Liana Satenstein is New York City’s preeminent fashion archivist and seer, able to predict the return of the YSL Mombasa bag, dissect the trend towards “nipple heels,” and summon out magical nuggets from the past that will be relevant in the future. This spring, we let her loose in i-D’s archive to see what she could learn combing through 45 years of issues.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been glued to my computer screen, jumping in and out of the digitized i-D Magazine archive and its winking covers. I’ve been combing through every issue from the seventh, 1982 pop art-inflected, scrawl-dribbled fanzine founded by Terry Jones to a Paolo Roversi black-and-white lensed cover of Naomi Campbell from 2019. The plan, I’m told, is to release the archive to you all later this year.

Some of us were there at the beginning—or the middle. There are many issues of i-D from my youth that I remember marinating in the international magazine section in Barnes & Noble. A snarling Lindsay Lohan from spring 2006, busting out of a lamé, ruffle-trimmed dress. Rihanna, glowing, from pre-spring 2009. Mariah Carey beaming in a bikini from June 2008. A little tagline floats next to Mimi’s head, “Put yr stunna shades on for Ice Queen, NADJA Swarovski!”

When I’m researching, say, an It bag, I need to submerge myself in every pocket, fondle the zipper, and smell the innards. I enter this realm, not by touching the physical bag, but by drowning myself in archives. I need to know everything about it, even if it involves contacting the PR associate who was promoting the carryall at the time. Even a mere It bag, like the Celine Boogie, the Fendi Oyster, or the Balenciaga City, is never just an It bag. To really understand the essence of an It bag (and there is one), one needs to see how many editorials it was featured in, who photographed the spread, and who the magazine’s accessories director was. That little red-hot It bag reflects what was happening in fashion–and what was happening in the world. While we can’t bottle a moment, an archive is a way for us to at least understand the moment.

Going through a digital archive is the next best thing to luxuriating at a desk at Library180, flipping through each ancient magazine by hand. Or maybe the sensation of clicking through the endless archive is akin to cracking open a fresh one at Climax Books. But these spots are in New York City, which is far for many. What is a fashion-curious kid supposed to do stuck in a small town, hovering on the border of New Hampshire? Alone in Kalamazoo, Michigan? Access is often cut short.

And even if you can get to the Library180s or the Climax Books of New York, let’s not forget that old issues of magazines can be expensive! I think a lot about myself in high school in nowheresville, Massachusetts, hypnotized by editorials shot in Moscow or Paris or Shanghai. It was so hard to get my hands on physical magazines: I saved up my cash bussing tables and begged my boyfriend to haul me into Boston so I could go to a magazine stand or a used bookstore. And when I didn’t have a physical copy on hand, I spent hours on The Fashion Spot or LiveJournal looking at shoots.

But even those prized photographs fade from the internet, whimpering away with each deactivated image-hosting site, morphing pages into a graveyard of broken links. If you are lucky enough to find a rare magazine tear online, the image is often rogue, an island separated from the rest of the pages and floating alone in the ethers of Tumblr, Pinterest, or Instagram. The image exists alone with no information about where it originated. In this world where photographs sans provenance are circulated on social media, we often don’t know the makeup artist, the hairstylist, or the fashion assistant. Without appropriate credits, these images lose a layer of meaning.

Today, information has become currency. Even the tiniest facts can give birth to full articles. The rarer the spread and the rarer the quote, the more conversations get started. How many times has someone spun a whole piece out of cobbled-together interviews and tidbits from the internet? It’s a beautiful thing.

i-D has always been a magazine for the hungry youth. It’s for the people whose beds are surrounded by cairns of magazines ready to topple. For those who organize them by date, type, and country. Who tab the pages with sticky notes in different colors! For those who make friends from across the country, thanks to a random fashion forum, and can talk about one Kate Moss photograph that struck them to their core and changed their lives. As for people who have worked in magazines, are jaded, and have seen it all, why not bring those raw feelings to life again with a bountiful archive? Why not democratize the thrill of discovery for all? Information is an elixir to boredom and stagnation, and it should be shared, and it certainly should be free.

Here are some things that I liked from the archive!

1. Rachel Weisz on the cover of i-D in September 1987, wearing bunny ears

The image of a plump-faced, sassy, winking young Rachel Weisz as a bunny on the magazine cover is forever Tumblr-versed. At the time, Weisz was only 17 years old, having completed her “A Levels in Art History, French, and English”, intending to study Drama at the Lee Strasberg School of Method Acting. She’s fun. “Men Only magazines make me want to have a wash but bunnying for i-D could have its rewards,” she tells i-D in a minuscule snippet on the credits page.

Also, fun fact: The photographer of the shoot Kevin Davies, tells i-D that the piggy smiley face on her left bicep was drawn on after the shoot by then editor-in-chief and i-D founder Terry Jones. (I said: “Oh, he drew it on in post,” and Davies responded with: “If you can call it that…”) Also, I love this part: The actress’s name is spelled incorrectly as Rachel Wise…in print! Life was so free.

2. The advertisements

I am a Vogue archive diehard, and I could happily illustrate campaigns in the magazine from 1997-2001 as if I were an orchestra conductor. But as for the advertisements for i-D magazine? That’s a whole different ballgame. Youthful. Experimental. This is where creative directors let their freak flag fly. Every campaign is like a shivering atom of energy waiting to pop out of the page. In a September 1992 issue, there is an incredible Levi’s campaign where it’s just hazy images of where people plop their jean-clad asses: chairs, benches, and motorcycles. In May 1999, the Calvin Klein ads are sexier, raunchier: Christy Turlington is all curves and aphrodite in a white cotton stretch bra and matching panties, smoldering in all of her smoky eye glory. There’s a Rorschach test image of a woman from Nike with her limbs and head replaced with a splattering of ribbon strokes, kicking in the brand’s Fit support tank and gym capri from June 2002. Oh, and Stüssy fans: You’re in luck. The archive is teeming with ads.

3. People were having fun… even the accountant!

For issue no. In February 2007, the magazine posed the question “If I ruled the world…” to the editorial team, including the advertising assistant and account manager. Fashion director Edward Enninful wrote: “I would make sure everyone had enough to eat.” Fashion editor Francesca Burns wished “high heels would be mandatory,” while the accountant Colette Kinsella penned “a normal working life would be three days a week, if you work part-time you work one day.”

4. All those Kate Moss images came from somewhere!

When I talk about images marooned on social sites, many of these are Moss’s i-D images. The model went on to appear on the cover of the magazine 20 times. This was her first one at the ripe age of 18 in December 1993, where she posed in a baggy sweater in a spread photographed by the woman who discovered her, Corinne Day. One image I had seen vomited again and again on the internet is from the cover with Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss strolling out of (or into) the nightlife abyss from August 1994. Inside, to introduce a story on New York, is a photo I have seen the most of. It shows the supermodel duo perched on a stoop: Moss in a slinky pink slip and Campbell in a tunic dress. This was created by the team of greats: photographed by Steven Klein and makeup by Pat McGrath!

5. The i-D merch was slammin’

There was once a time when the world was teaming with i-D merch. Collaborations from Simon Foxton, a young Judy Blame, and a freaky deaky Shawn Stussy. If anyone can find i-D merch, please tell me. No offense to the team (although they admitted it themselves), but i-D is the most difficult, worst word to search for on resale sites.

6. People

i-D did an incredible job of chronicling everyday people. There is a curiosity here that captures subjects in their most honestly dressed moments—similar to how Biz Sherbert chronicles youth in American Style. From the November 1997 issue says it best about the magazine’s role in interviewing and photographing people in their clothes: “The intention was to find fashion at its source, giving credit to new ideas born on the streets.”

One of my favorite spreads is from the January 1991 issue titled “Teenage Precinct Shoppers.” (The credits read as “With Help from Melanie Ward.”) The opening paragraph talks about the “small percentage” of elites who shop at Alaïa and Bodymap, but that a majority of the country heads to Marks & Spencer. The page shows a handful of kids in their favorite garms. Diverse. Vibrant. It’s a historical time capsule with subjects in their windbreakers, a 10-year-old boy named Rashi in a dastar en route to get his “hoover repaired”, a smiling lad in a Burger King crown, and a 17-year-old unemployed girl from Ilford in a bomber jacket and hoops.

7. Creative Freedom!

We see that unhinged zine mentality of i-D all the way through the magazine. The graffiti. The design. The advertisements. The photography is sometimes raucously bizarre. Photographer Alexei Hay had a wild (quite literally) editorial titled “The Raptor Project” in the February 2001 issue that featured a model collaged with photographs of wild birds and owl eyes. One image shows a hawk tearing the head off of a mouse.

Here is a short interview with Hay about the shoot.

LS: How did the shoot come about?

All those pictures were done with bags of clothes that were lent to me without stylist, which was a crazy thing. I know we got those clothes from Chanel, and the stylist was supposed to do that job, but he didn’t know how to call the showroom. He hadn’t done the job yet. So I think I called or he called or maybe he got them. I don’t know, but I had the bag of clothes in a sports sack bag.

LS: Why did you include the animal photography in the raptor shot?

Hay: It was a weird science photography challenge. You could shoot a supermodel and animals.

i-D was a place where you could draw from anything: you could do science photography, you could mix it with fashion, you could mix it with intimate sort of friend pictures, and they would even let me incorporate a picture that I took in college because it just went with the themes. And that was unheard of in an editorial thing, in an editorial arena. And remember i-D was still, it was just at the point where it was becoming very commercial too. I think I turned down one story because they wouldn’t let me smoke.

The panoramic cityscape around us is encased in a blur of smog, giving it the soft edges of an Impressionist painting. The waitress arrives, offering sauvignon blanc. We ask for three Diet Cokes with ice. “We don’t have those up here, but you can get them downstairs at the bar.” Challenge accepted. I saunter down to the abandoned cocktail area and order a half dozen Diet Cokes from the bar. I endeavor to carry them, but am told it would be a mark against the catering staff if I were seen schlepping fridge cigarettes up the stairs. One waiter then follows me with a tray of Diet Cokes, while another trails behind with a tray of rocks glasses. Upstairs, I am greeted like Napoleon returning to Paris. Pictures are snapped, others cheer. Even those not lucky enough to sip one salute the liberation of the Diet Cokes.

No one ever tells you this, but as a magazine editor one of the most important career decisions you make is deciding on your Press Trip Identity. How else can you withstand the social gauntlet of a luxurious school trip environment, crammed into Sprinter vans with friends, opps, and publicists alike? The i-D team has a myriad of PTIs: Alex Kessler transforms into a hedonist fit for the court of Henry VIII, Steff Yotka is the honor roll student who arrives everywhere on time and always reads the show notes, and Robby Kelly goes full Anthony Bourdain mode, brewski in hand, quietly becoming best friends with the most famous dude at the function. Another common type of PTI is to put on horse blinders and assume a distant disposition designed to give off an “I’m just here to write my review” energy. Some put on their bossy pants and performatively work on their phone in lieu of interacting. Many like to peacock, trotting to the breakfast buffet in their archive Whatever by Whoever from That Season. But the lion share of editors on a press trip take on a very similar PTI, which is basically a less funny version of Larry David, kvetching endlessly about every car ride, every group activity, and every function without sufficient dining options. Word to aspiring editors: Don’t be this person. For my part, I’ve cultivated a PTI that I guess we can call Whimsical Aloofness. I’m most likely going to miss most of the activities. I might even wear AirPods while everyone is chatting in the car. I have no idea who the famous people at the show are. But every once in a while, I’ll part the Red Sea with a tray of Diet Coke. This allows me to largely wander around and live in my own head, while still bridging the charm deficit that comes with being antisocial.

As the pavlovas arrive at the end of lunch, I begin daydreaming about the opening scene of Terminator, which was filmed at the Griffith Observatory: a young Schwarzenegger spawns out of thin air, completely naked, muscles lubed. He approaches a group of punk rockers and proceeds to kill them for their clothing. And just like that, one of the most iconic Los Angeles looks was born.

We finish up and some of us are whisked down the Hollywood Hills to LACMA, the Peter Zumthor-designed museum in which Jonathan Anderson will provide us with an intimate preview of his new collection. The designer arrives a bit frazzled—that’s usually his vibe—in his signature normcore jeans and hiking boots, sporting a rainbow of microchipped wristbands. He barely hesitates before launching into a monologue that careens across Christian Dior’s biography, Hollywood lore, handbags, and the memoir he recently read about a gas station gigolo. He is without a doubt one of the freest minds operating in culture today, one who can weave together a vast network of references from across mediums and eras, and create something intelligible, cutting, and, perhaps most importantly, expensive. Anderson is giddy about a Christian Dior jacket he found designed for Marlene Dietrich’s character in the Alfred Hitchcock film Stage Fright, which had long been buried inside the personal archive of Azzedine Alaïa. He is also tickled by a set of men’s shirts made in collaboration with Ed Ruscha, an artist who has long eluded both him and his boss, Dior CEO Delphine Arnaud. Anderson then describes how Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha serve as art historical bookends in defining the 20th-Century American landscape, to the knowing nods of us fashion folk.

Walking out of LACMA, I start thinking about MacGuffins. A MacGuffin is a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a plot device that drives a movie’s action forward but ultimately has no meaning. In Casablanca, the all-important “letters of transit” that you never actually see are the MacGuffin. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud is a MacGuffin. The briefcase that doesn’t get opened in Pulp Fiction is one as well. The magic of the MacGuffin is that it doesn’t matter to anybody that it’s never explained. Rather, it works on us through the images that wash over us, penetrating the ether like headlights through fog. One MacGuffin Anderson borrowed from Christian Dior was his gesture of putting a red dress down the runway toward the latter half of the show in order to “wake the audience up.” About four hours later, at the actual fashion show, I find myself woken up by this very dress, like a whiff of smelling salts. It forces me to ask myself: Was I even sleeping? And, if so, whose dream was I in?

The thing that designers and filmmakers have in common is their ability to create a planned reality that others can reside in. The ritual of the Cruise show, which is essentially a luxury group tour for editors, celebrities, and clients, is the most extreme expression of this ability. One does not go to a Cruise show by waltzing right through the door and right back out into the normal world. Rather, one stays at the Cruise Hotel, applies the complimentary Cruise SPF to their skin, eats at the Cruise Restaurants, takes a Cruise Selfie at the preordained locations, and thinks Cruise Thoughts on their way to more Cruise Activities. Here more than ever, the clothes are the MacGuffin. The plot is the lifestyle.

After the Cruise Show, we saw some Cruise Art at the Cruise Museum, piled into the Cruise Escalade to the Cruise Party at Chateau Marmont, where we had Cruise Conversations. Toward the end of the night, in a swirl of partygoers and vape smoke, I saw what seemed like a mirage: a man in an In-N-Out Burger uniform, paper hat and all, parting the crowd with a silver tray of hamburgers, much like the Diet Cokes of yore. He nodded at me knowingly, and I took a bite of my Cruise Burger.

A totally cliche (yet delicious) list of things to eat in Los Angeles:

• The soft-shell tacos at Leo’s.

• The hard-shell tacos at Tito’s.

• Sushi Park is fine, but I like Matsuhisa and deep cut Hide better.

• The Gochujang Smoked Tofu at Erewhon (they keep it in the yogurt aisle).

• Gjusta’s perfect boho version of schmear.

• Any Caesar or Asian Chicken Salad on any menu.

The competition focuses on four categories: fiction, non-fiction, experimental, and drama! All you need to do is to submit an original, unpublished work, up to 1500 words long. Maybe it’s a new idea, or a piece that has been sitting on your desktop for months, or maybe inspiration has struck… right now! One winner from each category will be selected by our judges and published in i-D’s Fall 2026 issue.

Short stories on any subject your imagination can dream up. Guest judged by Chris Kraus.

Personal essays, memoir, cultural observations—anything rooted in the real world. Guest judged by Cat Marnell.

Things aren’t so straight-laced anymore. Poetry, hybrid work, fragmented prose, things that don’t fit neatly into boxes. Guest judged by Julio Torres.

Screenplay excerpts, scenes, monologues, whatever you think brings the DRAMA! Guest judged by Jeremy O. Harris.

Entries are open to writers aged 18 and over, located in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EMEA region. Each winner will receive a $500 USD cash prize.

The submission window opens on 14 May 2026 and closes on 28 May 2026 at 23:59 GMT. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

All submissions go through this Google Form. Please read our Terms & Conditions here.

This feeling is not unique—in fact I imagine most people who know more than one artist always have some kind of reservation about their output. There’s surely someone who comes to mind for you too. I spoke to a bunch of people who describe being caught up in this dilemma—their names are changed below to protect their friendships—unsure about whether anything productive comes from being honest about it. When someone you like makes art you don’t, how do you navigate that?

Recently Jennifer realized that her friend is a “god awful” poet. “She’s really having a go at it,” she tells me. “She does poetry readings and has self-published an anthology collection. By all standard markers, she is a poet.” But the work isn’t hitting in a way she can fully stand behind. Jennifer’s been invited to many uncomfortable poetry nights.“ It was all too fussy and read like AI. I can’t think of any more excuses to miss her poetry nights and it’s getting awkward.”

How long can you keep up the act before you crash out and tell them how you really feel? I find that lacklustre artists happen to be the loudest, letting you know everything they’re up to, keen to show off their work. At art school, those friends are (for the duration of your course) inescapable. An art history student, Emma has been holed up with the worst of them for a while. She can sniff them a mile off and put a smile on for the sake of staying civil. They are perfectly nice people but, fuck me, she can’t stand what they make. She tells me there are three dominant types:

1. The so-parodied-it’s-serious white man doing Basquiat art

   “Ripping off one of the most famous artists is going to get you nowhere, unless your plan is to get clicks from rage-baiting.”

2. The nepo baby artist

   “Yawn. Sometimes talented, generally not. Mommy and daddy just happen to do late-summer weekends away with an art director. The only reason you’re getting noticed.”

3. The faux provocateur

   “The growing-up-in-Surrey-to-thinking-you’re-Marina Abramović pipeline is by far my favorite.”

She has been to parties, asked that harrowing question: What do you think? All along she’s managed to keep it cool. The nice thing about art school is that there’s an end in sight. That’s all good for Emma, but Jennifer is stuck in her bad poet situation. Has she managed to muster up the courage to lie? “I won’t betray my opinions and say ‘Oh wow that was amazing!’,” she admits. “I will try to say, ‘Oh wow, how exciting!’ instead.”

I’ve found myself doing versions of this out of politeness. If an actor friend is in a play or film I don’t like, but I genuinely think they’ve saved it, I’ll skirt around the quality of the text and hone in on their performance. I have vivid memories of running into a filmmaker whose film I had just seen and hated, and responding with: “You must be busy!”. Ben, a photographer, told me he’d recently been gifted a work by a friend of his that he hated. “I have to hang it up in my flat or they’ll notice!” he says.

I don’t think lying is good for anyone, even if it’s designed to protect the peace of a clearly passionate person. But “telling our loved one that their art isn’t to our taste would hurt and injure them,” says Harry Rawson, an Integrative Humanistic Counsellor I turned to to solve this problem. “The conundrum here is that the lie injures the relationship also. You could even argue that the sustained lie does more damage to the relationship than confessing.”

Rawson suggests that we could look at ourselves in this scenario. What does our hatred of our friend’s art, and our reticence to express it, say about us? Personally I think it’s a symptom of my unshakeable bitchiness that undergirds so much of what I do, but it’s probably a little bit of insecurity too. Rawson also cites Freud, specifically the quote: “Unexpressed emotions never die.” Rawson explains, “It could be argued that the feelings we may have about our loved one’s art, or our loved ones in general, have to come out.”

He added, “if we shifted our lens slightly, we could learn to celebrate the art, not in and of itself, but something deeply personal and a reflection of our loved one? We might say, ‘This painting isn’t to my taste, but I’m so proud of you for painting it’ or ‘I wouldn’t personally listen to it, but I’ve seen how hard you’ve worked on it and you should be really proud of yourself.’”

I started to think about it: What if I was that girl to some other person? The amateur DJ? The Bitcoin entrepreneur who developed a Diet Jackson Pollock artistic aesthetic? Would I want to know if those I loved were cringing a little at my new creative pursuit? Maybe they are! I never know what’s happening in the group chat—someone screenshotting my sentences and posting them with eyeroll emojis attached. Then I started to think: Maybe it’s healthy to keep some things to yourself. There’s something really lovely in that ignorance of not knowing.

Despite the annoyance it causes her, Jennifer is with me: She knows that her poet bestie won’t learn her opinion of her work. “At the end of the day that is my pal,” she says. “It’s not worth the hurt feelings.” But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of Jennifer’s mind that this secret beef might one day come in handy. “Some things are better left unsaid,” she says, “but if we have some kind of evil falling out—then I would reconsider.”

It’s quite nice when you see a show and you don’t have to lie about the thing to the person involved afterwards. Such is the case with Calam Lynch, who’s currently playing The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in the cool and deeply homoerotic Please Please Me at London’s Kiln Theatre. I saw it and told him it, and he, were both great—and that wasn’t a lie! We last spoke to him for his performance in What It Feels Like for a Girl, which is nominated a bunch at the TV BAFTAs tomorrow.

I asked him: What makes you think of 2007?

He said: “2007 reminds me of Putney Leisure Centre. Sure, on the one hand, it was just a leisure centre… it had a pool (Olympic size I think?) and a shit gym. But in 2007, Putney Leisure Centre was where I had my first kiss, soundtracked by none other than Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr the Mmrs”. It’s therefore a site of some spiritual significance.”

• Someone asked me what I was listening to the other day and I said old showtunes and Adéla.

• Which is to say, after our big Rachel Zegler digital cover story last year, her award-winning performance in Evita is coming to New York! One for people who like their plays like pop shows.

• The Cannes Film Festival kicks off next week. The next one of these will be dedicated to the good stuff I’ve seen.

• The muscle in the back of my armpit keeps twitching. I think it’s connected to me being on my phone too much.

• Blue Film is in US theaters this weekend. It’s so fucked up it would make Gasper Noé flinch. Read my review here, and my chat with its lead star Kieron Moore (<3) here.

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How would you describe your work?

I’m a photographer, director, and creator, but really I’m just compulsively collecting and living inside an archive of clothes. My work is heavily pulled from brand archives and old editorials, and I spend a lot of time researching, through books, movies, and even social media, inspiring them into something new.

How did you start collecting?

I started collecting during my freshman year of college, 7 years ago. I was always thrifting and antiquing in high school, but during COVID, when I got sent home, it kind of spiraled, and I became obsessed with sourcing online. My gateway piece was a Prada Spring/Summer 1994 tan skirt suit. I just thought it was cute and got it for a steal, not realizing it was early Prada and actually rare. That’s what sent me down the rabbit hole; I fell into a full Prada obsession.

Tell me about your current collection.

You mean my addiction? It kind of started with one Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2000 piece I bought junior year of college to wear to parties (I know an insane thing for me to do–wear McQueen to the college party). It was the pants that had coins running down the side. I started obsessing over that collection, then McQueen more broadly, and it spiraled from there.

I think as a collector, you have to fixate. Once you really know a designer, you know what’s worth buying, what’s rare, and what’s underpriced. I definitely fell into that with McQueen. I probably have around 100 pieces now, and I wear all of them religiously. I don’t really believe in keeping clothes precious.

At the same time, I realized I’d been collecting without knowing it, like owning Ann Demeulemeester purchased from a thrift store in high school, before I even understood what it was. Now my collection is a mix of a lot of early Prada, mostly pre-2000, Belgian designers like A.F. Vandevorst and Martin Margiela, some Hussein Chalayan, Dior Homme (Hedi, obviously), and then a completely separate obsession with vintage band tees. I’ll buy any Pixies or Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt on sight.

What’s the oldest piece in your closet?

Oldest in terms of actual age… I just got this 1930s monkey fur long coat with a matching collar, but don’t worry, it’s vintage fur!

What’s the newest piece?

The 1930s monkey fur coat was unboxed as I was typing this. But I also just won a small auction for a Fernande Desgranges 1940s bag. It’s a tiny doctor-style purse with a watch built into the exterior. I’ve been getting really into antiques recently, and honestly, it’s starting to inform everything else I buy. Even a lot of the ’90s and ’00s pieces I collect trace back to earlier silhouettes, like Alexander McQueen’s Fall/Winter 2000 fur coats that echo 1930s monkey fur; they just have a more McQueen-esque silhouette.

Were you always into fashion?

I loved fashion, even when I wasn’t necessarily participating in it. I was always obsessed with photography and documenting anything I found beautiful. I started an Instagram when I was 10 and would approach girls at my local mall, asking if they wanted to model for me. I’d run around my city shooting them for my social media, which somehow led to a photo going viral on Tumblr and Instagram and getting the attention of PacSun when I was 14. I started shooting campaigns for them, then small indie magazines, and eventually spent my summers in New York doing test shoots with agencies and collaborating with local designers and fresh Parson’s graduates for their final collections.

At the same time, I was a really shy kid and definitely didn’t feel like a fashion person. I grew up in Cupertino, California, right in the center of Silicon Valley and home to Apple. I was told you can only be three things in life: a doctor, an engineer, or a loser, so I thought computer science was my endgame.

Photography was my escape from this tech world from a really young age. I still just love photographing beautiful things, people, and clothing. The difference now is that it’s filtered through this deep obsession with vintage and archival fashion, so even the way I approach shoots and campaigns comes from that same instinct, just with a lot more knowledge behind it.

Do you have any family heirlooms?

I’m the daughter of two immigrants and, cliche as it sounds, they came here with nothing. I guess you can call my mom’s early-’00s Bebe sport bedazzled top an heirloom cause I’m never getting rid of that.

How would you describe your style?

I’ve called myself gothic on the internet once, and I don’t need to relive the public reaction to that. I honestly dislike reducing my style down to words. Alexander McQueen’s shows had no real continuity or relation to the previous ones, they each built their own little worlds, with models as characters and the clothing as part of the story. So I guess I love dressing like a character, too.

Are there any moments sartorially you regret?

I don’t regret anything I wear. I buy everything with conviction and wear it to death. If I regret anything, it’s not buying something rare because I was busy trying to negotiate $30 off like a psycho. Like when the McQueen S/S 2003 button jacket and pants were on eBay for $600, and I was arguing for $500… I’m just always convinced I can find something cheaper.

What are your favorite designers?

I feel like it’s obvious, but in no specific order: Alexander McQueen, Ann Verhelst, An Vandevorst, Hussein Chalayan, Hedi Slimane, Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada, Haider Ackermann, Yves Saint Laurent. I’m especially obsessed with ’80s YSL.

Tell me about what attracts you to McQueen.

He dressed women to be feared, not just admired.

What’s your grail?

I don’t think I have a specific grail, I think I’m kinda addicted to the thrill of the chase of finding pieces. I find “my grail,” and then it’s still not enough. I guess I wouldn’t mind the F/W 2004 Dior Homme kilt, but I don’t see that in my near future; They’re basically impossible to find, but wish me luck!

The internet is a fickle place. For those of us young enough to have grown up online, we’ve witnessed platforms come and go like seasons. We’ve hopped from Myspace to Tumblr, Facebook to Instagram, Vine to TikTok, but no platform has held us in its grip quite like YouTube. It’s where we learned to shave our legs, to execute the perfect smoky eye, to plunge a toilet.

Throughout its history YouTube has not just launched careers but redefined the path to stardom, and the meaning of stardom itself. Goodbye scouting on the street, hello GoPros and selfie sticks. When Mina Le first started out, creators like Ryan Higa and Jenna Marbles were capturing our adolescent attention with videos like “How to be Ninja” and “Hello Young People, I’m Hillary Clinton.”

One of the most prolific genres of YouTube content is the video essay, Gen Z’s drink of choice for media analysis and discourse generation. Few creators have endured quite like Mina, whose visually and intellectually stimulating videos strike the right balance of critical thinking, pop culture, and whimsy needed to hold our attention for more than 15 minutes. With video titles ranging from “How did Glasses go from Nerdy to Cool?” to “Why is Everyone Chinese?” and “How to Actually Get Smarter (again),” she offers studied and thought-provoking insights on the current state of culture and its wider implications.

When we meet at New York’s Win Son Bakery, she’s fresh off a Spotify event the night before, speaking for a live audience for the first time. On top of her channel, she’s reconnecting with the personal essay here on Substack, writing a screenplay, and preparing to launch a video podcast on Spotify this summer. Over scallion pancakes and tea, we chat about media diets, AI, and Tumblr obsessions.

Flora Medina: On top of your YouTube and Substack endeavors, you’re starting a video podcast on Spotify. Talk to me about what that’s going to look like.

Mina Le: I started podcasting back in 2021. It lasted a few months but I don’t think I was really aware of the market itself, it just seemed like everyone was making a podcast. It was the natural progression for anyone online, just get a microphone and start yapping. I was boots on the ground, sending emails to get guests. There was a lot of editing involved, I would make a full YouTube video then edit bits into the podcast, essentially dissecting my own video as a director’s commentary. It just wasn’t sustainable in the long-run.

I’ve always wanted to go back to podcasting, I want to speak with more people. So much of my work is me talking to myself. There’s no one there to piggyback off what I’m saying. It can feel a bit myopic too. It’s almost a way to check my own ego. I’m really concerned about misinformation, and the cult of personality that it’s easy to have as an influencer, so I want more voices in my space.

How are you envisioning the differentiation between YouTube, Substack, and the podcast?

YouTube is my bread and butter. I’ve loved her dearly and will always love her. She keeps the lights on. YouTube can be highly produced, I have an amazing editor and she’s pulling a lot of that weight, and I love it for that. But something I love about a podcast is that it’s more informal, it’s off-the-cuff. I feel more connected to the people that listened to the first iteration of my podcast in 2021 because they’ve been able to see me a bit more mask-off.

Sometimes with video essays, people don’t realize there’s a script and a true writing component. Substack has allowed people to see the side of me that is just a writer, it’s legitimized some of my work in that way. I also like personal essays. I know everyone’s like, “Why does another man need a podcast? Why does another woman need a personal essay?” But I like writing in that way.

When you think of an idea or a topic you want to cover, how are you determining the approach or where it will end up?

I go to YouTube with large topics. Things with many points of view or conversation. That’s also where I get the most views. On Substack I don’t really care about views. The written word is so personal, for me I’m like, “If it blows up, I guess that’s cool,” but if ten people read it, I know ten people have gone on this intimate journey with me, which feels like enough.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. It’s about New York City in the 1930s, my favorite kind of book. It follows a socialite who is also working her first job at a fashion magazine. It’s like Sex and the City, but if you survived the Depression era.

What do you see as the greatest threat to quality media right now?

Everyone says it, but ChatGPT. A friend of mine who’s getting a psychology PhD told me that for some of the assignments she’s working on with teenagers, they immediately put the assignment into ChatGPT to have it explained to them in a more “concise” way. Literacy goes down in that regard. I’ve also just noticed how people who are dependent on these chat systems, which are programmed to speak and cater to you as an individual, are losing the ability to communicate with other people if they don’t speak in the way you’re used to hearing. I think that’s really terrifying, not just for attention spans, but for being a member of society.

On a brighter note, what is inspiring you right now? Visually, creatively, or intellectually.

I’m always inspired by my friends. It’s a cheesy answer, but it’s amazing to see people who are not giving up or being cynical despite all the crazy stuff happening in this world. The people making the indie movie for less than a million dollars, or the people writing Substack essays, just making stuff in a time when we’ve been conditioned to be consumers instead of creators. I’m inspired, not necessarily by the aesthetic visions of what they’re doing, but the ethic and attitude.

I had a moment in time where I developed my own creativity from watching a lot of things, which is important to grow literacy, but now I’m in a position where I can do things and get inspired from the act of doing.

What was your first username?

My first email was my full name, which I didn’t love because that wasn’t chic at the time. My dad made the account, it was with verizon.net so that tells you everything you need to know. The first one I actually chose was something like devilangel412xx.

What was your first online obsession?

The first one I can remember—and am willing to admit to—was Spieling Peter on Tumblr. He was a Peter Pan actor at Disneyland. The poor guy, everyone just followed him around all the time. He was just the best Peter Pan at that point. I was in love with him. He was actually not a 12 year-old boy, he was a full man, which I need to preface.

Did you make videos as a tween or early teen?

I made some random videos that are buried somewhere on YouTube. I grew up in the era of Ryan Higa and Jenna Marbles, people just posting whatever they wanted. I do remember at 10-years-old, my friend was filming with her digital camera. I don’t know if that footage ever went anywhere, but there might be a digital footprint. Don’t look for it!

What was your first video ever about?

It was about Atonement. I’ll always remember, because I was also obsessed with that movie a few years after Spieling Peter. Specifically with James McAvoy and Kiera Knightley, the chemistry, and the cinematography. That video was about the costume design because I was also obsessed with the dress that she wears. For my YouTube one million subscriber party, I actually commissioned someone to make me a replica of the dress.

Arriving in Biarritz for Blazy’s first-ever cruise show felt like picking up the thread—with sea air in your lungs and salt on your skin. Cruise usually gets filed under “nice, commercial, quietly profitable,” but this had a different charge from the start. Biarritz, in the early 20th century was the spot to escape the throes of WW1—a sunlit collision of aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals. Gabrielle Chanel arrived in 1915 and moved with total conviction, opening a boutique, assembling a team of seamstresses, and turning out full collections at a pace that feels contemporary.

And she wasn’t alone in clocking the energy of Biarritz. Igor Stravinsky passed through and found focus here, Man Ray turned it into one of his surrealist playgrounds, and the whole town became a seismic meeting point. Dali, Picasso, Churchill… you name ‘em, they came for a carefree swim in the height of summer. Even today, there’s a lack of pretension that somehow coexists with the fact that, yes, it’s still fabulously wealthy. Wholesome in flashes, decadent in others, and all the more interesting for holding both at once.

A fancy hotel hates to see me coming. We stayed at the Hôtel du Palais—a grand, slightly theatrical reminder that glamour used to be taken very seriously and, in certain corners, still is. Built for Empress Eugénie, it faces the Atlantic with an unshakeable confidence that only comes from having hosted generations of people who understood the value of a well-timed entrance. The chic 16th century portraits lining the gilded walls had me in a chokehold.

My room didn’t have a bathtub (gasp), which I processed with admirable composure, but it did have a walk-in wardrobe! There’s something about being able to properly hang your clothes that rearranges your entire sense of self.

Dinner at the Halles de Biarritz—a picturesque fresh produce market in the middle of town—felt like stepping onto a film set. The whole market turned into a Chanel culinary dream come true (especially for a hungry boy like me). Biarritz sits just a short drive from San Sebastián, and you can taste that proximity immediately. Basque influence steeped through French technique, pinxtos reimagined with a little more gloss. I was obsessed with the jamón croquettes, each one perfectly crisp and molten—I had 6! Truffled egg mayonnaise so creamy and tender. Foie gras that deserved a moment of silence.

At one point I was eating Bayonne ham next to the gorgeous Nicole Kidman, who was mid-conversation with Bruno Pavlovsky, while Tilda Swinton swished through on the other side, as otherworldly as ever. It should have felt absurd, but it didn’t. It was oddly chill—just people nibbling, chattering, dazzled in head-to-toe Chanel. There were bags from every era of the house (shoutout Dallas Paris fringed Classic Flap. Need her real bad!). The fact I was so unfazed had me thinking: maybe… I’m a star too?

The show took place the following day atop a casino on the seafront, the Atlantic providing a suitably dramatic backdrop without ever stealing focus. Chanel has perfected that balance—nothing feels forced which is why everything lands (the boutiques have been raided and empty by fashion fans and editors alike). And then the clothes, which quietly dismantled any lingering cynicism about cruise. There was structure, yes, but also movement, a sense of looseness that felt very Biarritz. It was legitimately cool. A gargantuan seashell earring here, a towelling chanel suit there. Beach umbrella-inspired A-line raffia skirts gave us classic Blazy. The mermaid looks were immediate faves. One in a saturated turquoise that seemed to hold light, another in a smouldering red-orange that flickered like embers. Fishtail skirts paired with tailored jackets (and matching bags!), fantasy anchored just enough to function.

And then the shoes—or not quite shoes, something we called a “non-shoe shoe” back in my Vogue days—the soleless situation that sent the internet into immediate meltdown. But also fab for those who love feet, I guess.

The casting sharpened the point: real characters, a spectrum of ages, women with mysteries and secrets—there was even a model 6 months pregnant. It gave the whole thing a kind of grounded glamour. I was enamoured.

When Blazy took his bow, A$AP Rocky, Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton, Michaela Coel, and the rest of the room rose in a standing ovation that felt genuinely heartfelt. Afterwards, every model I spoke to, including i-D cover star Bhavitha Mandava, said the same thing in different ways: Matthieu cares. He cares about the clothes, about the team, about them. He told them to have fun. Which, in fashion, is not always a given.

Post-show, I had a chat with Rocky. He was in a brown jacket, red button-up shirt, brown high-waisted pants situation, but the real gag was the bag: a large pink denim Chanel purse with mini ballet flats attached—a gift for his 7-month-old daughter Rocki Irish. “Man, in order to make [that many] shows in a year… I don’t know how Matthieu does it,” he said, genuinely baffled. “This is genius. I’m witnessing it. I’m just lucky and blessed to be privy to all of this, like iconic amazingness.”

On what caught his eye: “I like the croc bag. I like the jackets. The rubber rain boots… that was just for me.” And then, when I asked if Chanel was for the boys, he said: “Chanel’s for Flacko.” He also, almost offhand, said something that stuck: being a girl dad has made him “more vulnerable… even more kind.” Which, somehow, felt completely in line with the softness of that tiny pair of ballet flats hanging off his bag.

That evening, back at the Hôtel du Palais, we knocked back some champers in style. The restaurant and terrace opened out onto the sea, the light dipping just enough to make everything glow. Everyone was in Chanel H2T, myself included (sort of), which created a kind of shared illusion, like we’d all been cast in the same indie flick. Or perhaps an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Rocky appeared again, this time as a surprise performer, and suddenly the night tipped from elegant to electric. Not me throwing it back next to Tilda and Blazy himself. I lived.

We were lucky enough to go to the re-see the next morning, champagne headache and all. These are all the things I didn’t clock at the show:

• The charming little chilli motifs—on handbags, on collars.

• A trompe l’oile ribbon print on a silk shirt and skirt set that also had real ribbons added to its hem—clever, very lovely, meta.

• Jacket linings that refuse to be an afterthought. Some in a chic newsprint, which immediately calls to mind Elsa Schiaparelli. Coco’s old rival. A little historical side-eye, maybe.

• “Chanel Utility” stitched inside separates. Low-key, high impact.

• Starfish-embroidered tweeds and fish-scale paillettes are even more INSANE irl.

• A gargantuan beach bag that suggests a lifestyle where you are carrying nothing but magnums of Côtes de Provence rosé and absolutely no responsibilities.

• I need the barefoot shoe this summer as a flex.

And then, of course, the slow comedown. The return. Back to London, back through arrivals, back into the version of yourself that answers emails and pretends this is all normal. From Chanel boy to just Alex again. Briefly.

There was, naturally, an ice sculpture: inside was a perfectly preserved copy of the issue. Condensation covered icy pink KIKO lipglosses that decorated the base. A kind of shrine to early ’00s beauty. A feat of engineering, honestly.

Anyway, I digress.

The long and short of it is I’ve been orbiting the beauty industry for over 12 years now, long enough to have witnessed its more awkward adolescence. We were trying, often unsuccessfully, to make beauty communications feel cool, or at least culturally relevant, while wedged between airport retail monotony, vaguely herbal spa branding, and early attempts at “inclusivity” that rang hollow more often than not. Around 2017, it felt dry. Beige, even.

Then, post-COVID, something cracked open. Beauty stopped being niche, or coded, or even particularly aspirational. It became participatory. Suddenly, everyone had a stake. From at-home dye jobs and Korean skincare rabbit holes to “mental health walks” that doubled as rituals of self-care, beauty expanded into the everyday. And, crucially, the people with money noticed. The gaze shifted from hype sneakers to serums, from drops to routines. A new kind of currency emerged.

Since then, we have watched celebrity brands barrel toward billion-dollar valuations, influencers build cosmetic empires from their bedrooms, and the broader wellness and longevity space swell into something closer to a belief system than a category. And underneath all of that, as always, limitless networks of subcultures and counter- culture beauty movements gathering around newfangled platforms like TikTok. And yet, it still feels like we are in the early chapters. Phase one, maybe.

Which is precisely why now feels like the right moment to step back from the beauty aisle and take stock of how deeply this world is shaping culture, in ways fashion, right now, can only slightly envy.

Enter our big, bold zine.

A space where we can document beauty as it actually exists today, messy, obsessive, hyper-online, deeply personal. Sometimes bonkers, sometimes thoughtful, often both at once. If it feels a little breathless, that is because it is.

Inside, you will find FaceTimes (because that is where the real beauty tea lives) with icons turned beauty moguls like Martha Stewart, workout guru Tracy Anderson, conversations with “scene” heroes like Haley Williams, and reflections from global figures like Kiko Mizuhara. At the centre is Tyla, whose story, traced from her childhood in South Africa to global pop phenomenon, anchors the issue with something more intimate.

She talks to Laetitia Lotthé about beauty not as a fixed ideal, but as something lived, tied to hair, to heritage, to memory. She reflects on growing up experimenting, figuring it out in real time, how beauty was never about perfection, but about expression. About feeling like yourself, even as “yourself” keeps shifting. That elasticity, that refusal to be pinned down, is exactly what makes her such a compelling figure right now.

Elsewhere, the zine spirals outward. A whirlpool centre-spread that reads like a Where’s Waldo of beauty culture, looksmaxxers, makeup It girls, medieval hair tutorials, and yes, forcing our Editor-in-Chief, Thom, to eat and review every David bar on the market. It is chaotic. It is dense. It is very online. It is the point.

So, who cares?

Well, clearly, a lot of you do. And we do too.

Because what is happening in beauty right now mirrors something bigger. The power structures are shifting. There is a renewed appetite for DIY, for things you can make, tweak, claim as your own. A move away from prescribed aesthetics toward something more instinctive, more individual. If fashion has long been about self-styling, then beauty is where self-fashioning begins, and in many ways, where it lands most intimately.

And maybe that is because, at its best, beauty is not about transformation so much as revelation. As our global beauty editor Marcelo Gutierrez has put it, it is about “expanding beauty’s visual language and pushing the conversation forward”, not flattening it into something uniform, but stretching it until more people can see themselves inside it. Our mission if to is establish beauty at i-D as place where industry giants and “internet people” can actually meet, on relatively equal footing, and swap notes.

From where I am scrolling, beauty does not trickle down anymore. It bubbles up, mutates, gets remixed in real time.

It belongs to the people.

And this zine is our attempt to keep up.

Harmony Korine nostalgia fuels the internet: the iconic bunny boy in his feature debut Gummo, Tumblr screenshots of the scuzzy words he wrote in Kids, the lurid bikinis of 2012’s Spring Breakers. But no filmmaker has arguably given less of a shit about the stuff they made in the past. In recent years, he’s rejected tradition entirely, making art that traverses the worlds of tech and cinema. I watched crowds of people walk out of AGGRO DR1FT, his Travis Scott starring Miami mafia movie shot entirely on an infrared camera, with garish nonsensical dialogue. It looks like a GTA cutscene. I loved it btw.

Korine also works in paint, photography, and printed matter. His first museum survey in the United States is called Perfect Nonsense, currently running at Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It captures three decades of his work across all of his mediums. Calling from his Miami apartment, where he’s lived for the last decade, he spoke to me about this retrospective, Skibidi Toilet, and his plans to return to traditional filmmaking.

Harmony Korine: What’s up, bro?

Douglas Greenwood: Everything’s great! I’m coming to you from London.

We’re coming to you from Miami.

Are you having fun down there? Congrats on the exhibition launch.

Thanks, I’m really happy about it. It’s nice to see everything from the last 30 years all in one space.

Does it feel like you’ve been working for 30 years?

It feels like I’ve been working for longer than that. I think I’ve been doing a variation of the same thing since I was 15, in high school.

I feel you. You’ve got this inimitable energy to your work that so many artists try to imitate. You only know that energy properly when you see your version of it, whether it’s through film or a painting or a zine you’ve made. You do so much.

I think that’s why I feel so burned out. The retrospective is just a smattering of the work I’ve made. For every painting or film, there’s 10 more that couldn’t make the cut. It’s difficult to turn off my imagination.

So how do you start putting this together?

They approached me a couple of years ago, and I mostly let Alex Gartenfeld and his curation team put it together. I’m pretty happy making the work and then letting those guys construct their own narrative based on it. And I rarely ever look back on it. I’m always thinking about what’s next.

You’ve lived in Miami for over a decade now. Does the heat of that place have a hold on you still?

Yeah, I’m in a permanent state of heat stroke. I just want to walk around sun kissed all day. In delirium, smoking cigars, dreaming of fishing, and drinking Mountain Dew.

Do you feel like Miami audiences see your work differently?

Probably, I think the vibes here are different. Irony really doesn’t exist in Miami—even the hipsters drive Range Rovers.

I was in Venice when you premiered AGGRO DR1FT. I remember hearing rumors that you’d intentionally turned up the volume to piss people off.

I was trying to get as many people as I could to walk out. I was trying to figure out if there was a pain threshold with volume that people would allow themselves to experience. We asked the projectionist to crank it to the point of distortion.

People were putting earplugs in, it was so intense. Do you love being antagonistic?

I was just born that way, so I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with being paddled in school growing up. Like it doesn’t seem real, unless there’s some kind of pain attached to it.

As you were unearthing these old works, were you reminded of how they were made? I was thinking of the Macaulay Culkin shots from The Bad Son…

It was a long time ago. I think it coincided with the Sonic Youth video. I think most of those images were shot over the course of one afternoon, and then we printed it and made Xerox copies, because I like the way the Xerox looks. But I’d forgotten about a lot of it. When I first walked in and I was like, “Holy fuck. Where did all this come from?”

Sometimes before I interview people I like to search their name on eBay, and see what the most expensive item there is. Yours are your Supreme decks from 2011, but your art books are not far behind.

I gave away almost all of those books to friends, so I’ve actually bought them back from eBay or booksellers and stuff. My favorite thing on eBay was my signature on a cue card for fifty cents, buy it now. Two quarters. Even less than the postage. I love that it made more sense for this guy to get two pieces of bubble gum than to keep the signature.

If it’s any consolation, someone tried to buy my Cannes cap you designed off of my head at the festival last year. I was wondering what your meme consumption was.

I like Skibidi Toilet. I’m excited for that movie.

By Michael Bay?

I actually think that would be amazing. I think that, in some way, that’s the greatest pairing. Pain & Gain is a great movie.

Is there anything you haven’t done in a while that you’d like to?

I feel like making a movie again. There’s a lot of stuff in the works with animation and gaming engines but it’s been almost a decade since I made a film, something scripted. There’s sometimes images you can’t get out any other way.

Do you want to make it in Miami?

My family is here, but I also like the idea of going somewhere else, like the Caribbean.

Lefty has started making movies. What’s she teaching you about art?

I don’t know! She was at the opening, and it was the first time she’d seen any of that stuff. She’s at the point where she’s just starting to make stuff herself, so it’s fun for me to watch her and hear her ideas. She’s a true character. I think she’s gonna make great things.

Who deserves a retrospective?

A Herman Nietzsche retrospective would really freak a lot of people out. For film, Alan Clarke, Michael J. Fox, or Burt Reynolds.

Do you ever spend time in Hollywood anymore?

It feels strange now because it’s decentralised. There’s no centre of power anymore. Kids who are doing streaming are more powerful than studio heads. Within America, there’s this idea of New York and Los Angeles dominance. There’s so much America that’s out there. New York and LA are not America. People should make art in Baton Rouge.

You found Miami.

And look what it did: Gave me permanent heat stroke.

Let’s look back to move forward. Since the festival’s creation in 1999, two strains of Coachella costuming have been duking it out for style supremacy. I think of these as the flat brim hats (Vanessa Hudgens/flower crown/Boho) vs. the cowboy hats (daisy dukes/boots). Instead of one eking out over the other, they’ve slowly and disgustingly merged into the amorphous fast fashion mess that is “Festival Fashion.” With thousands of inspo photos on Pinterest and articles on how to achieve the look, it’s cowboy boots paired with body chains, lace and corsets, polyester lace and fake suede, fringe and flower crowns, chintzy body chains and sparkles, all purchased cheaply from places Edikted, Nasty Gal, and Shein. It’s influencer fashion run through the meat processesser—divorced from originality and context.

These are not ensouled garments: Nobody owned those clothes a week ago and nobody will own them next week. The saving grace of “Festival Fashion” is that there isn’t much of it. To quote Joan Rivers on Miley Cyrus’s dress at the 2012 Billboard awards: “If it were any shorter, it would be considered earrings!”

I am not opposed to costume dressing nor am I opposed to buying something for an occasion. Some of my greatest purchases have been need based! And a festival like Coachella comes with its own hurdles. Clothes are worn all day under a blazing sun and then at night through a steep drop in temperature. Shoes are ground down. I get the idea of buying something cheap because it’s getting trashed anyway. I just think we can do better. This insidious aesthetic is ugly, literally and spiritually.

Steff (my fashion compass) pointed out that while audience fashion has gotten less interesting, performers are spending more time, money_, and attention on their costumes. José Criales-Unzueta wrote about the phenomenon for Vanity Fair, citing Beyonce’s 2018 performance as a watershed moment for the commercialization of the festival. Now the headline acts are closer to a Super Bowl halftime show with designer sponsors (Friday’s headliner Sabrina Carpenter wore custom Dior) and even performers on smaller stages tend to have costume changes.

Personally I think Bieber’s performance marks another turning point for the festival. Beyond being the highest paid Coachella headliner in history ($10 million dollars), it’s possible he came close to doubling his payoff through merch sales. Maddie Schulz at Vogue Business wrote after weekend one, “Via his brand Skylrk, Bieber sold $5.04 million worth of product over weekend one of Coachella, beating the festival’s previous two-weekend record of $1.7 million across both weekends.” If he managed to match sales for weekend two (I’ve yet to see reports of a final total) he stands to have made $20 millions dollars—off of a concert with seemingly low overheads. Bieb’s Skylrk windfall was felt on the festival grounds. The second most-worn festival aesthetic was just…merch. Skylrk merch, Sabrina Carpenter merch, Gap merch, you name it.

José’s portrait of Coachella as a miniature America (or at least, a funhouse version) is apt: big where American culture is big, small where it fails. With the increasing brand presence at Coachella it’s no wonder everyone feels pressure to copy their favorite influencer. Bieber’s hoodie on/laptop performance should give a temperature check on the current status of music and fashion: It’s all about the moolah!

But it wasn’t all bad!

Pink Pantheress wore one of my favorite silhouettes ever, a 9-to-5, cinched blazer with big jeans. A look that says, “The defense is WRONG!” A look that says, “I’m an enigma even though I can’t stop talking.” I wore a variation of this look the first time I met Liana Satenstein.

During my 2 a.m. Palm Springs to LAX car ride I made a sauciness/substance/meal metric. Basically, some musicians have the sauce (the swag/drip/style/je ne sais quoi), some have the substance (talent/prowess/creativity). If you have sauce and substance you could be a mini meatball, but you could also be a main course:

• I’ve been on a spreeeee.

  • I’ve got this set that gives me early Miu Miu.

  • I got two pairs of vintage Manolos in Palm Springs because an elderly woman named Martha told me that they should go to a good home (now that I think about it I’m kind of a terrible home?? My shoes are stuffed everywhere!! They’re chewed) and that young women should wear stilettos (I never do).

  • I got another two-piece, a pink and black Blumarine set by Anna Molinari that, depending on my posture, either makes me look like a colicky baby or a pin-up.

  • I got this gorgeous soft sheer dress for flopping around.

  • I bought a milking stool to use as a portable coffee table in my tiny apartment. Mine has a tiny phallic handle.

  • I bought an AC unit, and a plush mattress pad.

  • Finally I got “airplane pants” because I have no pants that I can sleep in and also look presentable for work.

• Dalya of Pleasure Lists had the most luxurious shoe I’ve seen in ages.

• Our Beauty Zine is out now!

“Wasian” means white and Asian or, per the chronically online, someone from The Republic of Wasia. It sounds like simple math, but the reality has always been more complicated. For a long time, it wasn’t exactly flattering as it came with assumptions from both sides—that your mom had been “rescued” by a white man (a chip my mom still carries), that you rode elephants to school; on the other, that you couldn’t handle “real” spicy food, that you were too white for it. Not one thing, not the other.

Remember that meme? “White people treat me like I’m Asian, Asian people treat me like I’m white.” Not no.

But there’s a flip side. Learning how to code-switch, adapt, and read the room comes early. To varying degrees, a couple of languages enter the mix. Moving between worlds becomes second nature. Taste develops quickly—cooking, ordering, eating (there’s no one more fun to dine out with than your Wasian bestie). And, fine, we’re usually kinda cute, I guess—sorry to the chopped members of the Wasia community.

Last week, Laufey dropped the video for “Madwoman,” and it felt like a Wasia baddie roll call. Alongside her were Hudson Williams, Alysa Liu, KATSEYE’s Megan Skiendiel, and Lola Tung, with cameos from Havana Rose Liu and Chase Sui Wonders. Elsewhere, Olivia Rodrigo continues her reign with “Drop Dead,” Charles Melton is on the new season of Beef and the digital cover of i-D, Wasia Project’s Will Gao and Olivia Hardy are working on a new album (we bonded over Sichuan recently), and a whole lineage of Wasian icons—Devon Aoki, Keanu Reeves, Vanessa Hudgens—suddenly feel more legible.

In short, welcome to Wasia.

At i-D, four of us are Wasian—me, fashion editor Ch’lita, associate editor Flora, and graphic designer Adrian. So I asked everyone a few questions and looped in Ben, an honorary member of the team and an agent at Total in Paris.

What’s your mix / background?

Flora: White American mom, Filipino dad. Wasian unicorn.

Ch’lita: Thai and New Zealand.

Adrian: Filipino dad, Jewish mom.

Ben: Chinese dad, Ashkenazi mom.

Alex: Thai mom, British dad.

How did you first become aware of being Wasian?

Flora: Around age 8, when I realized my cousins had only Asian grandparents.

Ch’lita: Going to Thailand and everyone fully gagging over me. It’s a whole thing there.

Adrian: When another kid called me Mexican.

Alex: I grew up in Southeast Asia, then visited the UK and was like, “Wait… I’m not this either.”

What race do people most often mistake you for?

Flora: Latina, sometimes Italian if I’m having a good day.

Ch’lita: Latinx.

Adrian: Any Latin American country pretty much.

Ben: Latino during July and August… it’s like my vacation ROI.

Alex: Latinx or whatever’s geographically convenient.

The best thing about being Wasian?

Flora: White-parent freedom, Asian-parent food.

Ch’lita: My positioning in the sexual marketplace.

Adrian: Ambiguity.

Ben: Making white-people food with Asian flavors. NYT Cooking wishes...

Alex: The ability to clock a menu instantly.

Worst thing?

Flora: The feeling of disconnect between parts of myself.

Ch’lita: I get sunburnt like a white person.

Adrian: Ambiguity.

Ben: One hooded eye, one non-hooded eye.

Alex: Being called “cute” when I’m trying to be hot.

Who’s your fave “honorary Wasian?”

Flora: Miranda Cosgrove.

Ch’lita: Bobby Gillespie.

Adrian: Björk.

Ben: My friend Carla. Thought she was Wasian for months—turns out she’s Jamaican and Danish.

Alex: Mikey Madison. Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Best food spot in the city you live in?

Flora: The Sandwich Board. i-D lunch staple. (New York)

Ch’lita: The Sichuan on Deliveroo. I only crave it when I’m hungover, which is… often. (London)

Adrian: Grill 21. (New York)

Ben: Deluxe Green Bo in NYC dumplings and sesame noodles, cash only, probably will end up sharing a table with an old Chinese couple or some tri-state tourists wearing Stranger Things merch. Mega. (New York)

Alex: The ultimate is Imperial Treasure. (London)

Best food spot in the Asian place you’re connected to?

Flora: Pineapple buns in my parents’ fishing town in Hong Kong. I think about them constantly.

Ch’lita: A grilled chicken and somtum spot off the highway near the zoo in Khon Kaen. Green walls. No idea what it’s called. I think about it often.

Adrian: Jollibee.

Ben: In Paris, I eat udon religiously. Sanukiya for the vibe, Kunitoraya if I’m trying to impress a non-Asian during fashion week.

Alex: Bangkok: Potong, Saolé, Charmgang. Chiang Mai: Mae Manee for khao soi, Three Kings for khao man gai. I’m so hungry.

Aside from the Wasia invasion… Here’s some thoughts on fashion…

• I just bought a new cardigan from Jake’s—a brown-and-white Fair Isle knit with a leopard hood—and I haven’t taken it off since.

• The cruise shows are creeping up fast. I’ll be in Biarritz for Chanel next week, then Dior heads to LA, and Gucci lands in New York (dying to see what Demna does next tbh).

• Steff’s already called it: romo-boho is next, and if A Current Affair is anything to go by, it’s already happening.

• One for the Versace (and sneaker) heads. In Tokyo on April 2, a crowd turned out for the TAI-CHI Sakura—a slick rework of Onitsuka Tiger’s classic trainer, made in Tottori, Japan, where precision meets pure Versace energy. No notes. We all need a pair.

• i-D launches its first-ever Beauty Zine with Tyla on the cover. Gagged!

• I need a new shorts silhouette/vibe for summer. Send ideas!

• Not exactly fashion, but very Wasia-coded: I went to Hausu recently—super fab, small plates with big Asian-fusion flavors. Don’t skip the ox heart ragu on toast or the ex-dairy sirloin.

• Tomatinis at the newly refurbished La Petite Maison in London are just as fab. The classic LPM warm prawns with olive oil, too.

When I was 21, I took a flight from London to Toronto for the film festival. It was the longest I had traveled by myself, and I felt juvenile and underprepared. I was attending as a film critic— writing for my own made-up magazine—but had never seen The Godfather.

So I downloaded a dodgy DVD rip onto my laptop and watched it on the flight. Why? Not because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. I was worried, for some reason, that in 2016, someone would ask me my thoughts on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic. To be at a film festival not having seen what many consider the best movie ever made would make me an imposter.

My job revolves around keeping on top of these things, but there’s plenty I have to let slip through the cracks—if not for reasons of practicality, then for my sanity. I’ve made peace with this.

You can be smart and also not know things. I don’t think this is a new development. I’m sure, back in the day, there was a similar sense of FOMO and self-described failure amongst people who didn’t see Jaws or whatever. But of course the monoculture doesn’t exist in the way it did then. It’s become its own unique bog water. The internet forced it to disperse. Take musicians for example: while arena-selling stars are still made big by radio play and late night TV appearances, our favorite artists, who seem like they’re everywhere on TikTok, are nobodies to our parents. Both are relevant. That’s twice as many trails to keep on top of.

The pressure to be able to launch into a spiel about every subject in contemporary culture has made us approach art with the scorn with which we tackle homework. TV shows, books, movies become tasks—the reward being that we have something to talk about in bars, at work, around the dinner table.

I struggle to make it through fiction novels. My friends tease me because I “don’t do TV.” I haven’t listened, top to bottom, to a single record by The Beatles. (It turns out I’m not alone in this.) I’m freeing myself from this pressure to take the blinkers off and rectify my blind spots immediately. Sometimes it’s smarter to just admit your cultural shortcomings.

I remind myself that our truly brilliant minds experience the same thought process. Our cultural leaders, tastemakers, artists of their generation, have their own thing that niggles on the brain. So I asked a lot of artists that I respect the following question:

Many brilliant people responded. There was new blood, like Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old novelist behind the year’s most talked about best-seller, filmmaker Sophy Romvari, who made one of my favorite movies of the year Blue Heron, and Dylan Brady, the young actor-screenwriter who just nabbed a history-making deal with A24 for his erotic thriller. There are ballet dancers, magazine editors, filmmakers, and musicians who walk among us—excellence on show—who are comfortable admitting that there are some things they know very little, or nothing, about. Let their responses be a reminder that you can have shit to learn and still be awesome.

Jordan Firstman (Actor, Writer-Director of Club Kid)

“I’ve never seen anything from the entire filmography of Paul Mazursky.”

Thom Bettridge (Editor-in-Chief, i-D)

“Prestige television is my biggest cultural blindspot. I just don’t have the attention span to follow a multi-episode story arc. And whenever I actually watch the show that everyone is ‘obsessed’ with, I find that it’s a bit like doing homework. The lobby of my building is featured prominently in the new JFK Jr show, and I still haven’t bothered watching it.”

Ellie O’Neill (Songwriter)

“I don’t really know anything about The Beatles. I think when I was a kid I decided I didn’t like them, because I had a guitar teacher who said everyone would have their Beatles phase, but it sounded tinny and cold and boyish to me. I couldn’t find it beautiful. I only recently learned they were from Liverpool because I was going to Anfield with my girlfriend, which has obviously made me think I could like them. I’m sure they have some perfect songs - I’ve just never been in a rush to listen to or get into art that is deemed essential or ‘the best’, I just feel it will be waiting for me when I’m actually ready to receive it. I also find it easier to get into things if someone I love shows it to me. I just started watching The Sopranos recently because the timing was perfect.

Nelio Biedermann (Author, Lázár)

“I have never read Harry Potter, which fortunately gets less important the older I get. I have never seen a single Star Wars movie nor a Marvel film, and I’m a stranger to all the famous fantasy books and films.“

Dylan Brady (Screenwriter, Actor)

“I never went to museums when I was growing up. It wasn’t part of my childhood. So when I went on school trips or, in later life, found myself on a date at the V&A or meeting friends at an exhibition, I often felt out of place. Like I was pretending to know what it was to observe and appreciate art. It felt like I didn’t have the right eyes to understand it, but as I’ve gotten older, I think it’s important to sit with the unclear, the uncomfortable, the things that feel out of reach of our understanding. Even if you don’t have the language to express how something makes you feel, to interrogate what something might mean, it doesn’t matter. To have experienced it is the point.”

Charlotte Regan (Writer-Director of Mint, Scrapper)

“I’ve started Severance about 12 times and never got through more than 5 minutes. Not because it looks dodgy, just because everyone is always banging on about it and that somehow makes me feel like I’m under mad pressure whenever I turn it on. Like if I don’t bloody love it something is wrong with me. Can’t cope with that pressure, I used to cry when I was subbed onto football games as a kid — don’t rehash my childhood trauma please.”

Oliver Zeffman (Conductor, Classical Pride)

“I work in music and like to think I have a pretty good cultural awareness generally - I go to the cinema all the time, I’m interested in art, I go to concerts, gigs, opera, sometimes I go to dance. I don’t know much about jazz though, but I want to! I’d love to be a better jazz pianist and be able to just play - but I never seem to find the time to sit down and practice.”

John Waters (Writer-Director, Artist)

“I know enough about show business! I’m proud that I am completely ignorant of reality TV [and its] stars. I’ve never seen one of them.”

Gert Jonkers (Editor-in-Chief of Fantastic Man, Co-founder of BUTT)

“I pretty much never watch television series, and that’s a problem because it seems to be everybody’s favourite reference, 24/7. I’ve never seen even a glimpse of Succession, Euphoria, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and the many, many other pillars of today’s reference culture. I’ve seen The Crown though, which I loved, and Heated Rivalry, but struggled with the pace of the latter—cute and quite funny but boring and slow.

“On a completely different note, I’ve never done coke or speed, but that really shouldn’t be something to apologise for or be ashamed about, nor do I consider it ‘culture’.”

Sophy Romvari (Writer-Director of Blue Heron)

“True crime, but I don’t know if I want to know more haha… I realize there is a huge fascination with true crime in all mediums, podcasts, film and TV but it has never drawn me in. I find that specific type of morbidity to be grotesque in a way that I rather not engage with.

“Something I would love to be less ignorant about is poetry! I feel like there is a whole expansive world of poetry that I’ve yet to tap into.”

William Bracewell (Principal Dancer at the Royal Ballet, London)

“I don’t want to sound like a completely out of touch millennial, but my contemporary pop culture knowledge is very poor. I only just found out what Letterboxd is, I don’t have (and don’t want) TikTok, and know barely any of this year’s Brit award nominees. I don’t know if I have an active desire to hermit myself from the popular, but I’m not sure I mind lacking knowledge in that area.”

I know everyone’s probably asked this but you directed AND starred in Bunnyluvr. How did you switch between the jobs? Tell me about your mindset.

I say this all the time, but what made it possible to toggle between the two roles so seamlessly was having the support of a really amazing crew. From my producers to my DP, Daisy, I feel like everyone was giving 200% to help make my vision come to life. That and I prepped like crazy. I had these one-pagers for every scene that mapped out the arc my character was going through, where she was coming from or going, what her relationship was to the person in the scene, etc. There was a section for directing notes that I wanted to remember to give to the other actors or general notes about the scene. I remember one of my producers, Ani, in our first meeting together said, “My goal is for you to walk onto set and only have to worry about acting.” Obviously that wasn’t entirely what ended up happening, but I feel like it got pretty close.

What’s your writing process like? What were you watching for inspiration?

I’m very regimented in my writing routine. I have to get up at 6 a.m. and write for a couple hours—then I’m pretty much useless the rest of the day. To get a full first draft of anything out, I need to go away for 2-3 weeks and completely immerse myself in the thing. The two movies I’m constantly rewatching whenever I’m writing are Phantom Thread and American Honey. Specifically for this movie, I was watching Tiny Furniture, Somewhere, Beach Rats, and Nymphomaniac.

What was it like directing a bunny? Have you ever spent that much time with a bunny?

Directing animals is basically just you bending to their will. You can’t really direct an animal. Especially a bunny. We sort of made whatever the bunny wanted to do work. I’ve NEVER spent that much time with a bunny!!! I feel like I learned so much about myself from working with the bunny. I really don’t think of myself as someone with a lot of patience, but working with the bunny taught me that I actually do.

You have such a strong group of incredibly creative friends. Tell me about collaborating with your friends.

The only thing I ever want to do is make movies with my friends—whether it’s theirs or mine. It’s so special to be able to make things with people who know you so intimately. Especially on a shoot like this one—where I was playing multiple roles and the performance had to be quite vulnerable—it was really important to be surrounded by people I trusted and felt comfortable around. Also, the life of someone who is making movies can be all-consuming and extremely unpredictable. My friendships with fellow filmmakers are so important because there’s just an inherent understanding.There’s no question when I disappear for weeks on end and then re-emerge. They don’t take it personally. They just get it. They’re like, “Of course you weren’t responding to texts, you were in back to back-to-back meetings and then in the sound mix for 12 hours.”

Where did you shoot? Any fun stories you want to share?

We shot all over New York. We would go from deep Brooklyn to Long Island to the Upper West Side in one day. The thing about making a no-budget indie film in NYC is that it is only possible because you are constantly calling in favors from friends or friends of friends. Most of the locations, someone on the crew had a special relationship to—we shot in the hospital that my producer Roger was born in.

How much time do you spend online? Do you have any favorite digital places?

My relationship with being online has only gotten better as I’ve gotten older in that I am much more boundaried with it. In terms of digital places, I am returning to YouTube lately and I really like Miranda July’s substack, browsing The RealReal, and endlessly watching clips of Clavicular & Woah Vicky on TikTok… that’s maybe the one thing that I could be doing less of

What do you want people to feel after seeing Bunnyluvr?

I feel like this sentence at the end of Rayne Fisher-Quann’s essay ‘No Good Alone’ sums it up better than I could: “It’s hard, certainly—it’s painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It’s better than being alone.”

What are you looking forward to this year?

I’m looking forward to throwing myself into new projects and to taking a REAL vacation.

(If you analyze it, it will come.)

But the one true market force I believe in is vintage. Whatever is happening at vintage fairs will become mainstream within 6 months to a year. (My genius friend Liana of Neverworns has a preternatural ability to sense what vintage trends will resurface.) This is not just a theory—I have proof.

When the Ballet Russes sold their costumes in 1967 and 1968, hussar jackets started to appear on Mick Jagger. Around that same time, Granny Takes a Trip was importing block prints from India, soon to appear on Patti Boyd and Marianne Faithfull. Once Mick and Marianne were into it, suddenly everyone else was, too, and the boho look of mismatched old clothes was born. Grunge came from the charity shop, and 20 years later, so did Y2K nostalgia.

So I went to A Current Affair, a preeminent vintage fair, determined to uncover some truths about what’s next. The last time I really trawled there was before COVID. Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons were all the hot tickets. The avant-garde of the 1990s was on the rails and everyone’s HF Twitter username had Margiela or Lang in it. (Some still do.)

Over the past weekend, the vibe had shifted from the fashion minimalist to something else. Iridescent Romeo Gigli blouses and crinkled Mary McFadden silk dresses appeared across multiple vendors. There was plenty of Zohran and Zhandra Rhodes, and a petulant beige-black silk chiffon skirt set from Bill Blass with real fur trim. As I passed the fitting room to look at myself trying on a Voyages scarf—more on that later—a girl was wrestling a bohemian scarf dress in ochre and orange to stay on her shoulders. “You have to get it!” I cheered, walking by. Across the room, another woman assessed a completely sheer lilac slip. There was more true vintage Yves Saint Laurent—from the 1970s, peasant era–spread across vendors than I recall ever seeing before. I spent 10 minutes trying to convince my friend Emily to buy this transparent Rozae Nichols blouse (a steal at only $148!).

This all started to feel oddly familiar: digging through shreds of chiffon with tiny glass seed beads, trying on whimsical 1930s deco shawls—two of which I tried at A Current Affair, both priced over $500. When I was 14, my mom took me to a store in the West Village stuffed with these kinds of fanciful, whimsical, romantic pieces. Not too saccharine, but the wardrobe of a countryside doyenne living in hazy squalor. Little Edie of the Cotswolds.

After the fair, I texted my diligent group of shopper friends and asked them to define the vibe. Lynette and Liana both put their finger on the “CBK-infused greige-dom” (Lynette) and “ladylike shoes” lingering from Ryan Murphy’s show and Pinterest boards. But Rachel nailed it: “Jemima Kirke / Geminola gossamer melancholy.”

Geminola was the jewel box I had visited as a teen, founded by Kirke’s mom, Lorraine, and stuffed with bizarre, elegant, mischievous little wares. Tutu skirts alongside hand-embroidered slips. Crushed silk bows. Devoré velvet. The air in the store was almost sepia.

We are moving towards romo-boho.

(That’s romantic-bohemian, and, yes, I will accept suggestions for other names!)

As I wandered, watching the shoppers, it was obvious. Long chiffon skirts with tiered ruffles layered over jeans—something I see almost daily on my trek through Dimes Square towards our office. Sheer tops worn with silk cord belts. Rachel’s vintage astrakhan coat with a white fur collar had a romo-boho spirit, and so did Lynette’s Junya jacket, made to look like it was stolen from the Louvre archives. I was even wearing seashell jewelry and a crepe SC103 dress!

Look closely and you can see the movement towards well-worn, rich fabrics; small, hand-embellished details; and that melancholy spirit across culture. It’s in Olivia Rodrigo’s wistful teasers for her new album (and her vintage-y Anna Sui dresses). It’s in the Conner Ives upcycled opera coats that have become the uniform of well-dressed women around the world. It’s in Jonathan Anderson’s open admiration of Paul Poiret. It’s what Danielle Haim, My’hala, and Emma Chamberlain wore at the Oscars. It’s Valentino! And it’s how Tish Weinstock dresses every day!

It’s Voyages—the fashion brand founded by the Mazzilli family in London in the 1990s. The store reportedly required a membership to enter (Kate Moss, approved. Madonna reportedly denied, even though she ended up in Voyages during her CoExIst phase in the late ’90s). It trafficked in incredible, one-of-a-kind slips, jackets, dresses, skirts, and bags all finished with hand-done beading and trims. Worn by Helena Bonham-Carter (patron saint of romo-boho) and Cher alike. It’s chronicled by an amazing Instagram archivist here and full of the inspo you will need to be ahead of the 2026 romo-boho resurgence. And if you see me jangling about in my blue devoré velvet wrap with glass-bead fringe, come say hi. Let’s go vintage shop together!

Anny Choi, the world’s greatest bridal stylist, gound a chamomile velvet Maison Margiela dress from the Matthieu Blazy reign, and Emily Farra, mastermind of the Toryssance, picked up a Giambattista Valli tweed jacket with flat silk bows. Both quite romo-boho adjacent, if you ask me.

Hey Lil’ Maniacs,

It’s been such a joy to receive all of your questions, and I will endeavor to answer as many as I can before I turn forty, one month from today. The countdown is on, but at least I have your many humane and tender queries to keep me distracted from my imminent death.

This week, we’re coming at you in collaboration with i-D Magazine. My pal Nicolaia was asked to choose the theme and she settled on “friendship”- which is fitting because both my bestie Alissa Bennett and I have done our time as i-D cover girls.

You know that TikTok sound where the guy says…

Well, I think Lissy and I are successfully proving him wrong :)

Anyway, I love this theme. My work makes it pretty clear that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about friendship- what it’s for, what it feels like, what it should feel like and how to navigate it when things get swampy, dark, or contentious. I think a lot of that comes from the childhood years I spent fairly friendless, trying to understand what other girls understood about connection that I didn’t (at the time, that seemed defined by bootcut jeans and choppy layers). Now that I think of it, maybe the issue was that no boys had come out of the closet yet, and I didn’t realize that my destiny was to be smack dab in the middle of a pack of gays? Let’s be honest, some of us just work better there.

That’s not to say I’m not a girl’s girl- it’s a religion, and I follow the bible to the letter. You’ll never catch me talking out of school or flirting with someone else’s beloved! But I have always found myself both obsessed with, and terrified of, the powerful tides of female friendship. It’s consumed me in ways both productive (art) and not as productive (“people pleasing” which we used to just call being a spineless pushover!). So the chance to answer your questions is also a chance to consider the journey I’ve taken on this subject, and the relative peace that has ruled my personal friendship kingdom for quite a while now.

One of the best things about getting older is that I find my friendships are far less conflicted. I can’t actually remember the last time a friendship required anything more than a small tune up—knock-down-drag-em-out fights feel as quaint as a horse drawn carriage, but I know I had ‘em because I have the sense memory to prove it. An analogy: when you’re young, you try lots of styles on for size. Emo, goth, skater girl, Sporty Spice, Zooey Deschanel vintage charm. Each one feels good for a moment, but then stifling- it can’t fully encompass you. So you switch and you slide and it feels pretty manic until one day, you realize you’ve found a groove- it’s not one abiding aesthetic but instead the melding of all your influences. Friendship is like that too- you start to realize the signature blend of people that defines you, what you get from each and- just as essentially- what you have to offer.

Hi Lena! Sending a DM because digital footprint! My question- how to know when it’s time to let a friendship go/how to navigate having that difficult conversation without wanting to hurt their feelings. Bonus point if you have mutual friends and know you’ll continue to see them. Can’t wait for famesick xx

This is a great question and hit me right in my guts in the best way. Thank you for sending:)

A lot of my book Famesick is about friendship, how beautiful it feels as it forms, and also, how it can outlive its expiration date. I find letting go of friendships- particularly with women, my Achilles heel- incredibly challenging. There is always a desire to try and fix it, to communicate and clarify. With romantic partners, we tend to sense when the jig is up, but- because we’ve been sold the narrative that besties are eternal- we may try and work the problem when it’s already pretty apparent that the fit is not fitting.

The best friendships can withstand a huge amount of change, personal ups and downs, geographic shifts and life’s most painful milestones- but sometimes the wires get crossed, and friends start expecting too much of each other, or become unkind because of their own stuff they’re not aware of/can’t express. To me, it’s time to pack it in when people stop expecting the best from each other. They start imagining (or sensing) darker currents or motives, and one person is trying to convince the other of their good intentions.

To my mind, real friendship is not:

-Predicted on some idea that friendship involves endless emotional labor. Yes, friends step up for each other in truly eye-watering ways, and sometimes even offer more than they have in times of crisis. But that’s a gift, not a given.

-Doesn’t involve score keeping (i.e. “I did x for you, so you better do x for me… or else…”)

-Isn’t snarky or cruel- when someone has an issue or needs to clarify something, they do it clearly and kindly. They don’t let some passy aggro bullshit slip after the ninth glass of wine.

-Doesn’t leave you feeling bad about yourself and afraid of them.

-Doesn’t push past your boundaries or expect you to be uncomfortable just to make them comfortable.

-Is honest and forthright.

Within all this there are so many configurations that work and a friendship can take many forms over one lifetime! But if you go down this check list and nod “yeah, yeah… yeah that one too…” then it’s time to consider that the dynamic is no longer working. This doesn’t have to be considered a personal or collective failure. It can actually just mean everyone is changing and sometimes the train can handle passengers, but sometimes it’s gotta go freight all the way to Nova Scotia.

It’s also okay to love someone but need space- unlike a family dynamic or a marriage, friendships don’t require you to keep banging your head against the wall until it’s either fixed or utterly unfixable.

Once you’ve had a friendship end or change- even if it’s not dramatic- seeing that person can bring up a lot. It reminds you of the joyful early days, when you were falling in giddy love, laughing with your feet kicked up behind you like teens in Bye Bye Birdie. It can remind you of the bitter end, when you felt unseen and taken for granted. And, most painfully, it can remind you of your own limitations and bring up a lot of guilt and self blame.

My goal when running into someone I’ve had an intimate dynamic with- any kind of intimate dynamic- is always to be elegant and kind and acknowledge the shared history while not re-instigating negative patterns.

DO: “Hey, it’s so nice to see you. I was just wondering the other day if your mother still quilts!”

DON’T: “Well, you look happy. Nice to see that for once, since your depression was such a running theme and apparently why you couldn’t come to my birthday party at that escape room.”

When it comes to mutuals, I never force them to take sides or make them listen to an Amazon wishlist of grievances. I try not to indulge in negatively speaking about someone with their friend (even though sometimes it’s the mutual friend who wants to do this, which can be very tempting lol! But remember, that means they’d do the exact same in your absence, and if ya think you’re immune I’ve got news for you honey…)

Your shared friends will appreciate not being put in the middle and will be impressed by your graciousness, even if you have to go home and vent to someone else who is purely on *your* team.

Which I am! I think you’re perfect.

Hi Lena, my dear sweet girl! I would love to hear your advice on this - my life changed a lot since getting sober 3 years ago, and as a result I’ve distanced myself from a friend group I used to spend a lot of time with. There is a wedding coming up this year and I really do not want to go. I used to be very close with the bride and groom and it makes me sad because I was one of the first people who knew about the engagement, but now I just don’t really see them being a meaningful part of my life going forward. I also had a falling out with the maid of honor, which if I’m being honest is the main reason I don’t want to go. I feel so guilty declining the invitation but I know I will be very uncomfortable if I go to this thing. I haven’t even talked to the couple since the engagement party last year and have since then distanced myself from the friend group all together because the maid of honor just dominates everything. How would you recommend I deal with this situation? What do you do when you don’t want to go to a wedding? Love you doll, thanks for taking the time to read this ❤️

Hey honey,

Words of affirmation are my love language, so all your endearments had me at hello. I bet you’re really cozy to spend time with.

Getting sober is a gargantuan life change, and it’s remarkable how quickly it can affect your friendships. Some people may experience your sobriety as an implicit judgment of their behavior. Others are on high alert for what they perceive as your instability, not understanding that getting sober was actually an attempt to change that. A lot of people just don’t know how to talk about it, and if they’re still drinking or using they may feel that you’re now “the fun police.” When I got sober, I noticed people ordering drinks and then looking concerned, like if they weren’t careful I might plop my face into their Negroni as if apple bobbing at a state fair.

Getting sober also means you’re more aware, and less able to ignore your own instincts or push down your emotions. If someone says something cutting or snide, you no longer have that blanket of feel good chemicals preventing you from reacting. A lot of my “using” (in quotes because that’s still not that easy for me to write!) was about deadening my responses so that I could tolerate dynamics that were no longer healthy, fun, or cute. When I stopped doing drugs, it was only a matter of time before we all recognized that the party was over for real. Turn on the house lights, rip out the aux cable, ya don’t have to go home but ya can’t stay here!

I don’t know what happened between you and this couple or the maid of honor (though I’ve noticed that brides often tend to choose the person they’re most afraid of for that job… Tell me I’m wrong…) but what I really hear is you saying that you don’t see them being a meaningful part of your life going forward. Attending a wedding is about celebrating the future, and if you don’t see a future together and are just riding it out because of some ancient sense of obligation then frankly: they don’t need a reminder of that in their wedding photos either.

There is no reason to go if it’s only to delay a hard conversation. At the same time, preparing for a wedding is an intense and often emotional experience (it wasn’t for me, but I am in hiding as a human being and so I’m taking notes. And btw, if anyone disagrees with any of this advice just know I am not a woman but in fact three weasels in a trench coat and fight me in the comments!). The bride and groom likely do not have the bandwidth for a big friendship come-to-Jesus. Therefore, on a purely logistical level, I would recommend a polite “RSVP with regrets” and if they want to dig in on why and what happened you can offer a reason on the kinder end of honest and suggest, say, you’re happy to regroup after their big day and hash it out. You have your sobriety to protect right now, and that is the most precious thing. Even more precious than a precious bride, and she will have plenty of people to be angry at in person:)

Say you wish them only the best, and here’s the hard part: mean it. During your daily prayers, whatever form they take, send out your hopes that their marriage is a smashing success by whatever metric is meaningful to them, wish health and vitality to them and everyone they care about, and practice the art of loving distance.

It will only serve you well as you go forward in your sober friendships, of which I’m sure you will have many.

From the lens of being a chronic illness girlie, what have you learned about friendships?

Wow. This is such a lovely question, and the answer is: everything. Being sick has taught me just how deep and abiding friendship really is, how selfless and life giving. Matt Wolf spent three consecutive Christmases with me in the hospital, bringing fancy potato chips and fancier gossip. Alissa has picked me up from the doctor and off the floor. My dear friend and literary agent Bill Clegg used to read me poetry as I sat in a bed in Lenox Hill like I was waiting to be picked up by the school bus to nowhere, looking handsome and eternal in a well cut coat. Russell aka is lightly snoring in bed beside me as I type this, after forcing me to eat half a veggie sub “because you’ve got a big week to carbo load for.” They showed me what love is supposed to feel like, and because of them I knew what to look for in a husband, in colleagues, and also the standard to hold myself to when I have a friend in need.

Illness meeting friendship in a “vinegar, meet baking soda” kind of way has also caused some of the gravest disappointments of my life, when people I thought really had my back, my front and my side revealed the limits of their capacity.

But that’s just it: capacity. When someone shies away from you during a time of health crisis, it’s important to recognize that it is often much more about them than it is about you. That’s not to say that illness doesn’t bring out the worst in us- how could it not? But it also brings out the best. And their response is formed by their history, their fears. Perhaps they grew up with a sick parent, or have faced some really hard losses they didn’t think they’d make it back from. Maybe it activates their innate dread of physical decay (that’s cultural, too!) or maybe their own lives feel messy and hard to control, and their inability to tell a tidy story in which you got sick, got better and moved on is scaring them shitless.

At the same time, chronic illness has meant I’ve had to disappoint a lot of people, people who I really love- maybe I couldn’t show up to an event that was important to them, or was having a bad flare that rendered me useless at a moment when they could have used someone. People who have enjoyed relatively good health often cannot compute that you can really, really want to be there and your body is not going to budge on its position. Your body is staging a filibuster, and all they know is that if it were them they could do it through sheer force of will. I’ve noticed that friends often feel scared to tell you any of this, because they think that your illness is a sort of blanket excuse that can’t be argued with. Encouraging my friends to share, reminding them that I’m an open door- even for emotions that they might consider embarrassing or illogical- has led to some of the greatest conversations of my life.

My first boyfriend in seventh grade wrote me a Valentine’s Day card I can still quote by heart: “Dear Lena, I really like you. I think this relationship could last awhile. I love you. Love, Callum***.” This was like a week before he broke up with me because I wasn’t ready to kiss with tongues, but that doesn’t change the fact that the sentiment was 10/10. And now, when I make a new friend, I give my version of that spiel: “I am really enjoying this. I feel like we could be, you know, real friends! FYI, I deal with chronic illness and that can mean I sometimes have to change plans or can’t be as available as I wish. It’s never personal, and I’ll always tell you the truth and show up in every way I can. Let’s make a deal to be honest.”

Once, Jemima said to me: “You’re like that Ja Rule/Ashanti lyric- you’re not always there when I call, but you’re always on time.”

And it was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard.

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Everyone had already bundled the new season of Euphoria into the flop category before it had returned. When its third outing was announced, the internet was furious: “Euphoria is DONE… fans are tired,” vloggers wrote. Teen Vogue questioned “Does the Euphoria Cast Even Want a Season Three?”

I was always under the impression that nobody really meant this. After all, we’d been left in the lurch for nearly half a decade, and we’d adored what had come before. There’s also the unavoidable fact that its entire cast have since become our favorite A-list movie stars. Didn’t we want to see them together for one last time?

Euphoria is fun to hate because it asks us to hate it: It’s loud and astringent and teeters on the edge of bad taste, often diving into it without giving a fuck. To me, the first three episodes of season three are a summation of the greatest American art: freewheeling, violent, garish—as fucked up as its country of origin. It feels like a final chapter— Zendaya herself said so. But more importantly it feels like Levinson’s histrionic doorslam on two decades of prestige TV.

Back in 2019, Euphoria entered the culture at the epicenter of our rediscovered desire to watch ambitious storytelling at home. Streaming helped. Stranger Things was pulling in big audiences on Netflix. On cable, Game of Thrones had enthralled audiences on a scale previously seen only in movie theaters, coming to an end earlier that year. It had been a while since we had been able to enjoy shows that felt compelling and well crafted (The Wire and The Sopranos were firmly a part of HBO’s past) but it was time for it. Everyone was bingeing streaming shows and the pandemic was just around the corner. TV was getting good again: Succession, Shogun, The Last of Us, Squid Game, The Crown. Euphoria, too, felt like an important part of its fabric.

But we’re looking back on that moment rather than living through it, which is why the ostentatiousness of the new Euphoria feels so notable. Amidst a celluloid boom in movies, it’s the first TV show in history to be shot on both 35mm and 65mm film, apparently to mirror its characters’ journeys “into the wider, wilder world.” The score, once provided by Labrinth, comes courtesy of Hans Zimmer, who won an Oscar for Dune, for fuck sake. You can feel it: that textural, aesthetic, sonic upgrade. It feels more expensive than ever.

HBO have leant into this leveling up in their presentation of it. The show was aired early to journalists in New York on cinema screens. One of its big marketing moments was a broadcast from the grounds of Coachella, where it was beamed directly into the eyes of those who had made it so successful in the first place: a generation who romanticized self-destruction, just as millennials had with Skins a decade before Euphoria debuted.

This showyness doesn’t come at the shallow expense of the story, though. I’d argue that quality has always been a key part of what made the show so special. It was made for an audience of aesthetes who love Tumblr screenshots of sexy people. But this time around, Levinson’s sexy people are going through their own shit at polar opposite ends of society’s spectrum. You have the murky world of addicts, making ends meet through nefarious means, and new faux-riche mansion dwellers. Agents to OnlyFans models and art students-turned-sugar babies. After dragging these kids through high school, the new Euphoria is proudly ignorant to the mundane middle classes. It’s a Mentos-and-Diet Coke show, frothing uncontrollably from every orifice, obliterating all that’s boring. I’m afraid it’s magic still works on me.

Levinson knows that we’re crying out for something like it—a show that dares to be grim, acidic, and original. We’ve reached the tail end of TV’s Golden Age, and he treats Euphoria as its last gasp. That pandemic-fueled streaming boom has led to a new era of stuff that feels like slop. We cannot name every show from the Star Wars and Marvel universes—there are so many. There are spin-offs of once successful properties, like Game of Thrones, but again they feel like paler versions of what we were once in love with, and we’re being told to treat them with the same kind of reverence. Just look at Harry Potter—a beloved film franchise (tarnished by its creator) that does not need to be retreaded. But here we are, so afraid of risk, that we’re being subjected to a decade of likely drab TV based on the same property anyway. We don’t need it, but people will watch it, and that’s enough for Warner Bros to spend an estimated billion dollars on its creation.

It feels like the death of something, but death now doesn’t mean death forever. I’m of the persuasion that certain kinds of culture die for the sole purpose of being brought back again when we’re primed and ready for it. Soon, I hope, a show as unafraid, unbothered, and controversial as Euphoria will burst through the fabric of television, obliterating the mush that will be season 6 of Harry Potter. I hope it’s not a Euphoria reboot, though. I’m craving a prestige freak made in its image.

You just witnessed Faye, Chloe Cherry’s character in Euphoria, chow down on golf ball-sized drug packets in the show’s first episode. Diva behavior!

I asked her: What historical diva deserved better?

Princess Diana. She was a just such an incredible person and good to the bottom of her heart. To this day, she's one of most important and influential people in government, and she would have made an even more positive impact on the world if she were alive today. She loved everyone, she wanted peace and safety, and stood up for what she believed in, even when the media and her own family disrespected her. We could use more people like her in government today.

• Seeing everyone flock to Coachella is reminding me of my first music festival: a four-day camping trip to T in the Park in Perth, Scotland. I was 16, and saw 4 era Beyoncé, as well as Odd Future doing three songs before being kicked off stage for, from what I recall, throwing glass into the audience (or vice versa). <3

• Erupcja hits US theaters next week, and I dug it. Felt like real indie cinema in a time when its aesthetics have been jacked by bourgeois filmmakers. Charli xcx’s performance is just one of many interesting things about it.

• The Cannes line-up is out. Any questions?

Between the ages of 14 and 17, at a moment when the adolescent brain is as malleable and pungent as a cantaloupe left out on a summer’s day, I attended LaGuardia, the prestigious New York City public school, where I majored in music. Each day upon entering the school, I passed by a wall with tiny alumni pictures on it: Liza Minelli, Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks, Jennifer Aniston, Al Pacino, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Jazz musicians, composers, opera singers, the heavy hitters keep coming. Because of this, I’ve seen everything Timothée Chalamet has ever been in. Including this (my best friend was waiting in the wings to go on and almost died slipping on one his dancers’ wigs). I’m not Jr. Club Chalamet, I just went to school with the guy!

Having spent my formative years in this incubator of creativity, I feel uniquely equipped to answer a question that’s been burbling up in mainstream culture:

The opportunity for stardom is everywhere. Our coolest popstar Addison Rae was a TikTok dancer. In an Elle cover story she told Suzy Exposito, “I always knew I wanted to be famous, to be a movie star, to be a singer—to just be a performer.” Adam Friedland, sure to be the next John Stewart, is a former edgelord podcaster. Saturday Night Live is filled with internet comedians. This very magazine held an open call led by casting director (and recent Oscar nominee) Jen Vendetti to cast the first issue of revamped magazine. (Enza, our covergirl, has gone on to become an international model.) It feels like everyone is either trying to be a star or trying to find a star.

The great democratisation of the internet has flattened the world to the point where any of us, at any moment, feel capable of ascending to stardom. We are all one good post away from greatness, from an audience, from a brand deal, from our dream. Scroll through Tiktok—the entertainment app where 63% of Americans under 30 are active—and it feels like a casting call for a role that hasn’t been written. Everywhere people are showing off their talents. Need someone to do a Benson Boone impression? Looking for a musician who plays the Theremin? The question is: who is everyone performing for?

Dylan Shanks is the founder of Open Door, a music management firm that represents artists like Omar Apollo, Teo Halm, and 54 Ultra. When Shanks is scouting he’s looking for a mix of qualities: the right look, the right sound, the right vibe. He tends to go to a show at least once a week. “But Tiktok is the most important place on the internet. That’s how the majority of artists and songs are found these days. If something goes viral, it’s not that it makes me more interested, it just means that there’s a much higher chance I actually discover it and if I’m discovering it then that means it’s probably resonating with people.”

During the pandemic the internet was filled with viral musicians. Record labels hoping to capitalize on the virality would swoop in and offer musicians record labels. A lot of those artists (who made the charts) don’t have careers anymore. In some cases early exposure can be a good thing Shanks points out. Addison Rae has a built-in audience long before “Diet Pepsi.” “It seems like it bought her the space to make her music without as much interference from a record label,” Shanks says “A lot of artists, on a first album, don’t always get the opportunity to do that. And that lack of interference and trust led to it being an extremely cohesive album.”

He reminisces about first meeting Omar Apollo, “He played at an Art Gallery in Chicago with a bunch of artists. He sounded great, but what really caught my attention was that later he was dancing, the center of attention without even really trying, and I remember seeing and being like, Oh, he just lives for that. That’s a person who wants to be on stage and perform.”

Adam Faze, Tiktok producer extraordinaire, has similarly been on the frontlines of the shifting landscape of entertainment for his entire career. We’ve known each other for years (I think I was one of the first people to profile him) and in that time, one thing has remained consistent: any interesting new person emerges online and Adam is already following them. “When I’m on Instagram Reels I’ll probably follow 20 people in a session, DM five of those people, and then meet with three of them.” Faze was bullish on megastar Kareem Rahm–their show Keep the Meter Running predated Subway Takes and is a personal and wonderful watch, somewhere between Parts Unknown and Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee. Beyond having a steady eye on a moving target, Faze is also producing stuff that’s just, well, objectively good.

Despite the volume of people he seems to be DMing, Faze’s thoughts about stardom are pretty conservative, “Even though we’re in a time where we’ve never had more creators, more people making content, more people trying to become famous…I think we still have the same number of stars. Star power is star power, it’s not something that can be created, it’s not something that can be taught.” Faze chalks it up to something essential, bordering on mystical, “Look at Kareem, he’s the only short form host that exists who truly feels larger than life. It didn’t matter then when we started Keep The Meter Running he didn’t have that big a platform, in my head he was already the most famous person.” He gives me another example: teenage streamer iShowSpeed, “Speed would’ve been famous in any generation, Kareem would’ve been famous in any generation. It shouldn’t be so tied to the moment. In some way it’s just destiny. You can create myth and lore. I think the people that are the best at that is Hybe [the creators of Katseye]. But it’s a very different type of star power. You can only go so far when the whole thing is manufactured.”

With the way media works the business behind stardom is more important to a musician’s career than ever. Shanks makes the point that once you’ve gotten somewhere it’s even harder to stay afloat, “Music isn’t the only thing an artist has to worry about now. Now you have to run a TikTok page, an Instagram page, a burner Instagram page, a Twitter, a Discord, interviews, plus come up with ideas for videos and artwork and marketing.”

Faze’s take is basically entertainment gatekeepers need to get a grip. They know how to spot a star, they’ve been doing it for years, “It feels like something shifted in the past 15 years because of the internet. The entire industry of Hollywood, not understanding why certain people have platforms and instead of developing talent the way they’ve done for a hundred of years, are instead like ‘We don’t get it but the kids like this person and they have 100,000 followers so might as well build something around them.’ Same with the music industry, they find these kids with a viral video, sign them, give them a lot of money but they don’t have staying power, and it’s like yeah… You’re hiring the digital equivalent of a one hit wonder.” Since Faze’s whole career has been in this new frontier of digital talent and entertainment, he explains, he’s managed to escape the pressure of working with people simply because the numbers are in their favor.

Finding that perfect rising star is a balancing act that casting director Stella Tompkins spends most of her time doing. Tompkins, who scouts talent for both herself and Kate Antognini, relies on a mixture of street scouting and internet casting. “The internet has given so much accessibility. So much of my days are spent scrolling through Instagram looking for talent. It’s annoying because post COVID it’s all self-tapes versus in person casting. It’s hard to judge someone from a tape that they could redo over and over. To break the online cycle of what the algorithm is feeding me I feel like in person casting is needed.”

Even for those attempting to ignore the internet and hold on to the old method of stardom, COVID ushered in an inescapable technological turning point. Few auditions are held IRL anymore. Not even those of my alma mater! During COVID LaGuardia switched over to virtual auditions, with an in-person call back. (Much less terrifying than the nerve-shattering audition process I experienced where you’re made to perform live in front of a small consortium of teachers.) Despite the change in medium, they’ve been steadily producing stars, everyone from Sombr to Lola Tung of The Summer I Turned Pretty. I wondered if what they were looking for remained the same.

I reached out to my High School music teacher Mrs. Ballard. Ballard has been teaching at LaGuardia for the past 19 years and beyond being a truly wonderful educator is also an authority on the subject, her past students (to name a few: Theo Hoffman, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Sofia Hunt, Meryl Dominguez) have gone on to sing globally. How do you listen to a thirteen year old and see what they can become? Ballard describes a focused approach, “I’m looking for preparation. Do they understand what they’re singing about? Are they being expressive on a different level? We’re looking at young singers, we’re looking for raw ability, that beautiful voice or ear. That’s the thing that’s most captivating.”

In this wild west of the attention economy, it can feel like there’s this mad dash to find the next big star, leading to young people feeling embittered that they’ve haven’t “made it” by a certain age, and gatekeepers confused that what they think should be working isn’t. Ultimately it’s not so black and white, and things aren’t so different. The Harrison Fords (became famous in his thirties) are just as abundant in Hollywood as the child protegees. And the real question…why does everyone want to be a star? Maybe you shouldn’t want to be? Do you want to be an artist or do you want to be famous? Do you want to be a great actor or do you want to be a celebrity? Do you want more eyes, people watching your every move, commenting on your posts? Maybe that’s the real trick the internet has played on us –convincing the general population that they want the downside of celebrity without the artistry.

I believe those who need to perform, for their soul and for the world, will eventually make it. My mom likes to tell a story about my High School audition. She was sitting in the hallway waiting for me when a girl came up to her and asked if she’d like to hear her sing. My mom said yes (obviously) and the girl unleashed a performance so beautiful, so exceptional, it was bizarre that it came out of a child. That girl was Lorna Courtney. You can see her on Broadway!

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She’d vowed not to talk about clubs, but Chloë Sevigny is chattering breathlessly down the phone at midnight, a mixture of gossip, complaints and a laugh like a drain. She’s raving about the Pulp show in Manhattan the night before, gushing about her adventures in London, a city she’s always so desperate to visit that she agreed to be on “awful Hotel Babylon” just because they agreed to fly her over. “Can I move there?”

“I never go out in New York though I’m out every night in London.” She didn’t want to talk about nightclubs, fashion and movies, even though her next film, The Last Days Of Disco, has the tunes, the art direction and the necessary collision with today’s most desirable retro nuances to make Chloë into someone other than “that girl from Kids,” even though she’s also now the girl from Trees Lounge, Gummo, and Broadway theatre. She knows all about irony, Chloë does, but she can’t help being dissatisfied with “retro-virus” and finally snaps when we’re talking about the latest wave of fine and dandy Warholism to hit London: “Eurgh! Everyone wanting to re-live all that Factory shit makes me glad that’s all over with, but people are still reveling in it,” she complains.

“Why don’t we just move forward instead of always trying to relive the past?”

Why not, indeed? Despite Chloë’s protests, the Great Disco Revival is in full swing. London’s galleries are once again in thrall to Andy Warhol, sometimes known more as the linchpin of aspirational NYC nightlife than as the world’s most heavily-branded Pop artist.

Socialite writer Anthony Haden-Guest’s The Last Party, a chronicle of New York nightlife encompassing the legendary Manhattan disco Studio 54 straight through to the dark mid-’90s excesses of smack-addled Club Kids, remains the hottest trans-Atlantic reading since Kitty Kelley’s The Royals. Perhaps unadvisedly, Studio 54 itself is mooted to re-open in a link-up with London’s Cafe de Paris—which may kill the fleeting spirit of retro fashionability inherent in the late -’70s/early-’80s glamour-puss designs of Antonio Berardi, Stella McCartney, and many others.

Still, the music never stops, with everything from the Full Monty-inspired Hot Chocolate uptake to the vocoders weaving in and out of the latest Beastie Boys album.

Right now, disco certainly doesn’t suck. Did it ever?

Not surprisingly, the biggest disco-reviving impact so far comes from two films arriving soon to British cinemas. 54, starring Neve Campbell and featuring Mike Wayne’s World Meyers as tax-evading sociopath owner Steve Rubell, opens early in 1999, but Whit Stillman’s The Last Days Of Disco, a fantastic US art-house hit, is due for imminent UK release.

Last Days brings the same upper-middle class, F. Scott

Fitzgerald sensibility Stillman used in Metropolitan to his latest subject: the twilight years of early-’80s clubs, when Studio 54 had gone off the boil, before Manhattan yuppies coalesced into the inspiration for books like Bonfire Of The Vanities and American Psycho. Its stars? With a great East Coast WASP accent, Brit Kate Beckinsale... and Chloë Sevigny.

Chloë realizes her presence here is doubly ironic, considering her protests about retro fashion and desire to shift profile from most people’s appraisal of her as a Downtown club kid made good. “I never really considered myself to be this social person, so being identified as this fashiony, clubby it girl was weird because I was just working at Sassy magazine and hanging out in clubs because it was free entertainment provided by the roommates I had when I first moved to the city. They all worked at clubs like Limelight and The Tunnel, so I went there for the free drinks. There’d be pounding rave music but I never danced to it. Now I don’t go out in New York unless it’s to gigs. It was all brand-new to me, coming from a New England town like Darien. Now I hate it, being labelled as a cool girl when I was just new. I hate having that whole image thing to deal with.”

In the film, Kate and Chloë are Charlotte and Alice, posh graduates entering the urban jungle in the early ’80s, learning the ropes of NYC nightlife—and sex-life—in preppy discos. “I was always fascinated by the upper-middle class kids who surrounded me at school, and Whit’s movies are always about this world of American rich kids that I really think is dying out. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing… I was surrounded by them but I was, like, a total opposite. I didn’t play field hockey—I was too busy smoking pot under the bleachers!” she laughs.

“Because I spent so much time watching these preppy rich kids, I was attracted to the project because I’d finally get to play one.” Her Alice is a bluestocking, a bookish girl whose ponderousness annoys the boys before she learns how to destroy them. “Kate’s character gives mine pointers on picking up boys and losing the kindergarten-teacher image, but gets really annoyed when the advice works. All the boys fall for me, which is weird when I think about me, because I never imagine boys think anything of me. All the boys probably think I’m a junkie anyway.”

“The Last Days Of Disco is the anti-disco movie,” explains director Whit Stillman. “We didn’t want to be Saturday Night Fever or 54. None of my films are precisely about nightlife, though they take place in nightlife settings with music and dancing. It’s very different from the broad strokes of mid-’70s imagery that most people associate with disco. One of the reasons I wanted to do it is because I think the ending of a scene is more interesting and poignant than its beginnings.”

Whit Stillman was first bitten by the discotheque bug in London on a teenage visit to Annabel’s. It was 1976 and punk was in the ascendant. “For me, punk was the thing threatening disco. I just didn’t like hard rock, so the whole ‘Disco Sucks’ attitude of American and British punks seemed like the attitude of sour losers. People who couldn’t dance and were clueless and aggressive about it. Maybe they’re the same people who now live in a world of pop culture clichés and have vengefully turned on us for not presenting them with the pabulum, hackneyed views of disco that they’ve come to love.”

Strangely enough, Stillman’s film manages to take the pulse of current fashion—where the early-’80s lines he uses and enthuses about are being duplicated all over again in fashion and beauty pages. “I think it’s very bad when you go to a movie and you spend the whole time thinking how weird people’s clothes were back then,” he rues.

“So we tried to use a look that was less ‘period’ to us now so we could cheat the retro virus. It was a trim look which was an homage to how things actually looked in 1962, when I was ten, which is the last time I can remember looking at the world and thinking that everything was wonderful. And in 1982, when I was wearing the look I put in our movie, my wife was impressed with me because she thought I looked New Wave. In fact, I was just a preppy without a suntan.”

Obviously, the sun never shone in Stillman’s old haunts. Darker still is The Last Party, Anthony Haden-Guest’s chronicling of 20 years of Manhattan nightclubbing intrigue. Having served as a consultant to Stillman, Haden-Guest’s input laces Last Days with a noir sensibility, but the blackest tales possible are the main feature of this compulsively gossipy, decadent book. Comprehensive documentation of the drugs, funny money and Mafia presence fuelling New York nightlife through the ages, it’s a far cry from the shiny, happy experience most of Britain’s five million clubbers go in search of every single weekend. Where big bucks and big clubs were the product of big egos, tragedy loomed. Haden-Guest calls it Nightworld and it’s an alluring place, though not always an attractive one. “I liked the book,” enthuses Whit Stillman. “But it’s a really different view of things from mine, because it’s the most sordid, rich, anecdotal version of it all, told from an insider ‘VIP High Command’ point of view. He likes to go for juicier meat than we did in our film, and invents all these interesting tags to describe the people involved as if they were components in a tossed salad. He calls our preppy clubbers the Baby Lettuce group because their views of nightlife were so innocent and romantic. It shows us how clueless most people are about what goes on behind those velvet ropes.”

Haden-Guest’s take on disco is the smooth, sinuous world of nightclub-bing, a far cry from London retro superclubs like Carwash and Starsky & Hutch, and the velvet ropes Stillman describes were instruments of exclusivity designed to keep the out-of-town and out of sync at bay. Significantly, the book marks the beginning of the era where Nightworld figures became much more than venue organisers and party-givers. Instead, nightlife figures became the first “social curators,” creating a living gallery/museum of aesthetics based on the elevation of glamour, cool and the shock of the new. To be successful, clubs like Studio 54 had to shock over and over to maintain their operators’ cultural influence and prove the kind of nous that had figures like Andy Warhol—a prime social chameleon and magpie—coming back for more along with a throng of fashionable folks keen to be part of the action. Haden-Guest’s book also charts the rise and fall of Nightworld fortunes with the cold logic of the Law Of Averages. For every Steve Rubell, peaking early before tax evasion jailed him and AIDS killed him in 1989, there’s someone like his ex-partner lan Schrager, who survived the albatross of Studio 54 ownership to amass a fortune as the hotelier behind cutting edge palaces like The Royalton, midtown Manhattan favourite of the fashion police.

Since the ’60s, when Warhol (him again) coined the term, every “superstar” who found themselves blossom and grow in clubland and then beyond is matched in equal numbers by countless individuals who’ve died on the vine. It never changes: for successful ex-club kids like Madonna, Harmony Korine, and Chloë Sevigny, there’s casualties such as Michael Alig, suspected of killing fellow Club Kid Angel Melendez in a case that’s stonewalled clubland impresario Peter Gatien of Limelight and Tunnel, the man who introduced the shocking Leigh Bowery-esque Club Kids, fashion victims and promoters, to his Downtown clubs.

The Melendez murder case—like the 1986 ‘preppy murder’ of Jennifer Levin, an underage clubber—shut down Nightworld at the behest of New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani, causing the clubbing vibe to go darker, smaller, more underground as a result. Yet the myths are still intoxicating, no matter the number of shootings... or incidents of shooting up.

Could we be headed for the same thing here? After the mid-’90s boom, British culture may be heading for its Cruel Britannia phase, when New Labour’s puritanism will clash with a liberalised public reared on rave culture and very different ideas of personal responsibility than those espoused by their elected leaders. Handbag house and the lager-thump of Big Beat have given way to noirish dancefloor stylings in smaller clubs, fashions are more predatory, drugs harder and more severe. This is hardcore, and London’s becoming a Dante’s Inferno of materialism and bloody-mindedness after our half-decade of Ecstasy daze; there’s a renewed interest in exclusivity and cool.

People now exchange the purity of inspiration—what originally got us searching mean streets for action—for cheap lays and tactics which would be shocking were they not so retro and reactive. Cocaine is now the mass drug of choice, not just an aspirational little something for the weekend used by media types to go mega-meta. Crack is being used by folks outside the Brixton/Hackney front lines, and that’s big news. And heroin? Not so much chic as going mainstream, it’s increasingly the drug of choice for suburban wannabes who’ve given up on going out—a sign that some young people are too scared and self-obsessed to go anywhere at all.

However, some solace is available if the present state of clubbing and fashion presents a bigger downer to pop-culture junkies than a Studio 54 Quaalude. The metallic blade of Nightworld is like a circular saw: it slices through today’s scene, recycling, changing the vista, knocking down icons and institutions to clear the way for something new. Cutting edge doesn’t even begin to describe it. Bombast about drugs is only a kind of warning the actual chemicals never go out of use or totally out of fashion.

And people will always go to clubs because, even at their darkest, we go because clubs are a portal into a world of fantasy and make-believe; we try on masks and assume roles in clubland, after dark. Before the boom goes kaboom, it’s crucial to realise there’s more to today’s nightclubbing revival than new twists on old hemlines, glitter eye shadow and fake drug-fuelled escapism. Admittedly, most of us aren’t the privileged few on the guest lists of small, exclusive places, but millions still go clubbing to look for something better, more glittery and more glamorous than the lives we’ve got. And for a select group—Chloë Sevigny, for one—clubs are an identikit, the dancefloor a zone where people work out the process of becoming real individuals, unhindered by the trappings of their former status-quo lives. Even if, like Chloë, you weren’t even dancing at the time.

Written by Susan Corrigan
Chloë Sevigny photographed by Matt Jones

Richard, an admittedly good looking English actor in his early 30s, is talking me through the character descriptions of the parts he’s been asked to audition for. “That’s just the past two weeks,” he says. “All four are about my looks.”

He is, on paper, perfect for these parts, but he has bigger ambitions that casting directors can’t see past. The parts he wants to play—ones that reflect his working class Northern upbringing, for example—he never gets seen for. “I have lost a few jobs because I’m too attractive for the role,” Richard says. “Or even worse: I’m more attractive than the guy playing the romantic lead.”

Yes, hotness is an impediment for fresh stars in the acting world. Most people don’t want to be movie stars anymore, and so the general landscape of hotness has adjusted with it. “Real” looks are back. A snaggle tooth, crooked nose, or unique body type have all become an integral part of the charm of the New Hollywood class. Appearing “imperfect” means that an actor can slip into the interesting characters they audition for. But for the conventionally hot, pristine looks now stand in the way of a good on-screen job.

That’s a big change in the industry. For most of the 21st century, the word Hollywood itself has been used as a catch-all term for ultimate beauty: Hollywood smile, Hollywood hair. Even a decade ago, the likelihood of mainstream success—outside of genres like comedy, for example—was contingent on people finding you dazzlingly attractive. But for a new generation of actors auditioning in the late 2020s, getting your foot in the door is becoming difficult when people can’t see past your beauty. “My best friend helps me self tape, and she says ‘Stop trying to look pretty,’” says Tessa, an actress in her mid-20s. “I’m not, I’m just standing in front of the camera. I may be blond with big tits, but I can also play a dowdy brunette with a jumper on.”

Her daily appearance has led her to some crushing, misogynist feedback: She’s regularly considered for “the whore” or “the other woman,” she says, “because of my hair color and perfectly symmetrical face. Most characters need to blend in, but I look like a lead, not an ensemble.” Tessa is not established enough to be a lead yet. But Tessa is too distracting in her beauty to be part of a wider cast. So she’s often stuck in limbo.

It would be ignorant to suggest that Hollywood has a dearth of conventionally attractive stars. Sydney Sweeney remains one of the most bankable of all (to Tessa, she’s the blueprint), and the boys of Heated Rivalry match that level of looks-led success.

The success of the Heated Rivalry hotties is less industry standard and “more so a symptom of Hollywood constantly wanting to make a new face explode rather than wanting legacy careers,” says Paul, a young actor who often reads for teenage parts. It’s a problem that feels almost exclusive to streaming shows. “The new star of streaming has been some young guy designed to make the girls go crazy for a year,” Paul continues, namechecking both the Heated Rivalry boys and the stars of the Ryan Murphy Menendez Brothers show. “They all got those jobs because they were hot. So that’s proof [that being beautiful] helps.”

But being positioned as a plucked-from-nowhere heartthrob also affects most actor’s longevity in the industry. Plenty of our teenage crushes—Desperate Housewives’ Jesse Metcalfe, Chad Michael Murray, even Zac Efron—were boxed in by their image and, despite their best attempts, couldn’t really forge grown-up careers. Few casting directors will let himbos go normie.

That’s not to say it never happens. Sydney Sweeney gave her best performance to date when she dressed down and wore next-to-no makeup for her turn in Reality. You could rattle off dozens of female Oscar winners, like Charlize Theron in Monster, Nicole Kidman in The Hours, or Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, who won their statues for doing an unflattering transformation, shedding their sense of vanity.

But if you’re, like, Abercrombie hot, getting a role in the first place—never mind one that gets you taken seriously—feels like a much trickier task. “I’d quite like to do something extreme,” Paul says. He’d gain weight, grow facial hair, or shave his head for a part that warranted it. “I think it’s quite magical to be given the opportunity to see how you would be in a different body.

“It’d be great Oscar bait,” he says.

I take issue with queer popstars who purport to be a part of the seedier side of our culture in their music but, in reality, are boring hermits. You can vulture your own culture!!! Tsatsamis, the Greek-British hot pop gayboy, makes unabashedly slutty songs, and I love him for it. I saw him play a pub basement and now he’s tearing up London’s Village Underground next month. <3

I asked him: What are your thoughts on dairy milk versus plant-based alternatives?

“I used to be oat milk all the way for a few years, but then saw a TikTok about how much it spikes your blood sugar and can make you crash. At the same time my friend showed me how many additives are in the barista versions that I was using, so I’ve gone back to dairy. Not that I don’t put worse things in my body, but I’m very impressionable.”

• Nicolaia’s deep dive into the sex recession is an i-D story for the ages.

• Speaking of sex, Grindr’s problematic stronghold on the gay dating app world is being threatened by a new, encrypted hook-up platform called meetmarket. Will it beat it?

• Speaking of gay stuff, a friend going through a (hetero) breakup was consoled by his discovery of the song “Being Alive” from the musical Company. Sondheim’s still got the girls shaking and feeling seen. That’s power.

• And apropos of none of the above: I wanna know people’s porridge (oatmeal) toppings.

At the top of the Google Doc I write in, there is a small magic pencil that offers me AI assistance:

For just a moment, let’s try to divorce AI from its circumstances. Forget about the environmental impact. Forget about the money the Sam Altmans of the world are making. Forget about the threat to your personal privacy, the evil eye of capitalism seeing your most embarrassing moments, the plagiarism and idea theft from vulnerable artists. Forget it all. What you are left with is a genie that offers limitless answers for every question. Isn’t that nice? The human condition is that we all want answers, but nobody wants to think.

This past week the New York Times cut ties with a freelance journalist over undisclosed AI usage. My take on AI usage amongst journalists, even the barest amount, is best summed by The New Yorker’s Becca Rothfeld, “Fact-checking, generating ideas, and shaping questions for interviewees are not ‘grunt work.’ They are at the heart of the journalistic process, and if you cannot do them yourself, you should leave your coveted full-time writing position to someone who can.”

I’ve always been interested in the brand Reformation. Founded in 2009 by Yael Aflalo, the initially mission-driven brand (deadstock fabrics only!) has become a one-stop shop for wedding guest dresses, office appropriate slacks, and “this is technically a dress” summer frocks. Despite past allegations of both racism and greenwashing, Reformation pulled in around $315 billion dollars in revenue in 2025. More revealing than its revenue is how they’re making it: Through the use of clever, simple, clickbaity copy. The brand’s name, a general nod to institutional reform, also references one of the most significant theological movements in Western history. Its newsletter and commercial content features sleepy photos of faux-Jane Birkins with text that feels ripped from Fleabag. The day-one tagline: “Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We’re #2.” What’s most perplexing about such provocative language is how nothingburger the clothes are.

Fashion has always been an easy way to signal what you stand for. Miucca Prada called it an instant language. As we move culturally away from thinking for ourselves and replace thoughtfulness with AI and quick answers, fashion will splinter into one of two categories: Succumb to irony (the Office Siren aesthetic or Demna’s Gucci) or embrace a sort of safeness through clothing that maintains the illusion of thought (from Reformation to The Row) without substance. It’s dressing like Jane Birkin without any of Jane Birkin’s politics, wearing bland clothing because it was sold with provocation and the promise of individuality. Remember, a global brand that makes billions every year cannot afford to be truly provocative. (The eventual outcome of the Protestant Reformation was the creation of the Protestant Church, a branch of Christianity that nearly half of the U.S. population belongs to—the message: even revolutionary movements can become the status quo.)

To be truly stylish is to be intentional, meaningful. Personal style says something about the person wearing the clothing, not about the manufacturer. The current over-reliance on technology (from AI to the Tiktok algorithm) has created mental laziness. People are ignoring what their aesthetic choices mean, in fact, refusing to make meaningful aesthetic choices entirely. This hands power to the brands and designers, who, in turn, look to the consumer for what to do. We are stuck in an aesthetic groundhogs day of intellectual virtue signalling. Rothfeld’s AI analysis applies to fashion too. The journey to the answers, through research, thought, and trial and error, is what makes style.

• Last night I watched Louis Theroux’s Inside The Manosphere. My main takeaway: These men want to be women. This is obviously reductive, but there’s an eye-opening moment in the doc where one of the influencers is explaining that women are born with value (being beautiful, desirable, having the ability to create new life) while men are born without value and have to create it and prove their value to other men. One, it’s beyond tragic that these men have convinced themselves that they’re worthless. Two, the “attention economy” has made men bitter that women can so easily make money off of their looks, and the influencers of the manosphere have emerged as a reaction that—men are capitalizing off of a fundamentally feminine profession. The bottom line is these men are just evil lifestyle influencers depressed that they weren’t born beautiful enough for a billionaire to fly them out on a jet. Sad! (And don’t get me started on the Manosphere’s adopting The Matrix red pill paradigm, a movie famously created by two genius transwomen.)

• Love Grace Byron, love this Grace x Maya Kotomori big brain link up.

• Justice for Elaine May’s Ishtar in Lena Dunham’s recent New Yorker piece (I could drink her prose through a straw; it’s so smooth).

• Cortis is on i-D’s latest digital cover! K-Pop!