DEATHMOTH MAY'17 by Itzel Vives

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may

La hija del Grunge

PÁGINA 20 FRANCES BEAN COBAIN FOTOGRAFIADA POR HEIDI SLIMANE

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8,9 Carta Editorial

12,17 Dita Von Teese

La mujer más importante del burlesque abre su corazón para contarnos sobre la vida después de Marilyn Manson y sus proyectos a futuro.

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La hija del Grunge

Frances Bean Cobain nos habla sobre su debut como modelo para Marc Jacobs, la música, el arte, la moda y todo lo que la hacen ser ella.

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Taylor Momsen

LucasDavid

Desde Gossip Girl hasta compartir el escenario con Marilyn Manson, la rockera más importante en la industria en esta época nos habla sobre su nuevo disco Going To Hell y lo que significa para ella.

El talento mexicano que ha conquistado al mundo con su manera de hacer bello lo grotesco.

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favoritos, Lucas David, el tapatío que decidió tomar la desición artistica más acertada de su vida: “Matar a sus idolos”, dejando que estos se ahogaran en un pozo de excesos, vómito y sangre, para luego ser reconocido por Courtney Love y después colabor con The Pretty Reckless en su mercancía oficial, Lucas es considerado para nosotros como uno de los artistas más importantes de esta generación y uno de los más interesantes.

Sin más preámbulo me despido esperando que disfruten tanro leerla como yo disfruté crearla. Keep on rocking, -Itzel Vives

El ROCK nos REVIVIÓ uando hablamos de básicos para nuestro guardaropa en tiempos actuales, es casi imposible no pensar en leather jackets, combat boots, choquers o ripped jeans; por eso es que en esta edición decidí que sería increíble enfocarnos en cómo la música ha afectado la indumentaria y nos ha permitido expresar nuestros sentimientos y puntos de vista de una manera más exacta. En este mes nos acercamos a conocer un poco más a tres mujeres admirables y fuertes que indagan en tres tipos diferentes de arte pero que tienen algo en común: El Rock. 8

Por el lado de la música tenemos a la hermosa Taylor Momsen del grupo Pretty Reckless, quién se deslindó de su carrera de actuación totalmente para convertirse en lo que luego sería una de las bandas de rock lideradas por una mujer más importantes de la actualidad. En cuanto a danza, la hermosa Dita Von Teese, impecable representación de elegancia y sensualidad que alguna vez unió su vida con el icónico Marilyn Manson. En cuanto a moda nos acercamos un poco a Frances con su debút en la indistria de la como la nueva musa deMarc Jacobs. Y por último pero no menos importante, el artista mexicano que ha conquistado el mundo y a sus artistas DEATHMOTH

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reina de la Seducciรณn

Dita nos habla sobre el burlesque, las nude selfies, el feminismo y cรณmo creรณ su nombre. 12

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choreography. I would rather have been a Ziegfeld girl walking down the stairs in all the feathers and rhinestones than having to tap dance all over the place. Have you ever had a costume malfunction? Oh, yes. There was one costume that I did for the Crazy Horse a few years ago. Mr. Pearl, who makes all the corsetry for Christian Lacroix and Jean Paul Gaultier, made this corset for me, where the only way out was by unlacing from the top of the shoulders all the way down the butt into the crotch. It’s so beautiful, I thought nobody has ever done a striptease out of a corset like that. I set my mind to become the Houdini of burlesque. So I had a few mishaps with that, especially at the beginning. I had a giant pair of scissors that were covered in Swarovski jewels that I would have the stage assistant bring out just in case I got stuck. Did you ever have to take the scissors to it? Yeah, twice, but that’s two times out of 75 shows. And people love when they see the mistakes. Also, everyone loves watching someone getting cut out of a corset—it’s so dramatic. You’ve often been credited for re-popularizing burlesque. What do you think about the current state of burlesque? I think it’s been amazing to watch the evolution of it. When I started performing burlesque in the early ’90s, my audience was very distinctive: It was fetishists, and a lot of men—even some men who were much older who remembered burlesque, in fact. It was amazing to watch its evolution from this very niche thing to this modern feminist movement. At my shows, it’s like 80 percent women now. The men that are there are the partners of the women, or they’re gays. I have never found a group of straight guys that are there together to ogle girls anymore. Where have all the fetishists gone? I think the fetishists are still there. But I think I moved on in a lot of ways. I was the poster girl, the modern answer to Bettie Page. I was on the cover of all the fetish magazines and I was the only one doing retro-style pinups. I moved on, and now there are so many girls who are fetish pinup models. It’s a huge thing. They’re doing what I was doing in the early ’90s, and I’m kind of doing what I love, which is burlesque shows and designing lingerie and writing my beauty book. Did you see the recent Instagram post by Emily Ratajkowski and Kim Kardashian West in which they said they would not be ashamed of their naked bodies? Do you think posting nude selfies is feminist? I feel two ways about it. The thing that I always say about what I do for a living, which could be perceived as empowering or degrading, is that everyone’s got a right to their opinion. It’s really

lose readers of DeathMoth. com know that Dita Von Teese, the Queen of Burlesque, has recently been diversifying her talents. Last year she released a beauty book, Your Beauty Mark: The Ultimate Guide to Eccentric Glamour, and also found time to design a lingerie collection. But after performing a sold-out, two-week run at Paris’s famed Crazy Horse theater, Von Teese is returning to her roots with a world-touring new burlesque show, Strip Strip Hooray! Before a series of West Coast shows began this week, we caught up with the star by phone to talk costume mishaps, nude selfies, and burlesque feminism. You have been a muse to several major fashion designers, including Jean Paul Gaultier and Zac Posen. Will they be designing some of the costumes that you’ll be wearing onstage for Strip Strip Hooray!? Well, Catherine D’Lish has been making a lot of the rhinestone-heavy costumes of the show. I have these spectacles of Swarovski that have hundreds of thousands of rhinestones on them. They’re mind-boggling in terms of showgirl costumes, so I’m wearing a lot of those things because they’re showstoppers. Christian Louboutin made all of my shoes custom. So we have this pair of cowboy boots that he made for me that have big ol’ Swarovski spurs that spin. He loves making showgirl shoes. He just made a whole fleet of showgirl shoes for my Crazy Horse Paris shows. So of course I’m going to be wearing those on this tour as well. And I just had a dress made from Ralph & Russo. They made a beautiful Swarovski-beaded gown that’s amazing. Zuhair Murad also made a beautiful dress that I’m not sure yet if I’m going to wear in this show; I’m trying to find a place to fit it in. Do these heavily embellished dresses ever make it difficult for you to perform a striptease onstage? They’re hard to maneuver in, sure, but the look of it is astonishing. In fact, the dress that I wear for my finale is an Asian-inspired gown covered in big Swarovski [crystals] with a 4-foot train with long sleeves. We used one of those special-effect Swarovski stones, which looks like an oil slick. It has all these colors in it, and it looks electric onstage. People actually ask me if the dress is electrified or plugged in. I always say that I really enjoy the opulence of costumes more than I enjoy learning 14

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how you view it. It’s not about what that person is doing; it’s about how people translate it. One person can go see a burlesque show and feel inspired and empowered and that they want to do the same. Just like someone could look at those photos and say, “I’m going to do that, too, and I’m not going to be ashamed of my body.” Or someone can watch a burlesque show and say, “I felt uncomfortable” or “I didn’t understand it.” It’s not for anyone to decide except for the person who’s doing it. And if you don’t like it, Don’t look at it. Don’t follow Kim Kardashian if you don’t want to look at her nude selfies! And don’t come to a burlesque show if you don’t want to see girls stripteasing. Why do women watch burlesque? There’s a lot of humor involved. There’s a lot of fantasy and spectacle and glamour. For me, one of the reasons I started making burlesque shows and posing for pinups was because I felt like I didn’t have many modern models of sensuality that I could relate to, because I don’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model covered in sand running down the beach. I can’t relate to that beauty. Burlesque is the idea of creation: the red lipstick, the red nails, the high heels, black stockings, and garter belts, which accentuate and hide things maybe we don’t like about ourselves. Corsetry, which enhances the waist. It’s these symbols of transformation that we can all relate to, and we can all create if we want to. There’s never anything that is too overtly sexual onstage, but it’s still erotic. The combination of all these things is what makes it magical. Do a lot of people come to you for advice on how to feel sexier? They do, and I really just explain where I’m coming from. You know, I’m a blonde girl from a farming town in Michigan. I can be very ordinary. I’ve been there before. The reason I started doing all of this, dressing myself in retro-style glamour, was because I felt like finally I had something in common with a sex symbol. My idols are women from the past, like Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Rita Hayworth. I felt like I could capture the spirit of that. A lot of people ask me about confidence, and I tell them. This is how I found my confidence. When I do photo shoots and people want to strip me of my red lipstick, and they want my hair to be straight, and they want me to be normal, I feel really vulnerable. I don’t like how that feels. So just notice the things that make you feel good and do those things. And notice the things that don’t make you feel good, and don’t do those things. Simple. 16

You recently said your show at Paris’s Crazy Horse was the first time you were “truly buck naked” onstage, and that’s something you never do. Why do it now? You know, I love classic 1940s and ’50s style. I love corsets, pasties, and G-strings and feathers and rhinestones. But my friend Ali Mahdavi, who’s a great director and photographer, had this fantasy of doing a technological striptease, so we used all light. It was the first time that technology had ever been used that way, but it was very dependent on being totally naked so the light could create the costumes on my body. It was really something special. But it was an interesting feeling for me to be standing there onstage totally nude, bathed in light. It was really interesting, all the feelings that it brought up for me. What was going through your mind? I had to really overcome my vulnerability. It scared me straight! I had to make sure I was in the right spot at the right time, because if I’m not, then people could see everything. But it was something that I had to overcome. I’m usually in control of the striptease, and I think that having the light in control and having to follow the light—that wasn’t so easy. Are you going to incorporate this new technology into your show? No, it’s very specific. It has to be in a very small place to work, like the Crazy Horse. Also, it’s extremely expensive technology. Personally, I’d rather spend all my money on rhinestones and feathers and a mechanical bull I can ride. How did you come up with the name Dita Von Teese? I was just Dita for many years. I had seen a movie with an actress named Dita Parlo, and I thought, God, that’s such a cool name. I wanted to be known with just a simple first name—Cher, Madonna. Then when I first posed for Playboy, in 1993 or 1994, they told me I had to pick a last name. So I opened up the phone book at the bikini club [I worked in at the time]. I was with a friend and I was like, “Let’s look under a Von something.” It sounds really exotic and glamorous. So I found the name Von Treese and I called Playboy and said, “I’m going to be Dita Von Treese.” I remember so well going to the newsstand and picking up the magazine, and it said Dita Von Teese. I called them and they said, “Oh, we’ll fix it. We’ll fix it.” The next month, same thing: Dita Von Teese. I left it because I didn’t really care. I didn’t know I was going to go on to trademark it all over the world! I had a laugh once when somebody once said, “Oh, her name is so fabricated.” And I’m like, “It’s a typo!”| DEATHMOTH

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hija del Grunge

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“I don’t model unless I think the project is cool, and I don’t put my name behind something that I don’t genuinely believe in,” says Cobain. “I thought this collection was great, and I was flattered that Marc thought of me for this. What I said to Marc when I was saying yes was that he’s an underdog for the masses. He’s still very rebellious within the fashion world, and he’s been like that his entire career.” Though the Marc Jacobs brand has a long-held reputation for featuring unexpected talents—iconoclasts ranging from artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to director Lana Wachowski have participated in the seasonal group ads—Cobain’s images mark the first time in four years a single face has represented the label. Seizing the opportunity as a chance to bring real-girl sensibility to the idealized world of luxury ads, Cobain didn’t attempt to be anyone but herself. “I’m not representing the beautiful top models of the world,” she says. “I’m representing what a general, standard, average human girl would look like wearing these clothes. I think that’s why Marc picked me for this.” In keeping with the theme of authenticity, the ads, shot by David Sims, stand in sharp contrast to the psychedelic looks seen on the runway. “The fashion show itself was so colorful, but it was the complete opposite of what we ended up doing on the set,” says Cobain. “The shoot had a very organic feel—all the makeup was my own. We used the lipstick from right out of my purse, and no one did anything to my hair. They just put me in the clothes.” She bonded with Sims behind the scenes over a book about Marjorie Cameron and the on-set music selection and says the atmosphere put her at ease. “I have so much respect for David; he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He and Marc created an environment in which I felt like I was thriving and enjoying myself.” The fact that designers like Jacobs are willing to trust in Cobain’s perspective speaks to her status as a tastemaker, but she’s far from fussy where clothes are concerned. “I honestly don’t care very much. I’m a black jeans, vintage T-shirt, boots girl. That is my daily uniform,” she says. “I can appreciate fashion without having to let it consume me or [feeling the need] to be part of that world. In my personal life, I’m just lazy about it.” Fashion’s current obsession with ’90s nostalgia gets a hard pass. “I don’t fucking care what they did in the ’90s; I wasn’t around and it’s not relevant to me,” she says. Cobain was born in 1992. “Yes, the ’90s were influential, for sure, but it’s just not my cup of tea. When it’s shoved down your throat every day for 24 years, you just stop caring.” The irony of the runways’ love affair with

ven though she has just been announced as the latest face of Marc Jacobs and is rapidly racking up likes on the designer’s Instagram page, don’t expect Frances Bean Cobain to join the legions of celebrity children turned professional models. “I don’t think I’ll be modeling for anybody else for a very long time—this is 100 percent outside my comfort zone,” says Cobain on the phone from Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t have done it with anyone other than Marc.” As the daughter of rock legends Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Cobain comes with a style cachet that brands have been eager to harness. Though approached over the years by various labels hoping to enlist her for endorsements, she turned down each offer until longtime supporter Jacobs came calling. 22

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grunge—a look her parents helped to popularize and one that Jacobs showed in the luxury space with his now famous Spring 1993 Perry Ellis collection—isn’t lost on her either. “I find it interesting where grunge originated from, and then where it was taken, which was high fashion,” says Cobain. “My dad was so poor that they kept going to Goodwill to get donated ripped jeans. It wasn’t a fashion decision; it was an ‘I don’t have any money, I have no other choice’ type of decision.” As far as any notion of her own role within the industry, Cobain expects the Jacobs campaign will stand as a cherished memory rather than represent a career shift. “I could never do [modeling] professionally, but I’m glad I did it with Marc, because I trust him,” says Cobain, a visual artist. Though she remains coy about her next move, she is certain it involves something more stimulating than posing in front of the camera. “Thankfully I have other skills than just standing there and looking cute.|

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reina del

Rock

Taylor pasรณ por el infierno para crear su nuevo album. pero eso solo la preparรณ mรกs para bailar con el diablo.

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only common thing that happens, at least for this band, for Ben and I – it requires isolation. We don’t write on the road, you jot down ideas and things always because you’re always thinking and percolating things but the meat of the material comes at home when you’re isolated and you can actually have time with your own thoughts. And when you go to sit down to write a new record, at least for me, I immerse myself in everything art.

This past weekend at Welcome to Rockville, Alternative Nation had the opportunity to speak with Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless after their performance. The whole band was very friendly and welcoming, with great senses of humor. Taylor and I started off having a very casual and comfortable conversation before I got into questions.

I watch great films, read great books like Stephen King, I paint, I sculpt, I swim, run, play guitar, listen to great records – you just try to stick inside your own head and pray that, like a lightning bolt, something’s gonna strike down and hit you and will turn into something. And it’s different every time, some songs are written in five minutes and that’s a magical moment, while some take years of jotting down ideas and lyrics and then putting music to it and seeing where that’s gonna take you, and then eventually you have a song. So it’s different every time and this record kinda…

I began by telling her how happy I was to have finally heard “Hangman” live, since it’s my favorite song off the new album, Who You Selling For. She decided to shed some light on where the inspiration for the song came from – a 16th century poem. “It’s by this guy named Chidiock Tichborne in the 1500s, and it’s a poem I grew up with and Ben [Phillips, The Pretty Reckless guitarist] grew up with. It technically doesn’t have a name – it either goes by Allergy or On the Eve of His Execution. It was to his wife. He got executed for treason and wrote this poem, and it’s like he suddenly saw his life for the first time because he was gonna be executed – hung – the next day. So the entire chant over the riff is that poem translated into Latin and the bridge is my own verse that I added to his poem.” Below is Alternative Nation’s full Q&A with Momsen. So first off, how is it touring with Soundgarden when they’re one of your biggest influences? Well we’ve only played with them once before and it was in Quebec City. They were amazing and I love 30

Portrays that.

Matt Chamberlain who was playing with them at the time, but I’m very excited to see them with Matt Cameron tonight. It’ll be my personal first time seeing Matt Cameron play, and he’s one of my favorite drummers. Soundgarden is one of the bands that brought us as a group together, we all bonded over the Beatles and Soundgarden. So when we got the call that we were gonna open for them, I didn’t know what to say. I have no words – we are extraor-

dinarily excited and I hope we don’t disappoint their fans. So Who You Selling For – I wrote a review for it, I’m a big fan – it has a very diverse sound where the songs are all very different. When you guys were writing it, did you intend on making it sound like that or did it kind of just happen that way naturally? Very naturally. When you write a record or make a song, it DEATHMOTH

takes a minute to look back on it and actually gain perspective, and I think we are just starting to do that now. We kind of unintentionally ended up making kind of a classic rock record. The new single is “Back to the River” featuring Warren Haynes because we had this southern rock tune that we loved, but it was demanding an amazing slide solo, and who are you gonna call? You call the fucking Allman Brothers, you call Warren Haynes. And he had to listen to it before he said yes, and he heard the song and said he’d love to DEATHMOTH

play on it, and he really elevated it to a whole new level. So it did become a very diverse record. Writing’s weird. You emote, you write, you think inside your own head…and it’s so yours. Ben and I are the two writers of the band and it’s a very weird thing, you sit inside your own head and you focus. A question that we get asked the most is, “What’s your songwriting process?” And there is no process. It’s kind of hard to explain because the

Yeah. Well we toured Going to Hell for about two and a half years straight. As an artist and a songwriter and someone who constantly needs to be moving forward, it started to kind of destroy us a bit at the end. So now we’re trying to mix it up. So when we got off of touring Going to Hell, Ben and I immediately jumped into writing the new record. We had our first number one and our second and our third [off that album], and we still love playing them but we needed something fresh to keep us going. So this record was actually written quite quickly, strangely. So we’re trying to switch it up now – tour a little bit, play festivals, get back in the studio, then get back on tour, instead of doing the grinding two-year cycle. Just to keep our minds fresh and clear and not be in this 31

kind of black hole of touring, which it can become. It sounds crazy because it’s the hardest thing to say to a family member, a friend, an interviewer – to complain about having this as your job. It’s ridiculous, it’s the best job on the planet! I get to go scream into a microphone and crank amps and write songs, and that’s my job! And that’s insane! But if you don’t take a break from it, you start to lose your mind for lack of a better phrase. Okay, so last question – I know you’re a Grunge fan, would you, if you ever had 32

the time or were approached about it, would you ever consider [singing for] Stone Temple Pilots? (Giggling) I thought about auditioning for that! Honestly, I freaked out the rest of the band. I called Mark [Damon, The Pretty Reckless bassist] and Jamie [Perkins, The Pretty Reckless drummer] and was like, “Yeah so I’m gonna go sing for Stone Temple Pilots now and yeah so we’re not touring anymore, sorry guys. This is it, my new gig.” And they bought it for a while! We fuck with each other all the

time but I actually had them for a minute. Have they hired a new singer? No, they still haven’t, they’ve been looking for one for over a year. You should think about it. I’ll think about it! But I like writing and playing my own songs. I love Stone Temple Pilots, I think they’re fantastic… maybe one show I would sing their songs. Well thank you very much Taylor! Thank you so much! DEATHMOTH

loco mundo de

Lucas David It was his mother, Julia, that unconsciously marked the creative path of her son, the later world-known artist Andy Warhol, by taking him to church every other day: constantly surrounded by religious images, the idea of the ‘icon’ was stuck in his mind. As a result, Warhol chose the most famous Hollywood stars of his age as main characters of it’s serigraphs and, thanks to the serial repetition of the same images, he took them to the utter level of everlasting symbols.

gged eyes, pills and plenty of cigarettes, he portrays illness and vices of the stars of nowadays popular culture. He glamorizes the destruction and deterioration of the body in a genial, unthinkable and elegant way; the bright colors that burn out the paintings contrast with the slow and anguished fading away of his icons’ limbs. Considering the techniques, Lucas

prefers ink and watercolor. In other works he mixes, inserts texts, cuts and pastes, creating strong juxtapositions that impress the viewer; he asserted that his inspiration, beyond Warhol, comes from personalities such as photographers Steven Klein and Steven Meisel. His personal modern muses are among all model Ali Michael, singers Sky Ferreira, Alice Glass and Courtney Love. He describes

Even though the fascinating 60s are far away, Lucas David, talented boy from Mexico, looked at Warhol’s art with an eye of our generation and reinterpreted the concept of the icon. He fearlessly decided to ‘kill his idols’, the ones of our contemporary worlds of music, fashion, and cinema by letting them slowly perish on a bed made of blood, pills, drugs and vomit. Lucas started drawing when he was a teenager and through the years he developed a unique and independent way of painting that now is leading him to huge appreciation and fame. The initial approach to his works of art is destabilizing, odd and naïve; ‘sick’ and ‘creepy’ are the first words that come to mind. But David’s style is deeper and rooted in fervid lines of thought: through bleeding noses, dru34

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his art as ‘large shiny chunks of vomit’ and himself as a ‘genuine visionary of today’. His pieces bring you to a screaming underground limbo, full of sparkling trash and chic malaise, where ‘holy-drugged’ icons reign.

Thanks to social media, Lucas David’s art became very popular and even the subject portrayed (Courtney Love) showed interests in the works, by reposting them and thanking him for this sick but truly origi-

nal depiction; furthermore, David hosted his first exhibition and collaborated with Taylor Momsen for The Pretty Reckless’ merchandise. Exciting projects will come soon, and they will shock for sure. Meanwhile, you can buy his prints and

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