adele

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CUM Polaroids, 1991-2011, courtesy VG Bildkunst, Bonn / EVA & ADELE, Berlin

Eva & Adele

Perhaps best known in the UK for their bizarre, ritualistic appearances as The Eggheads on ’90s TV staple Eurotrash, EVA & ADELE landed in Berlin just in time to witness the fall of the wall. In one of the first major art events of the new German capital, EVA & ADELE married at the Gropius-Bau in 1991. It was a kind of double unification, Berlin and them (each receiving almost equal attention in the media) that anticipated a future as gloriously queer as the happy couple.

There was a kind of hopefulness to the wedding, a wide-eyed belief in the future, perhaps stemming from the ecstasy of the fallen wall. And hope continues to be a central aspect of EVA & ADELE’s work. But is hope always optimistic?

Can hope be disappointed, be political?

Too bald (phallically so, Eva says), too much pink chiffon, too much turquoise eye shadow and too many ’80s twopieces: EVA & ADELE are a meticulously camp feast for the eyes. To think that they kept their endearingly hard-core German accents—or in Eva’s case, we suspect Austrian, though she won’t tell— quiet for the first seven years of their performance (for lack of a better term) is extraordinary. They wanted to remain strictly visual, they explain, wanted to simply be in a space, smiling. There is something extremely caring and generous in this silence, a state of being only for others. And even as they have begun speaking (extensively, one might say, interviewed by every magazine of note in the field), this generosity—their sheer likability—stands out as one of their greatest strengths. Their smiles are impossible to resist.

For this reason also, EVA & ADELE kiss all the best cheeks at Art Basel and

the Venice Biennale. Glasses-in-hand, matching purses, this two-headed supermingler may easily be read as a prophecy fulfilled; the present arrival of the happy future their queerness promises, a utopia come, a battle already won.

Again: wide-eyed, even uncritical. “Futuring,” they say again and again in their interviews and in their art, when asked what they do. But because the art institution has a tendency within its own space to neutralize subversive potentials, in that space EVA & ADELE very quickly become too quaint, too kitsch, too retro— and not at all “future”. As the favourite eccentric grandmothers of the European art scene, their subversive potential risks being overlooked.

For EVA & ADELE’s glass-carrying flamboyance was always driven by political struggle. Firstly, Eva has continuously and publically fought against transphobic gender legislation, and naturally their wedding in 1991 was groundbreaking not only for its historical context. Additionally, from the outset their participation in various prestigious art events across Europe was uninvited: a takeover of and a confrontation with the good taste and exclusivity of the established art world. Being a living sculpture in constant performance—or simply fabulously showstopping—EVA & ADELE, whether commissioned to or not, have intervened with and contributed to many of the seminal exhibitions of the past two decades. Simply via their presence (and despite their insistence that their only weapons are their smiles), these ladies have performed a type of passive-aggressive guerrilla warfare on normativity both in the art world and on the street. Their coming from the future

does not translate into uncritical eccentricity or utopian escapism: it is politics.

Understanding “futuring” comes down to whether we must conceptualize the future as always rigidly distinct from the present and past on a linear trajectory. For while it takes a big leap of faith to believe that EVA & ADELE may actually be from the future, they are indisputably of the future: the queer future. When they walk down the street they represent the possibility of an alternative, as well as the hope for one, and the active struggle to arrive one day at that future. When they bypass the present and insist on a future that is sterile and of an indetermin­ ate third gender, they are confronting a normative futurism, which has at its centre heterosexual reproduction. In other words: the reproduction of existing systems of oppression. The future EVA & ADELE want to evoke is not about reproduction, and not really about the future either. Rather, enacting a queer future in the present becomes a way of exposing an actually existing queer reality.

Again: EVA & ADELE walking down the street. This is the actual event, the fabric of their art. “We move without any protection,” Adele says. “It was sometimes really dangerous.” There is a type of hopefulness there, at its root much more bound up with fear than with optimism.

The enduring indeterminacy of their work marks it as an act of defiance. Queerness being historically an identity confined to certain private spaces—bars, clubs, (art) scenes—it is interesting that the only place EVA & ADELE do not appear as queer as we know them is in their home.

Becoming EVA & ADELE is a ritualistic and prolonged event that takes three hours and “all the energy one has”. Shaving.

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Waiting. Painting. Getting ready to go out. Their art exists everywhere they go, shaved and painted, and is located between them as a call, and the response of the world around them. Exposure as resistance—coming out—is one of the basest and most vital forms of queer resistance. EVA & ADELE’s act is defiantly public. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of their work is the consistency, the adamancy with which they have turned up, come out, been out only and always in the public.

Adele explains: “Every confrontation, or every inspiration we give, in the street, in the U-Bahn, is a moment of inspiration for the people we see, also a moment of communication. In the U-Bahn a young girl came up to us. The young girl, a very, very normal young girl, and she sits and she looks and looks and looks, and asks: ‘Are you like that every day?’ And we say, ‘Yes,’ and she says, ‘Courage! You must have such courage!’

And I think, This is a really good situation.

Wherever we are is a museum.” This slogan is one that permeates their practice and encapsulates both the anti-institutional, defiant and political elements of their work, as well as its openness: the care, the humour and the warmth that has made EVA & ADELE’s confrontation with the contemporary (art) world so successful. www.evaadele.com

Gc Interview

By Leendert Sonnevelt Photography: Brendan Baker & Daniel Evans

Styling: Melissa Thompson Model: Jake L—Tomorrow Is Another Day

x e l A s n i l l u

M

It’s only been a year since Alex Mullins founded his eponymous menswear label, but with two solid collections under his belt and a third up his perfectly tailored sleeve, the British Fashion Council NEWGEN winner is already securing a solid position at the forefront of British fashion. Glamcult met him to talk about his long-distance relationship with America, his somewhat inexplicable passion for workwear and—spoiler alert!—his not-so-mysteri­ ous thing for men in denim.

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Gc Interview

Alex Mullins hen exactly did you become W interested in fashion?

It’s been a continuous fascination, really. Fashion says a lot about you, doesn’t it? When you first meet people and look at how they represent themselves… I mean, whether you like it or not, everyone judges each other. Clothing tells someone’s story; you read people by what they wear. My parents are both in the creative industries, so it’s always been around me. Considering how you look, how you dress, how they dress, the history of clothes, the way in which clothing functions as protection— I’ve always found it all really appealing. as going to fashion school W always part of your plan?

Yes, definitely. My mum is a fashion lecturer so I’ve always considered fashion my root. As a child, growing up in southwest London, I wanted to be a plastic surgeon. I don’t know why—perhaps I wanted to fix people. When I got bored with my toys, I started playing with clothes.

I s making people look pretty still a part of what you do?

Well, I don’t want to be a plastic surgeon any more! My current intention is rather to make people feel comfortable.

I want my clothes to make them feel good and confident, as well as to excite them.

Maybe that does relay back to plastic surgery a little bit…

B efore you completed the MA (Menswear) at the Royal College of Art, you finished your BA in Fashion Print at Central Saint Martins. What’s the most important thing you learnt there?

Saint Martins was all about pushing creativity; students need to focus on the tiny weird things they like to do. If I’d do something uninteresting, my teacher would say: “That is so fucking boring, why are you even doing that?” Once I was doing something a bit safe, and one of the teachers commented, “Why don’t you put a massive yellow duck in the middle of this?” It made me think, What have I got to offer that no one else has? ow that you run your own label, N what does your day-to-day life look like?

It’s busy! It’s literally just me at the moment. I usually wake up early and go for a walk to clear my head. My days are long; I’m addicted to working, just because I really love it. The computer stuff isn’t particularly exciting, but I find that you can also put creativity into a business mindset. re you succeeding at the A “computer stuff”?

I’m working on it! When I was doing some consultancy, my ambition was to walk into places and say, “How can we make you more money?” I try to remind myself to think that way. I need to be able to consider strategy— where I want to be in the future and how I can get

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there—but most of all, how can I progress my personal narrative? I’m very connected to what I do; I wouldn’t have it any other way. I always put a lot of myself into my work. I’m not very mysterious and I don’t feel like I should be. I give myself to whatever I do, one hundred per cent.

J ournalists like to mention that you worked for Kanye West, but nobody actually mentions what you did…

I guess they never really ask that, do they? I did some pattern cutting and textile development, and I assisted one of his two head designers. It was just a summer job, though. It was good, but obviously I had to go back to school.

A nd what about your work for Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs?

I actually made costumes for TEED! He would tell me what he was obsessed with at that moment, and I would say what I was obsessed with. Last year we made an outfit consisting of 68 roses. He took them on tour with him and pinned them all over himself before the shows. TEED really likes shiny stuff, which is obviously an affection we have in common.

S o when you work on your own collections, do you create with a specific muse or artist in mind?

Yes, I always have an inspiration board and a separate board for the men I’m trying to dress. Which is quite nice [smirks]. It can be anyone: Marlon Brando, for example. For my A/W14 collection, I approached him as just another guy, aside from everything we know about him, and created a narrative from there.

Most of the clothes I love are in some way worn-out and distressed. The way they fall apart makes them more beautiful. They’re almost like a later thought, something that’s happened without you realizing it. I also thought about whether I would wear the clothes myself. I need to be connected to my pieces; I want to be able to wear them with a pair of Levi’s or a white T-shirt. My work looks quite wild, but I don’t want to make stuff that is unrealistic. hat about your A/W14 collecW tion? Tell us more about the story behind it.

The way I dealt with it was very different from how I’d work on things in the future. I think the collection is a lot quieter than my more recent work because I wanted to keep back a little bit for what’s to come. The narrative is about a cowboy who came to London in the late ’70s and tried to fit in. He eventually got in with the art crowd, but he also went a bit mad, painting on his clothes, making strange objects and sending postcards to his family. The scarves are in fact huge London postcards. Did you see the printed suit? As a fabric that used to be a massive, hand-painted

Alex Mullins card. I cut it up so the print has become completely abstracted.

T he collection seems darker than your other work.

Yeah, that’s something I really wanted to capture. The clothes are definitely saying something, but they’re not meant to say something crazy. Some of the pieces are loud, but the story is rather hushed.

Y our silhouettes seem to be inspired by workwear. Many people wouldn’t even consider that fashion. What about it fascinates you?

It’s just that I think workwear is sexy. Yeah, I really do! [Laughs] I love topstitching and I love denim. These days you can wear denim to a smart place and still look elegant. Men look comfortable in jeans! I think the fabric itself, but also its history and connotations, are very attractive. Worn-out jeans suggest time and hard work; they even make you stand differently. Wearing a pair of silk trousers feels so different from walking down the street in a pair of jeans and a jean jacket. There’s a reason why denim is featured on so many album covers. I think it’s definitely, definitely sexy.

S ubcultures also seem to be a recurring theme in your work. What exactly makes you keep touching on them?

I’m genuinely fascinated with the way the Earth has evolved for different pockets of people in different places. The prime example of this, which I deal with a lot in my work, is America. Explorers have dramatically changed the country into something vastly different. Growing up in London with its mix of people I always wondered, Who are these people and what makes them look so beautiful?

In the school I went to there were weird trends that would come and go. Girls would swap one sock, for example. It even got to the point where everyone was wearing coloured contact lenses and students would swap eye colours.

I really like that! These kids were doing it without any sort of interest in fashion; they were doing it to be part of a gang.

Y ou said you’re fascinated with the way America has changed.

Considering that you grew up in the UK, where does that interest come from?

When I was little, advertisements for cigarettes were still allowed. My mum always smoked Marlboro Lights and my dad’s into Marlboro Reds—there’s no way I could avoid the Marlboro man.

When I was about five, my parents bought me a wigwam and a Native American headpiece. I just sat in my wigwam all day, pretending I was a chief. As I got older, my interest in race and place evolved. I took a trip to America when I was 21 to do an internship with Jeremy Scott. I kind of became obsessed with the age of America; in its current incarnation, it’s still so very young! What if we’d left the people to develop for themselves? There are so many interesting little facts. America didn’t have apples or pears before the Europeans arrived; it didn’t have horses or cows.

Y et your work never becomes critical.

That’s true; I don’t ever directly refer to cowboys or Native Americans. Sometimes I say, “That guy’s a cowboy!” on account of his self-assurance. Looking amazing is all about confidence and colour. I don’t ever want my work to become a parody. I believe “doing cowboys” for a season isn’t very cool.

So what do you believe in?

That’s a tough one. Does it have to be one thing? I believe in fate, I believe in happiness, even though those are very obvious things. Whatever you’re doing, go with your gut and go with your heart. Yeah, that’s genuinely what I believe in. www.alexmullins.co.uk

Do you still consider yourself part of a subculture or are you an observer now?

I was in loads of subcultures! I actually pretended I could skate, but I just wanted to hang around with skaters [laughs]. We used to spray-paint our shoes and if you’d skate a lot—or in my case, rub my shoes against the wall— you could see the different layers of paint underneath. I don’t think I’m part of a subculture now; the way I dress is very neutral. I’ve been very grungy; I’ve also been very rockabilly. The way I dress at present is about classic clothes: white T-shirts and jeans.

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Gc Interview

By Britte Kramer Photography: Dan Wilton

e l g n

u J

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Jungle When enigmatic pop-art outfit Jungle appeared on the scene in 2013 with funk-dance hybrid The Heat, we knew nothing about them but their logo and their über-stylized press shots—invariably of other people. Their sound may be large, but in fact Jungle consists of just two guys from Shepherd’s Bush, London, who are known only by their initials, T and J. But it turns out there’s no great mystery intended, as Tom McFarland and Joshua Lloyd-Watson tell us. It’s just their childhood nicknames for each other. Their eponymous debut album sees T and J on a hectic touring schedule, playing all the big festivals to both critical and popular acclaim. They took some time, though, to tell Glamcult about writing songs with monkeys on motorbikes in mind and nightmares about crowd-surfing keyboards.

Tom McFarland and Joshua LloydWatson have known each other since they were ten years old. T was playing in the garden with his brother and a few neighbours when J jumped over the back wall. He said, “Hi,” they played football together, and soon their musical connection started to develop. By recording sounds of—for example— cigarette lighters, the experimental tone was set. Nowadays, you’ll see them rocking coke bottles on stage, and in the studio they use basically anything they can get their hands on.

Pencils drumming on a desk, snapping fingers, beatbox snares and hi-hats sounds: it all ended up on their debut album. T: “Once we were working on a track and the door creaked, and J was just like: ‘Wait! Come back! We’ve got to record that!’ And that’s the fun of it.

It makes it unpredictable and exciting.

It also makes you realize you don’t have to do things a certain way, that you’re not limited by what others have done before you—you can just make music.

It’s easy to be influenced, but I think that becomes an issue with creativity. Being free in the way you express yourself is the most important thing. You shouldn’t be handcuffing yourself, you know what I mean? Whenever we’re not having fun, we stop, we take a time out and walk away from the situation.”

It doesn’t seem that the time outs are especially necessary, though. J: “A lot of what’s on the record is stuff that came up first time. When you try too hard, you’re not being true and honest. It all becomes a bit forced, and whenever it’s forced, it sounds wrong. What we do, though, is we love to make environments. We tend to put ourselves in those places before we write the songs. So, for example, I’ll have a drum beat and T will be playing some organs, and I’ll be like, ‘Meh, the chords are so good, but where are you, man? Where are you? I don’t want you to be in Shepherd’s Bush, I want you to be standing on the beach at this festival and there are hundreds of thousands of people. And sharks.

And people surfing. And little monkeys on motorbikes.’ You’ve got to play it like you’re there, you know? That’s how you get that feeling. We don’t like to listen to other songs while we’re writing, because we’d end up becoming thieves.

The best place to steal from is your own visual imagination.”

When on stage, Jungle is a band, but in the studio it’s just the two producers, building on those experimental sounds they discovered at ten years old. T: “Our music is quite heavily electronic, but underneath we have a completely natural starting point. A lot of what we do in the studio is sampling ourselves. We record

parts, cut them up and loop them. That’s really fun, actually. It means that there are endless possibilities to what we can do, and it makes the creative process much less predictable. But then when you go live you have to form a band around you. That was a big challenge, but it’s been really fun. They’re great musicians and they’re all our friends— we even grew up with a couple of them.

My relationship with J is very tight, so it made sense to surround ourselves with even more friends and spread the love, I guess.”

With a show almost daily, and only a single album out, it could quite easily get boring. But not for Jungle.

They do a lot of on-stage improvisation, completely in line with the spontaneity in the studio. T: “We’ve got to make the most of the great musicians we have around us. When the drummer or the percussionist tries something new on stage, it almost makes us the audience, because we don’t know what they’re gonna do next. But we trust them to put all their heart into it. On stage it’s about having fun, looking around you, smiling.

When we were growing up we went to a lot of concerts and you know when you’re at a concert and there’s so much energy that you take from the stage?

As a 14-year-old kid you digest it, you use it. Now we have the opportunity to

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give that back to people. It’s like giving people a gift, almost.” J: “It’s great. It’s just that energy that we feed off and then recycle back into the room. The audience becomes one, and the people become like other members of the project.”

But despite the number of shows they’re doing, things can—and do—still go wrong: J and T both have nightmares about performing every now and then.

T: “I think that’s part of the job, really; expecting things to go wrong. It keeps you on your toes. I had a dream once where I walked on stage, and the whole band was playing, and I got to the front of the stage and my keyboard wasn’t there. I had to shout through my microphone, ‘Where’s my keyboard? Where’s my keyboard?’” J: “You sang it!” T: “Yeah, I sang! [Singing] ‘Where’s my keyboard?’

And then I just saw it being passed through the crowd.” J: “I know that feeling, man, I fucking know that feeling! You dream that you go on, and everybody else in the band is fine, but all your shit is broken and fucked up.” T: “I guess this shows how much faith we have in our friends, when in those dreams we’re always messing up and they’re the ones doing it right…” www.junglejunglejungle.com

Gc Interview

By Kelsey Lee Jones Photography: Taufiq Hosen

y t a t r e B Hea

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Beaty Heart Peckham drum-pop trio Beaty Heart maintains a freestyle philo­sophy, with unconventional use of their beloved beats and an eclectic cornucopia of samples and sound bites. The end result is psychedelic, feel-good quirkiness, with a tropical vibe. This is music that sends you on a looping journey through pink and opal skies from a band that seeks to stimulate your eyes and ears in equal measure.

Imagine taking some top-notch psychedelics—nothing intimidating, just a really good trip. Wholly unexpectedly, you drift gently into another dimension, a dimension where everything is easy.

It’s wide-open and floaty up there, and pre-existing thoughts simply dissolve.

It’s a place where things make no sense, yet so much sense. In a new array of sunset-soaked colours, you’re infected with happiness. Surrounding you is a blanket of bright stars. A giant tambour­ ine floats by, then a curly human head with fiery red hair rotating on its axis, and a pair of hands fist-pumping the air. Eyes closed, you have a smile on your face, giggling quietly to yourself…

Now imagine the soundtrack to your trip and you have a close approximation of the sound of Beaty Heart and their debut album, Mixed Blessings. An irresistible force of optimism, it’s all a bit detached from reality, and it makes sense that the band uses the word “escapist” to describe it. A kaleidoscope of bizarre noises loops around, yet somehow they work together perfectly; there are notes flying at you from all directions. Myriad instruments gently vibrate, skip, clap, jingle, and whistle.

You hear keys, strings, bells and more,

layered with sounds of nature and sweet, echoing, falsetto voices singing lovely lyrics to you. So upbeat is their sound, the band once recorded a Meditation Mix and made it available via their website. A fun idea, it was intended for the listener to use after playing their record in order to bring that “buzzing” mind back down from its elevated state.

Afro-psychedelic, tropicalCaribbean, feel-good calypso—call it what you will, this is music with obvious tropical influences. Which makes it especially anomalous is that the guys behind it are a trio of pale-faced redheads straight out of Peckham. As their moniker suggests, rhythmic drums are most prominent in Beaty Heart’s sound —organic, woody thumps. Drummers Charlie Rotberg and James Moruzzi, and lead singer Josh Mitchell, formed the band that recalls Vampire Weekend at Goldsmiths College, the south-east London art school made famous by Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists —although they’re keen to point out that they’ve been friends since high school. Their close friendship plays a big part in the way they interact as a band.

They’re comfortable with each other— maybe too comfortable, suggests

James: “If someone were to listen into our conversations in the van, they’d probably think, These guys are fucking weird!” The boys lived together for some time, which allowed them to jam and freestyle together constantly, making use of every room in their hippy student house, with “all kinds of instruments, and bits and bobs all over the place...”

There’s no formulaic approach to Beaty Heart’s process; rather, it’s freeflowing experimentation. “We like to keep it open. We have this philosophy that sometimes when you swap on to a different instrument or a style that you’re not comfortable with, it creates something special in itself.” There’s a naivety in their work—in the best possible way. Their music translates as that happy feeling when experimental ideas first come together and start working.

Their album, they say, captures the “joy that came from learning new instruments”. The guys themselves are a little wet behind the ears, and were somewhat wide-eyed on their meeting with Glamcult—which is no doubt part of their charm. They’re nice guys, and free from pretensions. Although new to the ways of the industry, the boys assure us they’re ready for what’s to come, and

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are currently “learning the ropes of touring”.

And we predict that what’s to come is going to be big. These multi­ talented lads clearly have something special. Their creative capacity extends beyond their music, and given the context in which they met, it’s perhaps not surprising that they design much of their promotional material themselves. The identity they have created for Beaty Heart is strong and vivid, psychedelic with a pop twist—reflective of their sound.

Their trippy, edited videos are a visual feast, and help give them their niche as a band. Their bold imagination has, no doubt, developed from those art-school days and the appreciation of visual art in various media. They mention their love of the work of Henri Rousseau and his painting The Dream. They are clearly drawn to the surreal, which is echoed in their obsession with cult films such as The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Onibaba by Kaneto Shindô. “You know, the one with the thumping drum all the way through?” Of course, Beaty Heart, of course. www.beatyheart.com

Gc Interview

ITS 2014 Isn’t it the beautiful dream of young creatives to receive international recognition for their work? This year at ITS 2014 (International Talent Support), such dreams were realised. Glamcult met with a few of the lucky designers, artists and the jury at the show in the Italian city of Trieste. Columbian-born, London-based accessories designer and finalist Daniel Ramos Obregon showed us his collection inspired by astral projections and hallucinations, while juror Marie Schuller, head of fashion film at SHOWstudio, let us in on some of her favourite nominees. Eccentric art duo EVA & ADELE, meanwhile, were a little less forthcoming: “We won’t tell, we only vote”. www.itsweb.org Zoe Waters (UK) Diesel Award

Katherine Roberts-Wood (UK) Fashion Collection of the Year Award

“Through the dream, a realm that still today engages scientific research with constantly new challenges, we express our daily lives, our unconscious fears, inner changes and desires.”

—ITS

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Photography: Giuliano Koren

ITS 2014 “ITS supports designers globally and really democratically. You can tell by the mixture of people, it’s really stunning. I think it’s one of the best platforms for young artists and designers.”

—Marie Schuller, SHOWstudio

Daniel Ramos Obregon

ould you tell us something C about your work? Where does your inspiration come from?

I’ve always been interested in the human psyche. With this project I was looking at our physical identity —our bodies—in contrast with our psychological identities. I discovered this concept in the works of Russian philosopher Roman Krznaric: outrospection —which is also the title of my project. What Krznaric proposes is that through living outside of oneself and out of one’s comfort zone, getting to know more about other cultures and other people and just experiencing a broader world view, one gets to shape one’s identity. Unlike introspection, which is a reflective process,

it’s an experience-based practice. So what I did is, I took that element and I appropriated it and gave it another meaning by relating it to astral projections, which is a phenomena that happens when you’re dreaming or hallucin­ ating or when you have a near-death experience. It’s the feeling that your mind, or soul, leaves the body, it’s like floating around in space but you can see your physical body from outside.

So the whole collection is a metaphor for that.

Photography: Daniele Braida

ow does it feel to be at the H ITS awards?

It’s been fantastic. This is my first awards event and everyone’s so friendly and welcoming. They really make you feel comfortable, it’s been very nice!

What’s next for you?

I’m actually moving back to Columbia from London. But I’m already looking for ways to return, because I really want to be here and I want to get as much industry experience as I can. Ideally, in the future, in a couple of years, I would like to start working on my own accessories brand.

Yasuto Kimura (Japan) SHOWstudio Prize

Anita Hirlekar (Iceland) Fashion Special Prize

“The conditions we look for when we vote are radicalism and beauty.”

—EVA & ADELE 59

Gc Report

D E H A LLEN H A A R LEM

M I C H E L AU D E R ‘L ARGE AS LIFE’

C H R I S T I A N FR I E D R I C H ‘ON SOMETHING NEW / DIRT IN A HOLE’

T E N TO O N S T E L L I N G E N 2 0 S E P – 3 0 N OV 2 014 O P E N I N G 19 S E P 17 0 0 U U R ( V R I J TO EG A N K E L I J K )

G R OT E M A R K T 16 , H A A R L E M D I – Z A : 11 0 0 – 17 0 0 U U R ZO: 12 0 0 – 17 0 0 U U R DEHALLENHAARLEM.NL

Visual Essays

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Left Jacket The Suits, trousers Acne Studios, ring Lyppens Right Jacket Velour, pullover H&M, trousers MTWTFSS Weekday, shoes Filippa K, glasses RETROSUPERFUTURE

Left Pullover Velour, trousers Samsøe & Samsøe, ring Lyppens Right Trousers Eddy Anemian for H&M, shoes Filippa K

Left Sweater Acne Studios

Right Sweater MTWTFSS Weekday, trousers Topman Design, belt A.P.C., shoes Filippa K, glasses RETROSUPERFUTURE

Photography: Jeroen W. Mantel Styling: Thomas Vermeer Hair and make-up: Magdalena Loza for Balmain Hair—House of Orange Model: Melle—IAmELK Agency Assistant photography: Thomas Born

y b e v i t l o e n W and . h t t i h fa y sig b

Femke Sweater Avelon, skirt Blk Dnm, boots Hope By Ringstrand Soderberg, beanie hat American Apparel, scarf Hugo by Hugo Boss, leather gloves Agent Provocateur Willy Bodysuit This is Lily, shirt Paul Smith, bomber jacket Paul Smith, shoes Hugo by Hugo Boss

Femke Top Black Body, skirt Mtwtfss Weekday, skirt BLK DNM, shoes Dr. Martins, choker Webers Holland

Femke Shirt LA Sisters, dress Avelon, jeans American Apparel, shoes Dr. Martins, necklace Webers Holland

Willy Sweater Franzel, trousers Hussein Chalayan, shoes Hugo by Hugo Boss

Willy Coat CĂŠdric Charlier, jacket Hussein Chalayan, trousers Paul Smith

Femke Jacket and trousers Hussein Chalayan, dress American Apparel, skirt MTWTFSS Weekday, leggings Hugo by Hugo Boss, shoes Ann Demeulemeester

Femke Jacket Yohji Yamamoto, sweater Falke, dress under sweater CĂŠdric Charlier

Willy Top MTWTFSS Weekday, shirt Monki, skirt The People Of The Labyrinths, shoes Hussein Chalayan Femke Vest Monki, shirt Avelon, skirt Yohji Yamamoto, boots Cédric Charlier

Willy Dress Agent Provocateur Femke Sweater Hugo by Hugo Boss

Photography: Duy Vo Styling: Majid Karrouch—Manja Otten Management Hair: Magdalena Loza for Balmain Hair—House of Orange Make-up: Chiao-Li Hsu for Clinique— House of Orange Model: Femke—Bloom and Willy—Paparazzi Model Management Assistant photography: Lotte van Raalte Assistant styling: Hadassah Martes Assistant make-up: Tineke van der Donk

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Sales Information A.P.C. www.apc.fr

Diesel www.diesel.com

Meadham Kirchhoff www.meadhamkirchhoff.com

Acne Studios www.acnestudios.com

Dr Martens www.drmartens.com

Monki www.monki.com

Agent Provocateur www.agentprovocateur.com

Falke www.falke.com

Moschino www.moschino.com

Alex Mullins www.alexmullins.co.uk

Filippa K www.filippa-k.com

Other Stories www.stories.com

Alexander McQueen www.alexandermcqueen.com

Franzel www.franzelamsterdam.com

Paul Smith www.paulsmith.co.uk

American Apparel www.americanapparel.net

G-Star RAW www.g-star.com

Raf Simons x Sterling Ruby www.rafsimons.com

Ann Deumeulemeester www.anndemeulemeester.be

Gareth Pugh www.garethpugh.net

Retrosuperfuture www.retrosuperfuture.com

ASOS www.asos.com

H&M www.hm.com

Samsøe & Samsøe www.samsoe.com

Avelon www.avelon.me

Heohwan Simulation www.heohwansimulation.com

The People of the Labyrinths www.labyrinths.nl

Bastian Visch www.bastianvisch.com

Hope by Ringstrand Soderberg www.hope-sthlm.com

The Row www.therow.com

HAPERENDE MENS

Black Body -

Hugo Boss www.hugoboss.com

The Suits www.the-suits.com

FUTURE ISLANDS THE HOLD STEADY TYCHO DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 CARIBOU GLENN BRANCA ENSEMBLE MODESELEKTOR / HENRIK SCHWARZ / NOSAJ THING

Blk Dnm www.blkdnmcloseup.com

Hussein Chalayan www.chalayan.com

This is Lily www.thisislily.nl

Bobby Abley www.bobbyabley.co.uk

Jacquemus www.jacquemus.com

Topman Design www.topman.com

Cédric Charlier www.cedric-charlier.com

Kenzo www.kenzo.com

Velour www.velour.se

Chanel www.chanel.com

Lacoste www.lacoste.com

Webers Holland www.webersholland.nl

Converse www.converse.com

La Sisters www.lasisters.com

Weekday www.weekday.com

Costume National www.costumenational.com

Lyppens www.lyppens.nl

Yohji Yamamoto www.yohjiyamamoto.co

Craig Green www.craig-green.com

Marques’ Almeida www.marquesalmeida.com

Diesel Black Gold www.dieselblackgold.com

Mattijs www.mattijsvanbergen.com

TICKETS: MELKWEG.NL

12 OKT CARIBOU

FRI 5 SEP

BIT SHIFTER / TREY FREY EINDBAAS

FRI 12 SEP

FRI 3 OCT TUE 7 OCT FRI 10 OCT SAT 11 OCT SUN 12 OCT TUE 14 OCT THU 16 OCT

ACTRESS / AARON DILLOWAY

MODESELEKTION – AMSTERDAM DANCE EVENT

FRI 7 NOV SAT 15 NOV SUN 16 NOV WED 19 NOV WED 19 NOV THU 20 NOV THU 27 NOV SAT 6 DEC

THE ASTEROIDS GALAXY TOUR ZOLA JESUS SBTRKT GRAMATIK KLAXONS MØ THE HORRORS JUNGLE

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