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“Isn’t Writing Supposed To Be Harder Than This?” – Curtis Sittenfeld On Having Fun With Her New Novel
“I knew I wanted to write a fun book this time,” author Curtis Sittenfeld tells me. We are discussing her seventh novel, Romantic Comedy, a smart and witty romance that reads the way When Harry Met Sally plays. It tells the story of the aptly named Sally, a comedy writer on a late-night sketch show, whose cynical approach to love is tested when a famous musician takes an interest in her. But ‘hot’ men don’t date ‘ordinary’ women – do they?
“I spent a lot of lockdown watching Saturday Night Live,” Sittenfeld explains. “I noticed this trend for very ordinary men on that show marrying or dating these extremely famous, hot women… Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost, Emma Stone and David McCary, Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson. I thought to myself, someone should write a book about a female writer and a super-hot male celebrity. I first thought that would be too delightful for me, isn’t writing supposed to be harder than that?”
The bestselling novelist, whose books are widely acclaimed, was clearly due something lighter, less weighed down with – for example – hefty political associations. Her last novel was Rodham in 2020, a counterfactual reimagining of the life of Hillary Clinton if she had not married Bill. Her third novel, American Wife (2008) was a pseudo retelling of Laura Bush’s life, and The Nominee from her sublime 2018 short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It, felt like an early stab at writing Hillary.
She describes these women as prime Sittenfeld fare, namely, people whose consciousness she wants to roam around in for the years it takes to write a novel. “I have to have a certain amount of compassion for a character,” she says. “I would not want to write from the point of view of a character I found despicable. It’s like going to lunch with a person you hate – why would you do it?”
I ask how it felt to inhabit the persona of comedy writer Sally – wasn’t there pressure to ‘write funny’? Yet her easy wit as we chat makes the inquiry redundant. She approached Sally as a fellow writer, which explains the epistolary interlude in the novel’s middle section, set over some Covid-era flirtatious email exchanges (“Sally is at her best on the page,” notes Sittenfeld). It could have been clunky, but instead feels fresh and compelling.
“There’s something charming and irresistible and timeless about two people falling in love,” she says, of the smart dissection of romance – of why and how we fall in love, and what it feels like – which forms a connecting tissue between so many of her novels. “To me, it’s endlessly interesting. It’s always fertile ground to explore.” The result is, as Sittenfeld herself would say, “too delightful”.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld is out now
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
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The Nigerian Filmmaker Using AI To Fight Ageism In The Fashion Industry
Age doesn’t seem to have much of a place in fashion. Think of most runway shows, and chances are the only images that’ll come to mind will be of young, often too-thin, predominantly white models, whose perfect skin and dewy looks are almost crystallised in time. The same goes for ad campaigns, billboards and fashion editorials.
But what if old – or just older – people had a spot on the stage, too? Fashion Show For Seniors, a photo series by Nigerian filmmaker and artist Malik Afegbua attempts to answer that question.
The images are, simply put, an homage to old age. Black African models with grey hair and lined faces are seen strutting the runway. They’re draped in beautiful shawls and wraps, elaborate gele (a type of head tie predominantly worn in West Africa) and fila (a soft hat for men). The overall effect is joyful and arresting, the models proud of their years.
Except, they aren’t real. Afegbua used AI-software to conjure this parallel fashion world. It’s a way, he says, to show how technology can challenge stereotypes and forge new conversations around topics such as ageism.
“With my work, I always try to find new ways to tell stories,” he says, speaking from his home in Lagos, Nigeria. “Artificial intelligence is proving to be a fantastic tool to do that. It can help create things that don’t exist, like older models on a runway – as obvious as that might sound. I see it as a way to shift perceptions.”
Fashion Show For Seniors – which propelled Afegbua to Instagram and media stardom in early 2023 – is part of a bigger endeavour titled The Elder Series, which is set on debunking stereotypes around older people as well as celebrating African faces and bodies. Like the runway show, the project puts digital grandpas and grannies in colourful, beautiful garments inspired by traditional Nigerian clothing and Afro-futuristic fashion.
Afegbua credits his mother as his inspiration. “She had a stroke last year. It has been incredibly hard, as I have always been close to her,” he says. “I found myself imagining a place where she would be happy, and that’s how I started working on this. I thought these images would put a smile on her face and maybe on others’, too. From there, it evolved into a wish to speak for the elderly and the marginalised. To make them feel seen.”
Asked whether he thinks AI was the only way to achieve that visibility, Afegbua replies with a confident “yes”. “Had I gone to a production company to propose they put a group of older people on the catwalk, they would have thought I was joking,” he explains. “But because this is a finished product – you can see how stunning they look, and how it can really be done. It’s easier to take the conversation in a new direction and say, ‘This isn’t far-fetched.’”
He believes AI can be a powerful tool for the arts in general. “Tech is only going to get better,” he says. “So why not embrace it? As an artist, it can help you reach your destination faster, with sharper clarity.”
At the same time, he notes, Black creators can also use AI to improve it. “When you search ‘Black woman in a fashion show’ in the AI software, the images I made might come up, because they’re now part of the system,” he says. “That can expand the way we’re portrayed digitally, which means better representation. I see it as a relationship that can only become stronger.”
Marianna Cerini is a freelance writer for publications including Conde Nast Traveler, BBC Travel, CNN Style and Fortune
The Way I Work... Sahara Longe
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, Service95’s Funmi Fetto meets London-based artist Sahara Longe
Sahara Longe is a British Sierra-Leonean figurative artist known for her vibrantly colourful, often large-scale oil paintings. In 2021, she was selected for the Palazzo Monti Residency programme in Brescia, Italy, and her celebrated works have appeared in shows including Art Basel Miami and Art Lagos. Her solo exhibition New Shapes at Timothy Taylor London is on now. She chats to Service95 about working with her “unfriendly” dog, her love of collecting weird objects and hiding family members in her paintings…
On Her Daily Ritual… I walk with my dog through the park and get to my studio in Brixton for 10AM, then I’ll paint until 7PM. At lunch time I head to Brixton Market, there are lots of food trucks there. I go to the Ethiopian one – the food is so yummy. Afterwards, I come back and continue painting. It’s pretty boring, but it’s very nice. Just me and the dog – heaven!
On Her Studio Playlist… I work in silence for the first two hours, only once I’ve done the hard stuff can I put music on. I love singing along to the Les Misérables soundtrack as it’s just so dramatic. Either that or The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. In the evening, I turn it up really loud because the studio next door has gone home.
On The People In Her Paintings... I’m fascinated by street scenes, so I put a lot of strangers in my work. I’ll sometimes see a face and imagine what their life’s like. I also like to use people I know: my Nigerian hairdresser (she has a great face); or I’ll sometimes tuck my sister Edwina into a painting. I have an aunt I don’t like much, so I put her in as an evil character. It’s so fun.
On Her Work Uniform… Anything I accidentally splashed paint on would become my new painting clothes – I destroy everything! So I’ve recently got these all-in-ones that cost £25. My painting clothes have to be comfortable.
On Travel… I’m going to Japan soon as I really want to learn more about woodcutting techniques. And one of my favourite places in the world is Florence. I lived there as an art student. The people are so friendly; it’s like a very beautiful but relaxed party.
On Collecting... I’m obsessed with Agatha Christie stories, but mainly I love weird vintage stuff, like these 1960s plates with eyes that wink at you. I have a lot of vintage cheerleading outfits that I bought in Texas, but they don’t actually fit me. And I love the Sierra-Leonean dolls and sculptures I got from my mum – I just find the expressions on their faces so powerful. If I come across a ceramic King Charles spaniel, I have to buy it. I’m not sure where my obsession comes from – I don’t have a King Charles spaniel! Mine is a mixture of jack russell, chihuahua and pomeranian, the worst dogs put together. She’s so unfriendly.
On Artistic Inspirations… Ernst Kirchner used a lot of colour and African masks – I love the way they show up in his work. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a huge inspiration; I was blown away by her Tate Modern exhibition in London. I’m also obsessed with Michael Armitage. I went to his Royal Academy of Arts show in 2021 and I was like ‘Oh my God, how do you do this?’ His use of materials and colour is so cool and complicated.
On Alternative Careers… I love to paint furniture, but I’m not very good at making furniture. Maybe I would go into farming. I grew up on a farm in Suffolk and really love animals, but I’m not vegetarian so I’m probably the worst animal lover in the world.
On The Best Advice She’s Received... Never sell something you’re not proud of. There’s a lot of stuff I’m glad I didn’t sell. But there are a few works I did where I’m like, ‘Please God, I hope the building it’s in burns down.’
Funmi Fetto is the Global Editorial Director of Service95 and a Contributing Editor at British Vogue
Exclusive Excerpt From Susan Sontag’s New Essay Collection, On Women
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a groundbreaking American writer, philosopher, activist and critic. Her influential works spoke powerful truths about the political and social standing of women in the 1970s. This is a Service95 exclusive excerpt from her essay The Double Standard Of Ageing, which appears in On Women, a new collection of her feminist writing
I remember my closest friend in college sobbing on the day she turned twenty-one. “The best part of my life is over. I’m not young anymore.” She was a senior, nearing graduation. I was a precocious freshman, just sixteen. Mystified, I tried lamely to comfort her, saying that I didn’t think twenty-one was so old. Actually, I didn’t understand at all what could be demoralizing about turning twenty-one. To me, it meant only something good: being in charge of oneself, being free. At sixteen, I was too young to have noticed, and become confused by, the peculiarly loose, ambivalent way in which this society demands that one stop thinking of oneself as a girl and start thinking of oneself as a woman. (In America that demand can now be put off to the age of thirty, even beyond.) But even if I thought her distress was absurd, I must have been aware that it would not simply be absurd but quite unthinkable in a boy turning twenty-one. Only women worry about age with that degree of inanity and pathos. And, of course, as with all crises that are inauthentic and therefore repeat themselves compulsively (because the danger is largely fictive, a poison in the imagination), this friend of mine went on having the same crisis over and over, each time as if for the first time.
I also came to her thirtieth birthday party. A veteran of many love affairs, she had spent most of her twenties living abroad and had just returned to the United States. She had been good-looking when I first knew her; now she was beautiful. I teased her about the tears she had shed over being twenty-one. She laughed and claimed not to remember. But thirty, she said ruefully, that really is the end. Soon after, she married. My friend is now forty-four. While no longer what people call beautiful, she is striking-looking, charming, and vital. She teaches elementary school; her husband, who is twenty years older than she, is a part-time merchant seaman. They have one child, now nine years old. Sometimes, when her husband is away, she takes a lover. She told me recently that forty was the most upsetting birthday of all (I wasn’t at that one), and although she has only a few years left, she means to enjoy them while they last. She has become one of those women who seize every excuse offered in any conversation for mentioning how old they really are, in a spirit of bravado compounded with self-pity that is not too different from the mood of women who regularly lie about their age. But she is actually fretting much less about aging than she was two decades ago. Having a child, and having one rather late, past the age of thirty, has certainly helped to reconcile her to her age. At fifty, I suspect, she will be ever more valiantly postponing the age of resignation.
My friend is one of the more fortunate, sturdier casualties of the aging crisis. Most women are not as spirited, nor as innocently comic in their suffering. But almost all women endure some version of this suffering: A recurrent seizure of the imagination that usually begins quite young, in which they project themselves into a calculation of loss. The rules of this society are cruel to women. Brought up to be never fully adult, women are deemed obsolete earlier than men. In fact most women don’t become relatively free and expressive sexually until their thirties. (Women mature sexually this late, certainly much later than men, not for innate biological reasons but because this culture retards women. Denied most outlets for sexual energy permitted to men, it takes many women that long to wear out some of their inhibitions.) The time at which they start being disqualified as sexually attractive persons is just when they have grown up sexually. The double standard about aging cheats women of those years, between thirty-five and fifty, likely to be the best of their sexual life.
That women expect to be flattered often by men, and the extent to which their self-confidence depends on this flattery, reflects how deeply women are psychologically weakened by this double standard. Added on to the pressure felt by everybody in this society to look young as long as possible are the values of “femininity,” which specifically identify sexual attractiveness in women with youth. The desire to be the “right age” has a special urgency for a woman it never has for a man. A much greater part of her self-esteem and pleasure in life is threatened when she ceases to be young. Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man’s destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny. Because she is that more narrowly defined kind of human being, a woman, it is also her vulnerability.
On Women by Susan Sontag; edited by David Rieff. Published by Picador, May 30, 2023. Copyright © 2023 by The Estate of Susan Sontag. All rights reserved
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“Instruments Of Resistance And Vindication” – The Powerful Work Of Senegalese-Italian Artist Binta Diaw
When the visual artist Binta Diaw was 11 years old, she came across a drawing of the Brooks, an 18th-century slave trade ship. The image, commissioned by British abolitionists in 1788, portrayed people squeezed on board the vessel, and was aimed at raising awareness of the inhumanity of slavery. “It stayed with me,” she says of the picture. “Over the years, I internalised it in a way I wasn’t even aware of.”
In 2019, Diaw made a replica of the drawing from earth and seeds. The installation, Chorus Of Soil, was “a temple dedicated to the memory of all those women, men and children who lost their lives during the crossings.” But it also referenced the present. She used melon seeds – a nod to the so-called Mafia-operated plantations in Southern Italy, where thousands of migrants are being systematically exploited today. “It was my way to remember the past and call out what’s essentially just a different kind of slavery,” she explains. “My contribution to our collective history.”
Born in Milan to Senegalese parents, Diaw makes this contribution the focus of her art. Using textiles, found objects and natural materials, her works explore themes of migration and immigration, identity and the Black female body, challenging the Eurocentric gaze and, often, questioning perceptions of Italianness and Africanness.
“I am interested in exploring Blackness both through my personal experience as a Black Italian woman – something that’s too often still regarded as ‘exotic’ and ‘other’ – and through the lenses of archival research, Afro-diasporic communities and intersectional feminism,” she says. “I want to take care of myself and of those who see themselves in what I do.” Above all, that means deconstructing the past. “So much of Black people’s narrative never made it into history books,” Diaw says. “I am keen to recontextualise our voices and give us the space we’ve been denied.”
In some of her most compelling works, Diaw uses hair – African hair braiding in particular – to reclaim that space. For her 2020 installation Uati’s Wisdom, she crafted a huge tentacle-like sculpture out of hair extensions inspired by the West African water goddess Mami Wata, to celebrate radical traditions of matriarchy. Dïà s p o r a (2021) featured a giant black wave representing a cartography of the routes of marronage, and spotlighting the importance of African hair in transmitting vernacular knowledge.
“Just like with bodies and lands, hair too has been subject to colonisation,” she says. “Over centuries, it has assumed functions, meanings and values dictated exclusively by Eurocentric aesthetic norms. I’m trying to break those norms, turning hair into an instrument of resistance and vindication.”
Her practice has struck a chord. The 28-year-old’s work has appeared in galleries across Europe and Africa, and she won the prestigious Pujade-Lauraine/Carta Bianca prize last year. This month, she’ll unveil a revisited, site-specific version of Chorus Of Soil at the Liverpool Biennial.
“Liverpool is where the Brooks departed from,” Diaw says. “So, it’s important for the installation to address that. I’d like it to be a moment of regeneration – another personal attempt to correct things.”
The Liverpool Biennial runs from 10-17 June 2023
Marianna Cerini is a freelance writer for publications including Conde Nast Traveler, BBC Travel, CNN Style and Fortune
The Way I Work... Laila Gohar
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, Marie-Claire Chappet speaks to the artist and chef about everything from her workspace to her creative process
She was famously dubbed – by Drake no less – the ‘Björk of food’. The New York-based Egyptian chef, artist and Financial Times columnist is certainly an explosive creative force; a magnetic auteur making food an art form. She is also the co-founder and creator (along with her sister Nadia) of Gohar World. It’s a line of surrealistic homeware, the perfect accompaniment to her delicious flights of fancy. Here, she tells Service95 about her chaotic desk, her strict work-free weekends and her tendency to get into trouble…
On Her Working Conditions… I work in my studio, which is a 10-minute walk from my apartment in downtown NYC. My desk is extremely chaotic. It’s a very multi-purpose space, but the bits and pieces that end up there serve as a reflection of the exciting things happening in the studio and my life.
On Her Work Uniform… I wear a lot of Simone Rocha. She is a good friend; I like her exaggerated silhouettes. I want to be in things that are roomy and I can move in easily. Being able to transition from day to night, work life to home life is important. For scent, I wear Eau Triple Sumi Hinoki by Officine Universelle Buly, one of the old French apothecaries. It’s very subtle. I hate it when you hug someone and their scent lingers on you.
On Her Work Process… I start around 10AM and finish around 7PM. Every day we stop to have lunch at the studio. I always schedule things around lunch, that’s a golden rule. Work is a friendly and familial environment – people are chatty and personable. We did a secret Valentine this year which was cute. We like to maintain the holiday spirit! I have a strict ‘no work on the weekend’ policy.
On Travelling… I love travelling for work, mostly to Paris and Milan. I love the way the earth looks when you are just about to land in a city, divided into big patches of blue and green, like a quilt. It has been so nice to be able to travel again in the last year and to connect with friends. I went to Paris last autumn to curate the Contemporary Curated show at Sotheby’s. I also made a life-sized chair out of cake for the show. It was a lot of fun.
On Creative Inspiration… I like to be in nature – either in a forest or around lots of trees and flowers or to go for a walk. I love farmers’ markets. I look to creatives, too. I love Louise Bourgeois, especially her fabric works and drawings. She was also a collector of beautiful things and a fellow lover of lace – my kind of woman. On Instagram, I follow @npr, @gohar.world and @casabosques, and all my friends to inform and inspire me. You are what you consume. Life’s too short to follow people who don’t make you feel good.
On Her Favourite Artwork… A small painting by my friend Cassi Namoda. She is extremely talented. I love it because it has sentimental value and it’s beautiful. It’s nice to look around [your home] and be reminded of the people who make your life sing.
On Her Best Career Advice… Put your head down and keep working. There are no shortcuts. Also, surround yourself with great people. I am lucky to work with an extremely loyal, hardworking and funny team. Success is about partnership, it doesn’t just come to one person. If I hadn’t figured out a way to express myself and found this career, I think I would be in a lot of trouble. I was a really cheeky child…
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
“Showing The Highs On Camera Was So Freeing” – Model And Activist Rosie Viva On Her Bipolar Documentary
“The first time I spoke with other young people who had bipolar, it was a breakthrough,” explains Rosie Viva. “It was the first time I wasn’t scared of it anymore. I accepted it. My opinion of myself did a complete 180.”
Viva – a London-based model, mental health activist and now filmmaker – has just completed a documentary about her bipolar disorder. It’s her second time tackling the topic on screen. The first was a personal project, crafted largely during lockdown; a raw and intimate attempt by a young woman to understand herself through the experiences of others also living with the condition. The second is the TV production Modelling, Mania And Me. It is slicker, perhaps, but no less exposing. Yet for all the apparent hardships of being filmed at some of her lowest ebbs, Viva found the experience liberating.
“What was quite nice was being able to show the highs of bipolar,” she explains. “There’s still a lot of secrecy around that. I’ve always felt more shame about my highs than my lows, as society finds those more difficult to understand. A lot of people can resonate with lows and try to give advice, but they don’t ‘get’ the high part. Showing the highs on camera was so freeing.”
Her story feels made for the screen: a beautiful young model is arrested at London Stansted airport for jumping on the baggage drop-off desks and hitting the fire alarm. You couldn’t make it up. Following this incident four years ago, Viva was hospitalised. Her mania – which she previously believed to be high-anxiety – was finally diagnosed. She then received three months of inpatient care and began her road to recovery.
Yet, what is most interesting about Viva’s narrative is not its dramatic beginnings, but the nuance of her journey. “When you make a documentary, [the producers] want a neat ending,” she says. “My struggle has always been trying to explain that this is something I will manage for the rest of my life. There is no ending. This is me.”
Viva acknowledges that many people might wait until later in life to retrospectively tell their story. But she felt it important to show herself still figuring out who she is, in the hope of providing relatable solace for other young people in similar positions. “I’m really happy with life right now because I understand myself more,” she says. “I know when my low ebbs mean it’s the bipolar talking and I am at peace with it.”
She hopes the documentary highlights symptoms of bipolar, so that someone who hasn’t yet been diagnosed might watch it and get help. “Having gone through what I have, it gives you a new appreciation of everything,” she says. “You know what serves you in life and makes you safe and happy and you gravitate towards that. I used to think my diagnosis meant I wasn’t normal, now I think my old way of thinking was abnormal. My diagnosis saved me – now I am in a new normal.”
Watch Modelling, Mania And Me on Channel 4 YouTube Documentaries now
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
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All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
The 5 Best Vintage Stores In New York City
A certified world fashion capital, New York stays true to its title when it comes to shopping. Its individuality thrives on an amazing vintage scene, making it the ideal place to forgo fast fashion trends and embrace sustainability. However, in a city this big it can be hard to know where to start. So, here’s our list of the best vintage hotspots:
1. Kalimera founder Alexandra Cherouvis has had an impressive first year. Her Brooklyn store boasts a beautifully decorated space with lots of light and even better clothing. Often sourcing from Europe, expect high-quality leathers and inclusive, well-fitting pieces. Out front, Kalimera has a sale rack packed with affordable buys. Longevity is key to its ethos. “I gravitate towards classic staples,” says Cherouvis. “I want customers to get a great quality piece that lasts longer than a single season or trend.”
2. Tired Thrift started as a “passion project” for founders and cousins Elona and Lediona Zharku. They were at college when they set up in Green Point sourcing “authentic pieces directly from the decades current fashion trends are getting their inspiration from”. Their store “for Gen Z, created by Gen Z” proved a hit, and Tired Thrift has since opened a second location in Manhattan. The aesthetic is witty Y2K slogan tops and micro minis in inclusive sizes. There’s a focus on community via Instagram Story sales, TikTok content and in-store customer events.
3. Madame Matovu has been a West Village staple since 2007. It’s a treasure chest of clothing, accessories and costume jewellery and each piece tells a story. The eclectic experience of Madame Matovu encapsulates the energy of NYC. And while the city is ever changing and gentrifying, owner Rosemary Wettenhall retains a loyal community of customers thanks to her excellent taste and years of experience. Perfect for fashion magpies.
4. Rogue, in the Lower East Side, may be reminiscent of your childhood bedroom – if you’re a ’90s baby at least. Focusing on the ’90s and 2000s with a nod to old-school rave wear, the store’s “nostalgia will hit you like a brick”, according to founder Emma Rogue. She progressed from online selling to a bricks and mortar store in 2021. She has since gained fans including Post Malone and Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott. This seal of approval is testament to Emma’s hard work and social media following (check out the popular street interview series on Rogue’s Instagram and TikTok). Visit for colourful pieces that won’t break the bank, and don’t forget to give SpongeBob a nod on the way out.
5. Chess And The Sphinx owners Sara Chess and Erika Perenic hand-pick every piece in this intimate Bushwick store for a customer base they describe as “unafraid to be noticed”. While the inventory ranges from the ’50s to the 2000s, most hails from the ’70s onwards. The inspiration, the owners say, is “a strong and empowered feminine image”. Expect to unearth beautiful vintage lingerie, a rare ’90s ALAÏA, perhaps, or some satin Prada pumps.
Georgia Moot is a model and writer, based between London and New York. She has written for British Vogue, Refinery29, Browns and Dazed
Why We Need To Decolonise Our Healthcare Systems
At no point in my medical education – including a decade studying for three degrees and countless hours spent on hospital wards – did anyone mention how the legacies of colonialism and racism affect my decisions as a doctor.
Shortly after completing my master’s at the London School Of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine – one of the world’s best public-health schools – I became disillusioned with how healthcare is taught and discussed. We never talked about the tension between majority white, middle-class doctors and racially minoritised patients. We never addressed how our health institutions have been shaped by imperialism. Nobody challenged these narratives. No one was given the space to do so. The system was heavily weighted in favour of a few.
Medicine is taught the way it is practised. Only a few bodies have ever historically mattered: usually those of white, male, able-bodied and heterosexual people. While studying, I would listen to senior doctors make disparaging, sweeping generalisations about why some Black people were at risk of high blood pressure. There was no discussion on how the effects of racism may result in Black patients being disproportionately affected by high blood pressure and how this can lead to fatal strokes. This is a concept known as ‘weathering’, coined by Professor Arline Geronimus in 1992.
This is why I decided to build a collective – Decolonising Contraception (now known as the Reproductive Justice Initiative charity) – in 2018. Its purpose was to start addressing the racial inequalities in sexual and reproductive health and the effects of a colonial legacy on contraception provision. We dove into the history of our institutions, looked at the mistrust between providers and patients, and how race played out in health consultations. Increasingly, both members of the public and medical colleagues would reach out to me with examples of injustice or racism they had witnessed in the healthcare system.
The combined events of 2020 – where we saw Black Lives Matter protests in the US resonate with the Black diaspora and other marginalised people across the globe – along with the disproportionate death toll from Covid-19 faced by these same communities, made the conversation on racism and healthcare even more urgent.
It is what galvanised me to write Divided: Racism, Medicine And Why We Need To Decolonise Healthcare. The book draws on my own experiences both as a patient and a doctor, on those of my family – who emigrated from Nigeria to the UK in the 1950s and worked in this same healthcare system decades before me – and those in the Global South who are trying to make a change. Ultimately, my hope is that Divided will provide momentum to those who are challenging healthcare injustices around the world, so that we can have a more equitable system for everyone.
With that in mind, below is a list of five people of colour working to change the medical world for the better (in no particular order).
- Chidiebere Ibe – a Nigerian medical student and illustrator who is creating medical illustrations that centre Black people.
- Malone Mukwende – co-created Mind The Gap, a free handbook for medical students that shows how skin conditions present on darker skin.
- Dr Ayoade Alakija – a former co-chair of the African Union’s African Vaccine Delivery Alliance, who was integral in highlighting inequalities in vaccine distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Dr Black Deer – an indigenous scholar-activist who is shining a light on how we achieve health equity for indigenous communities.
- Dr Uché Blackstock – the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, an organisation on a mission to dismantle racism in healthcare.
Dr Annabel Sowemimo is a sexual and reproductive health doctor. She is founder of the Reproductive Justice Initiative and the author of Divided: Racism, Medicine And Why We Need To Decolonise Healthcare
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Why We Need To Talk About Underwear
We spend more time in it than in any other garment. Nothing else gets closer to us. It’s with us through so many of our most personal life moments – the good ones and the challenging ones. It’s functional; it’s intimate; it’s sexual; it’s reflective of the cultural moment. Hell, it’s political! I’m talking about underwear, one of the most important tools in our sartorial kits. And yet, for the most part, we treat our undies with embarrassment and dismissal. Why is that?
The question had been preoccupying me for a couple of years before my friend and fellow journalist Emily Cronin and I launched Hello Girls, a podcast all about women’s underwear. We decided underwear was a topic worth talking about in, well, intimate detail. And, having had a great response since launching the series in March this year, clearly others feel the same.
Our title flips the infamous Wonderbra ‘Hello Boys’ ad campaign starring Eva Herzigová and her ample bosom, which caused a commotion when it appeared on UK billboards in 1994. Fast forward 30 years, and with our awareness of the patriarchy and the damage it causes, we recognise it’s the female gaze that needs to be catered to when it comes to our own undergarments.
We believe underwear is the foundation of everything, not least good conversation. And there’s a lot to talk about. Our idea of what’s acceptable, what’s not, what’s sexy, what’s comfortable, have shifted. Nothing new there. Underwear is constantly adapting to reflect society. It’s a good lens through which to track the status of women throughout time.
The change from corsetry to simple bras in the 1920s reflected women’s bid for equality and voting rights. The hyper-feminine silhouettes of Dior’s New Look in the 1950s read as a desire for a return to traditional family structures after the trauma of WWII. Although women didn’t actually burn their bras in the late 1960s, the barely there, natural bra shapes of that time rejected previous ideas of traditional femininity and echoed the sexual revolution and the advent of the Pill. And think of the outrage in the conservative 1980s when Madonna sang Like A Virgin wearing a visible bra and not much else.
In the early 2000s, we laughed at Bridget Jones’s big knickers. Why? Because they signalled a woman no longer at her most desirable? Weren’t Bridget’s control pants simply an attempt to conform to the impossible physical expectations society put – and still puts – on women? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, it was funny; underwear is routinely funny, but what lies beneath the laughter can be complex and nuanced.
Today, we seem more willing to embrace those nuances via brands that meet our diverse expectations. And yet we do not live in a feminist world. We might tut-tut at the Hello Boys ad or pity those who deemed it somehow emancipated at the time, but here we are in 2023 still fighting the patriarchy while simultaneously embracing the naked dress and visible thongs. Are we really that much more progressive? I take no side, but merely want to point out that, when it comes to underwear, there’s a lot to delve into.
Hello Girls is available on Apple and wherever you get your podcasts
Kate Finnigan is a London-based writer who contributes to the Financial Times, The Gentlewoman, The Observer and Vogue
In Praise Of Anime
For The Love Of Books
After months of planning, I am so proud to announce the Service95 Book Club, launching later this month! Words cannot express how thrilled I am – sharing the joy of reading is something I feel really passionately about, so this is a dream come true.
And so I’m inviting you all to join – all you need to do is continue to follow along on our socials and at Service95. Each month we’ll announce our chosen book accompanied by author Q&As, discussion guides and more incredible content to help you get the most out of these wonderful reads.
To celebrate the launch, this week’s issue is a books special, including a piece by Douglas Stuart – author of June’s Book of the Month, Shuggie Bain – about the images that inspired the novel. This story of a young boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow totally won my heart, and I can’t wait for us to explore it together.
Dua x
Douglas Stuart On The Powerful Images That Inspired Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart is the author of Shuggie Bain, Service95 Book Club’s first Book of the Month. The novel follows a young boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow. Here, Stuart shares a personally curated set of images that inspired the book, representing the defiance, resilience and pride of often-overlooked working-class communities.
Before I became a writer I worked in fashion for 20 years, and ever since I have turned to photography to inspire me. And so, at the start of the writing process, I gather as many photographs as I can, as well as clippings of fabric or buttons – anything that evokes the time and place I’m writing about – to help me create the mood. I chose this particular collection of photos because they are really close to my heart and central to the writing of my novels.
They capture working-class communities in Glasgow and the North of England that were often overlooked by traditional photojournalism. In fact, two of them were the result of an assignment where The Sunday Times newspaper sent French photographer Raymond Depardon to Glasgow to show how modern it was, and how much progress had come with the city’s new housing schemes. What he found were ordinary people living on the margins and clinging to life in a city that was coming apart quite rapidly.
The boy with the pink bubble gum is Shuggie for me. I love how audacious that pink bubble is – bubble gum was the only pink thing boys were allowed so it’s kind of special. The image was taken next to the Govan shipyards [a major employer in Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s] and you see the looming crush of industry that will catch all young boys in the city. You’ve got childish things such as drawn-on goalposts, right up against the biggest shipyards in the city. Childhood leads directly into manhood; they’re very close together, which is something I’ve tried to capture in my writing.
In these images, I see people united by class. We don’t often record working-class lives, so images like this that feel unvarnished and very true are such powerful records. I feel like I know all the people. I feel a deep personal connection with the subjects in a way I don’t with all photography.
There’s a sense of time passing – of decay and hope and clinging on and ultimately, strength. I like the resilience in these images; the joy of the girl on the car; the men laughing on the street corner. I like the spirit of defiance. The girl is so free and joyful, just like those men. I really respect that. I also love the enormous pride of the woman in the red coat. That’s the sort of pride I tried to capture with Shuggie’s grandmother Lizzie. You might not have very much, but you would never go out the front door without your hair being set, and your best coat on.
These photographs are so powerful for me because they don’t flinch. As a kid who grew up in poverty, I was taught to feel very proud of being working class, but also a deep sense of shame around poverty. Whether you come from Appalachia or Pittsburgh or Paris, society doesn’t want to look at real people struggling. And what I love about these images is that you can’t turn away from them because they have so much charisma. There’s so much pride. They heal a lot of things inside me.
The Good Buys
On our radar this week, three scents inspired by books…
All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
The Resurgence Of The Library
Any bookworm would be downcast when faced with a news cycle telling us that public libraries are closing – almost 800 since 2010 in the UK alone. But there is hope: small, specialised libraries are popping up all over the world, using digital and physical spaces to bring books to us all.
The Oslo-based International Library Of Fashion Research has over 5,000 items ranging from lookbooks to magazines from 1975 onwards and also offers a digital arm. In 2021, Solange Knowles’ multidisciplinary brand Saint Heron launched a virtual library and archive of Black authors where members can borrow books for 45 days at a time. Then there’s Phoebe Lovatt’s Public Library, a space in London where visitors can browse the collection of books and zines and discuss texts in regular salons.
All this comes at a time when books are especially fashionable. BookTok, the corner of TikTok dedicated to reading, is increasingly powerful. The hashtag has a whopping 136 billion views and helped publishers sell 20 million printed books in 2021, according to The New York Times. Pictures of celebrities including Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski reading titles such as Hilton Als’ White Girls and Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else have made them so-called ‘hot girl books’.
Meanwhile, piles of finished or ‘to be read/TBR’ books are now a familiar feature on Instagram feeds (see @bibliostylefile by Nina Freudenberger for posting inspiration). Adding to the trend? More connections between fashion and publishing – see author Ottessa Moshfegh modelling for Maryam Nassir Zadeh AW22 and Rachel Comey’s collaboration with the New York Review of Books. The result is that books – once seen as hopelessly geeky – are the height of fashion right now.
If that sounds throwaway, those involved in the book industry believe the rise in interest comes from a desire to think more deeply. Writer and consultant Lovatt started her Public Library in 2021 as a place in which to read books, but also to talk about them. The salon events are popular – possibly because they provide a different kind of date in your diary. “In a way, the books are not the point; they are symbolic,” she says. “I want to foster space for a different kind of exchange and a different kind of connection. I enjoy going out for a drink, but I also really enjoy the exchange of ideas.”
Lovatt adds that books provide a counterpoint to our digital lives. “We hear a lot about how dumbed down our culture has become,” she says. “But I haven’t found that to be true at all. People are hungry for nuanced conversation. Social media is amazing for communicating and connecting on one level, but there’s so little room for nuance.”
Lovatt admits she is as guilty as the rest of us when it comes to mindless screen time, hence reading provides a much-needed reboot. “Even if I don’t feel like [reading], I make myself do it,” she says. “You pick up a book and you’re having a totally different sensory experience – one that I crave and need.”
7 Incredible Libraries To Visit Worldwide
- The Morgan Library, New York City – opulent, with illuminated manuscripts on the walls, it houses original manuscripts by Balzac.
- Royal Portuguese Cabinet Of Reading, Rio de Janeiro – a treasure trove for bibliophiles, it has the largest collection of Portuguese texts outside Portugal.
- Beitou Public Library, Taipei – Taiwan’s first green library, with rainwater used for the toilets and natural light reducing the need for electricity.
- The British Library, London – home to one of the world’s biggest collections – with more than 170 million items including one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.
- Stuttgart City Library, Stuttgart – this minimalist structure designed by architect Eon Young Yi is something to behold.
- Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria – the city was considered a hub of knowledge 2,000 years ago before its library was burned. This 2002 building aims to right that wrong.
- Woollahra Library At Double Bay, New South Wales – an inclusive, collaborative community space designed as a garden within a library.
Lauren Cochrane is a senior fashion writer at The Guardian and author of The Ten
Stuttgart City Library, Alamy; Beitou Public Library, Alamy; Phoebe Lovatt’s Public Library; Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading; Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Shutterstock; The British Library, Shutterstock; The Morgan Library, Alamy; Woollahra Library, Alamy
The Good Buys
On our radar this week…
All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Sirens On Screen: Documenting Lebanon’s First All-Female Metal Band
“When I heard Maya scream for the first time, I remember thinking, where else in society do women get a chance to do this?” LA-based, Emmy-award winning documentary maker Rita Baghdadi is speaking about one of the subjects in her latest film Sirens. Set in Beirut, it follows the powerful story – captured between 2018 and 2021 – of Lilas Mayassi, Shery Bechara, Alma Doumani, Maya Khairallah and Tatyana Boughaba, AKA Slave To Sirens, the first all-female Lebanese metal band.
The journey began with a Skype friendship between Baghdadi and Mayassi, a guitarist, after discovering the band’s music on Facebook. They formed a close bond and Mayassi invited her to Beirut. “I just saw a younger version of myself and thought other people would see themselves in her,” says Baghdadi. “Lilas was unapologetically herself while also struggling with a lot of things. Getting to know her one-on-one made me realise she would be an incredible person to make a film about.”
Mainly focusing on the relationship between Mayassi and fellow guitarist Bechara, the film shows the musicians – Arab women caught up in a tumultuous time in Lebanon’s history – trying to make it under extraordinary circumstances, including a revolution and the unimaginable trauma of the 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut. The film weaves the story of Lebanon through the eyes of the band, “with the elements of the music, and the politics; everything had to flow through the girls,” says Baghdadi.
For the band members, the unexpected experience of having an LA-based filmmaker follow their story has provided a platform to keep fighting to pursue metal – and inspire more women to do the same. “We want girls watching the film to feel they can do whatever they want without being judged,” says Bechara. Doumani adds, “We have a lot of obstacles, like, ‘Oh, you’re a girl. Why are you in a metal band? You have to be soft and nice.’ But we want them to be courageous, to get out of the box and do what they want.”
Importantly, Sirens breaks away from stereotypes of the Middle East. With her own heritage from the region herself, Baghdadi was adamant the narrative shouldn’t revolve around themes of oppression or conflict. Instead, she captures Slave To Sirens “as real young women just living their lives”.
Sirens is available online at Apple TV, and screening at Screenwave Film Festival, Australia (28 April); Rock This Town Festival France (29 April); and Pink Apple Festival, Zurich (1 May)
Pia Brynteson is editorial assistant at Service95
Slave To Sirens; Lilas Mayassi, Shery Bechara ⓒ Oscilloscope Laboratories; Slave To Sirens ⓒ Davina Maria; Lilas Mayassi, Shery Bechara ⓒ Oscilloscope Laboratories; Tatiana el Dahdah, Rita Baghdadi; Rita Baghdadi, Glastonbury (2019)
The Good Buys
On our radar this week…
All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Life After Gal-Dem: What Liv Little Did Next
Why do we tell stories? Often, it is to understand our place in the world or to make others feel seen. It is why, in 2015, Liv Little founded gal-dem, the revolutionary publication for women and non-binary people of colour, which ran for eight incredible, re-defining years. Sadly, in March this year the publication announced its closure, leaving an indelible legacy on the world of publishing; and highlighting – long before whispers of performative activism – the need to platform hitherto marginalised voices.
Little, who said of the closure: “it might be the end of a chapter, but what a chapter to be a part of,” had walked away from the publication in 2020. It seemed a strange decision for a woman who had built an empire still at the top of its game. Yet Little, who Zooms me from the sofa of her home, her two cats intermittently clambering over her, tells me she had reached burnout point. “I’m someone who wants to take up space in many different ways, and my approach to storytelling has always been about not feeling fixed to one particular way of doing it,” she says. “Nothing lasts forever, and nothing must be [forever]. I would get really bored if I was doing the same thing indefinitely.”
When Little left gal-dem, she enrolled on an MA course in Black British literature. At the time, she said: “You can only become a brilliant storyteller through the act of study.” The result of that course, and of her career pivot, is her debut novel, Rosewater. It’s the moving, powerfully executed tale of Elsie, a young, queer poet living in London, trying to find a sense of home – in every sense – after being evicted from her social housing. It has a lot to say about creating art in a capitalist society, about family and what homecoming can come to mean, if we fully embrace it.
“I wanted Elsie to be someone whose voice is important, which is why she is a poet,” Little explains. The poetry itself was supplied by real-life poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal, another example of Little’s inclination towards sharing space with other artists of colour. “The ability to connect with the heart through the mode of poetry and performance… that’s where Elsie’s magic and power lies, and that’s where Kai’s does too,” she says. “When they first sent me the [poem] on the Guyanese dish pepperpot, it reminded me of my mum, and really communicated what that food means culturally and spiritually. I cried when I read that poem.”
What draws Little to a story is character and finding that character’s voice. She describes Elsie as someone “uncompromising”. “I didn’t want her to be someone who was insecure about their Blackness, their queerness or their talent. She’s not any of those things. She knows that she’s good.”
After a personal tragedy caused Little to leave her MA course early, she describes a period of extreme sadness and disorientation. Perhaps, I suggest, the voice she was searching for was her own. “I think you’re right, maybe that was what I was trying to do,” she says. Rosewater would suggest she has achieved it.
Rosewater by Liv Little is out now
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
The Shape Of Sound: How Christine Sun Kim Is Reimagining Sign Language As Art
Sound has populated art for a long time, but it has predominantly adhered to a narrow definition – that of the audible. In 2008, the multidisciplinary artist Christine Sun Kim noticed that while galleries in Berlin, where she is based, were lacking visual art, there was an abundance of sound. She wanted to change established narratives and carve out more space for the Deaf community. So, she said in her celebrated TED Talk, The Enchanting Music Of Sign Language: “I decided to reclaim ownership of sound, and to put it into my art practice.”
Kim – who communicates in American Sign Language (ASL) – began by exploring the similarities between musical notation and ASL. Now her work resides in major collections such as those of the Whitney Museum Of American Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London, and she continues to investigate the social implications and politics of sound through visual media.
I meet Kim at the opening of her newest exhibition at Somerset House Studios in London, Edges Of Sign Language. It marks a shift in her career towards a more minimal approach, through canvases whose shape – rather than content – is representative of the ASL words and phrases they depict. Score (2023) is a slanted shape with an ambiguous beginning and end, which “refers to a [musical] staff”. “It’s about working with ASL interpreters,” Kim tells me. “I am the ‘score’, providing information. At the same time, the interpreter is also my ‘score’; their voice influences the way mine is expressed.”
These new works are a natural progression from Kim’s earlier mural and public art. In 2021, she installed ‘open captions’ (automatically present subtitles) across the city of Manchester in England. “As my visual vocabulary increased, I felt constricted in space,” Kim explains. “If you make something as big as possible, it forces someone to see it; we’re imposing our lives on you.” One caption, which was displayed above the city as a plane banner, read: THE SOUND OF NO FIGHT. Another, situated on the façade of the National Football Museum, read: THE SOUND OF AGREEING NEVER TO CALL IT SOCCER. “Humour is a tool for my survival,” she explains. “I am so pissed off. I’m angry. But how can you be mad and not push people away? Humour!” After all, wit – like all the visual data used by Kim in her work – is bound by neither culture nor language.
Alongside foregrounding a new understanding of sound and language, Kim highlights the exclusion and ableism embedded in society. “Deafness has never had a place in history,” she says. “In my work, I want to force that place.” Kim plans to dip her toes back into performance art and continue her work with shaped canvas. “In the beginning [of my career], it was really easy to be pigeonholed, so I avoided using sign language in my work,” she says. “But now, I’m ready!”
Edges Of Sign Language runs at Somerset House Studios in London until 21 May 2023
Ella Slater is an art and culture writer based in London
Captioning The City (2021) ⓒ Lee Baxter; How Do You Hold Your Debt (2022), JTT NYC; Too Much Future (2017), Whitney Museum Of American Art ⓒ Ron Amstutz; The Star-Spangled Banner (Third Verse), (2020), François Ghebaly; All Day All Night ⓒ Reinis Lismanis. All: Christine Sun Kim; François Ghebaly, LA; White Space Beijing
Festival Season Is Here
“It Felt Like A Fever” – Author Max Porter On Creating His New Novel Shy
In the summer of 2021, the author Max Porter dreamed of a boy walking through the woods that encircle his home city of Bath in England. “The membrane between the boy and the woods was thin, like he was glitching,” he recalls, sitting on a lock gate by the Kennet and Avon Canal, pointing towards the apparently haunted woodland where he imagined the boy. Porter had spent the previous year on projects unrelated to prose (including an art installation film with the actor Cillian Murphy and writing lyrics to music with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy). Waiting for his next novel to come along “was starting to feel like a fever”, he says. Then all of a sudden he woke up one day and it was there: his emotionally tormented, soon-to-be protagonist was “in [me] like a poltergeist”. Shy is the book that spilled out; the entire first draft written in just three weeks.
It doesn’t usually happen like this. It was, says Porter, “the first time I’d done no drawings or research”, but he has grown used to the unexpected. His 2015 debut novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, about a father and his two sons mourning the loss of their matriarch in the company of a cacophonous crow, was bought by its American publisher for £1,000. They expected it to sell 60 copies. The now-bestseller has been translated into 27 languages and adapted into a celebrated stage play.
Despite his debut’s unexpected success, the pressure hasn’t changed how Porter writes. “I’ve been lucky enough that that’s always been my starting point: making the work I love,” he says. “I don’t have to steer my ship back towards what I want to do.”
His latest novel is the story of a disenfranchised teenager named Shy making a morbid pilgrimage to take his own life. Porter explores the boy’s past through the detached voices of others: his anguished mother, a ghost, and the staff at the school for troubled children where he lives.
The author speaks of his characters as if he didn’t create them but discovered them in his dreams. Shy, he says, “might not be able to express himself very well but his political compass is impeccable”. Irish actor Murphy, who starred in the stage version of Grief, noticed this too: “There is a humanity and a fragility to [Porter’s] characters and work that breaks your heart,” he told Service95. “But he does it with wit and care.”
In both Grief and Shy, children and young people are written with the kind of respect and emotional precision they’re seldom afforded outside young adult fiction. It’s a reflection of Porter’s perspective on the power found in adolescence. “I hate that we belittle the ferocity of the teenage experience,” he says. “It’s an in-built psychological snobbery that I think is not only antiquated but dangerous, and counterproductive. As a society we could listen better to teenagers. We wish adult society could be like that.”
Shy may primarily be a period piece about a boy and his sadness, but it also functions as a modern parable for the way we’re crying out for help in a world on fire. The morning Max and I meet, the IPCC has issued a ‘final warning’ to policy makers to combat the climate crisis or face irreversible damage. “There’s this sense that scientists are just screaming at the world to listen to them,” says Porter. “That felt very Shy-like to me.”
London-based writer Douglas Greenwood is a contributing editor at i-D magazine, and has written for titles including the New York Times, GQ and Vogue
The Good Buys
All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
This One Thing... The Inspiration Behind Frieze Show Manifold
When curating my Frieze exhibition Manifold, I was thinking about the idea of layers, about artwork that is complex in nature, about artists operating from a lens of openness and abundance. It turns out they were all Black women. That might have come from a point of personal bias, but it became central to the project.
I was inspired by Lubaina Himid’s curatorial exploits in the 1980s in London, when she organised a series of exhibitions featuring women of colour: Five Black Women at the Africa Centre in 1983, Black Women Time Now (1983-84) and The Thin Black Line at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in 1985. The show at the ICA took place in the corridors of the institute, as a reflection of the marginalisation of Black women in the art world. For me, it became even more important that the multiplicity of the Black female artist took centre stage – in a space that was ours to succeed and fail in.
As Manifold launches its second edition, the lens of abundance has come to mean something else. It extends to the viewer, to opening up and not pigeonholing artists. Sometimes, when exhibitions of artists of colour are arranged in European and North American contexts, their practices are placed in problematic contexts that directly relate them to whiteness. We neglect to look at the diversity of Black culture, of transatlantic dialogue, of Blackness in relation to Blackness. So, this exhibition is essentially 17 brilliant Black women from all over the world in conversation with each other, making diverse work and refusing to be the objects of simplistic interpretation.
Manifold is showing at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London until 29 April
Faridah Folawiyo is a curator and writer based between Lagos and London
Study II (Birthday Hair), Olukemi Lijadu (2022); Lovers Rock, Fadekemi Ogunsanya (2022); Hair Tiles Chop Chop, Joy Matashi (2021); Au Goûter, La Mangue, Rachel Marsil (2023); Untitled, Oluwatobiloba Ajayi (2022); Ao Ng Meme (Are You Not Inviting Me), Lebogang Mogul Mabusela (2023); An Old Remorse, Turiya Adkins (2022); ⓒ FF Projects
The Reflective, Playful Art Of Stephanie H Shih
Stephanie H Shih credits the blossoming of her artistic career to a handful of dumplings and a bottle of Chinkiang vinegar. In 2018, it was those two Asian food staples that the Taiwanese-American ceramist decided to recreate using clay. She was drawn both by the objects’ mundanity and their ubiquity within Asian-American households, hers included. The final pieces showed such painstaking detail they could almost pass for the real thing. When Shih posted them on Instagram – starting with the rice-based black bottle – the response was so overwhelmingly positive she realised she was on to something big.
“A lot of viewers in the Chinese-American community began sharing stories related to those foods and their childhoods with me,” Shih says from her Brooklyn studio. “It was clear those items weren’t just part of my personal memories but of a mutual experience. That got me thinking about exploring what other kitchen staples people were nostalgic for from within the diaspora.”
The series that followed, Oriental Grocery, set out to do just that – and turned Shih’s ceramic practice into a full-time venture. For it, Shih polled more than 20,000 of her Asian-American followers on social media to gather a culturally and ethnically diverse list of foodstuffs that would feel representative of their backgrounds. The pieces she crafted as a result spanned life-sized versions of rice bags, seasonings and different soy sauces, aimed at showcasing the breadth of the Asian-American diaspora and challenging the idea of a monolithic Asian cuisine.
In more recent works, she has expanded the narrative further – always by seeking a dialogue with her audience – looking at the Western groceries that have a special place in Asian culture. From Spam and Kit-Kats to Danish Butter Cookies and Ovaltine, they are all products introduced to Asian diasporic communities via colonial exploitation, assimilation and military presence (as in the case of Spam, an American import to Asia), but went on to find huge popularity among local communities.
“Food plays such a big role in the way individuals, particularly immigrants and children of immigrants, can connect with their cultures,” Shih explains. “To me, it feels like the natural vehicle to understand how we shape our sense of self.”
But the artist has also used food to reach beyond the personal. In her show Open Sundays, held last year in New York’s Lower East Side, she examined the 100-year-long overlap of Chinese and Jewish communities in the neighbourhood through classic pantry items from both cultures, such as White Rabbit Creamy Candy, Dr Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda, Yang Jiang Preserved Beans and Streit’s Passover Matzos.
For her last solo exhibition at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, she paid homage to the cultural history of the city’s Chinatown – not just through food but the books, films (by way of stunningly rendered ceramic videotapes) and pop-culture objects that have defined it, including perfect replicas of Nike Air Jordans and a ‘Linsanity’ basketball cap (after the Taiwanese-American player Jeremy Lin, who rose to sudden fame in 2012), because “there’s something very Asian-American about watching the NBA,” Shih says.
“What I am interested in is challenging the idea of ‘authenticity’, to focus on cultural interchange instead,” Shih adds. “A culture is never untouched by other cultures, yet often people try to freeze it as a way of protecting it. But that is unhistorical and unhelpful, as reality is much more nuanced. With the pieces I make, I want to approach the way we think about our identities in a more expansive way.”
Marianna Cerini is a freelance writer covering cultural trends, travel, fashion and the arts and has been published in Conde Nast Traveler, BBC Travel, CNN Style and Vogue Italia
Jasmine Rice (2022), Air Jordan (2022), Berggruen Gallery; Dr Brown’s Cel Ray Soda (2022); Yang Jiang Preserved Beans (2022); Five Books (2022), Berggruen Gallery; White Rabbit Candy (2022); Four VHS Tapes (2022), Berggruen Gallery; Ovaltine (2021); Danish Butter Cookies (2021), all Stephanie H Shih ⓒ Robert Bredvad
The World’s A Stage
The Good Buys
All products featured are independently chosen by the Service95 team. When you purchase something through our shopping links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Warhol’s Textiles: A Portrait Of The Artist Pre-Pop
Andy Warhol may have been dead for nearly 40 years, but his presence is very much alive in 2023 – found everywhere from your Netflix queue to your social media feed. But even with that omnipresence, there are parts of the artist’s work yet to be explored. A case in point? His textile prints. They are the focus of the latest Warhol exhibition at London’s Fashion & Textile Museum, open now.
More than 60 designs created by the artist in the 1950s are on display. Playful and dynamic, they depict everything from cakes to clowns, butterflies and horses; the work of a pre-Pop Warhol who was thriving as a commercial artist. The exhibition’s curator Richard Chamberlain describes them as “another string to [Warhol’s] business bow, which at the time also included book and record covers, greeting cards and wrapping paper”.
Chamberlain’s co-curator Geoff Rayner believes these pieces can be seen as part of Warhol’s evolution towards the soup cans and Marilyns we know and love. “The repetitive nature of textile repeats certainly played its part in directly informing his Pop Art,” he argues. “An important example of this is his textile for the New York firm of Leon Rosenblatt. He creates rows of buttons, all with slight variations. This is using the same concept that he employed in his iconic soup can and Coke bottle painting some three years later.”
While all the designs in the exhibition have their charm, many also reveal details about Warhol’s lifestyle. “Warhol was a regular visitor to the legendary New York cafe, restaurant and boutique Serendipity, which was owned by his great friend Stephen Bruce,” explains Chamberlain. “He was known to have had a very sweet tooth and would frequently be found eating lavish ice creams [there].” These experiences translate to a series of food-related textiles, including some mouth-watering ice-cream sundaes.
Warhol was famously successful as a commercial artist. He earned so much money that he bought a house on the Upper East Side, and he was able to support himself as he moved into fine art. But his commercial work remains a crucial part of his legacy. “Warhol’s elevation of everyday objects can be seen clearly in his textile designs,” says Chamberlain. “[They] were created with little brief or agenda attached to them, more a case of ‘art for art’s sake’.” They are also – as with this exhibition – yet another way for Warhol to remain famous, and in your timeline, for another 15 minutes.
Andy Warhol: The Textiles, runs until 10 September 2023 at the Fashion & Textile Museum
Lauren Cochrane is a senior fashion writer at The Guardian and author of The Ten
Andy Warhol, New York (1971), estate of David Gahr; Andy Warhol: The Textiles © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/Licensed by DACS, London; ice-cream desserts; shoe-print blouse, Jayson Classics (c1957-58); clown textile (c1955); brush-print dress; button-print textile, Leon Rosenblatt (1959–60); ice-cream print dress; candy apples, silk by Stehli Silks; © Fashion and Textile Museum
My Hometown: Anjali Mody’s Goa
The epiphany to move to Goa hit Mumbai-born designer Anjali Mody during a trip to Bali. The founder and creative director of JOSMO (a multi-disciplinary design and manufacturing company) was on a sourcing trip to Indonesia and decided to stay a few extra days with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Akshay Tandon. The tranquil green expanse surrounding their rental villa in Ubud made the couple yearn to foster a similar life back in India. That was seven years ago.
Within a year, they had moved full-time to the sunshine state of Goa, which was a fitting mise-en-scène for a lifestyle pivot steeped in unadulterated proximity to nature. The decision came at a time when Mody was contemplating changes on the professional front too. Her brand, which turns 13 this year, was already working on quirky commissioned pieces for the country’s movers and shakers – think chandeliers made from pocket watches and bar stools crafted from guitar picks. While this work fed her appetite for design, she felt the need to make her brand more accessible.
The designer admits it was (and still is) very unusual to have a business like hers in Goa. “But when you have conviction in how you want to live, you can’t base those decisions around work, or life will just pass you by,” she says. Mody now has her own private factory spaces here, a mere 15 minutes from her house. “And my office is just 10 minutes away. It’s an invaluable luxury, really,” she adds.
Mody’s house in the village of Nerul overlooks paddy fields and is a stone’s throw from her family’s holiday home, which she frequented in her childhood. “The peace and quiet is unmatched. I am more content and grounded here. Seeing all this green has changed the chemistry of my brain. Goa is medicinal,” she muses. “You also have more control over your day here. You are the master of your own time.”
Goa offers the ability to disconnect and tap into the unhurried pace of life – which has attracted an influx of creatives post pandemic – but ultimately it is a place where, says Mody, “You can be as hectic or as laidback as you want.”
Anjali Mody’s Top 6 Goa Recommendations
- I prefer South Goa’s under-the-radar beaches, such as Agonda and Palolem. No luxury frills here – just you and the water.
- Sundays are spent at the beachside boutique hotel Vaayu Kula in Mandrem with my friends and family. The location, vibe and menu are unmatched – I love the basil beauty drink. We only return home after watching the sunset.
- There are many design and fashion stores unique to Goa. There’s, of course, JOSMO! I also love Flame, The Good Life, Ranji Goa and SavioJon for their curations. The love that the founders pour into their edits is very evident.
- Bhatti Village, Vinayak and Copperleaf are your spots for a great authentic Goan thali, which typically comes with fried fish, curries, rice, veggies, coconut salad and pickle.
- Feni is a liquor made from cashew apples that’s indigenous to Goa. Go to hole-in-the-wall neighbourhood bar Joseph’s in Panjim for the feni and the vibe.
- Elsewhere is a charming private beachside property in an estate dating back to 1886 where you can stay in creek-side tents or standalone bungalows. The exact location is revealed only when you make a booking.
Praachi Raniwala is a Mumbai-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveller and Vogue India
Nerul; Agonda; thali, Vinayak; Prana Anjuna; Vaayu Kula ⓒ Kshitij Jadhav; Palolem Beach; Joseph Bar, Panjim; Ranji Goa; Flame; Vaayu Kula ⓒ Kshitij Jadhav; SavioJon; Agonda; SavioJon; Vaayu Kula ⓒ Kshitij Jadhav; Palolem Beach
If Spiking Is An Epidemic, Why Is It Still Not A Specific Criminal Offence In The UK?
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The ‘Sunday Best’ Sartorial Tradition: An Explainer
During the height of slavery in America, Sunday worship and two sets of clothes were often the only freedoms enslaved communities were afforded. One of these sets of clothes was reserved exclusively for church. And while many treated their mode of dress as a sign of reverence towards God, for others it became a moment to present themselves in their best attire and show their glory in grand style. This was how the term ‘Sunday Best’ was coined. It is a tradition that has been passed through generations within the Black community across the world and still influences creatives today.
Georgia, USA, 1899; Pittsburgh, USA, 1941; Aitutaki, The Cook Islands; Kingston, Jamaica; Douala, Cameroon; Harlem, New York; Harlem, New York; Ikutha, Kenya; Mar Lodj, Senegal; Kensington, London; Brixton, London; Malakula, Vanuatu; Matuku, Fiji; Mahajanga, Madagascar; Mulago, Uganda; Nevis; Saint Croix, Virgin Islands; South Carolina, USA; Vieux Fort, St. Lucia; Soufriere, St. Lucia © Alamy
“[Church] was a saving grace for the Black community [at a time when they] had nothing to look forward to,” shares Karen Binns, a creative director and stylist from New York. But the ethos of presenting your best self on a Sunday was a concept that went beyond Black America. For Dr Christine Checinska, curator of the V&A Africa Fashion exhibition, who is British of African-Caribbean heritage, “Sunday Best was a part of weekly life growing up – clothes had to be laundered and ironed, shoes had to be polished, hair had to be neatly ‘done’.”
Omoyemi Akerele, founder and CEO of Lagos Fashion Week and Style House Files tells of a similar experience and explains that in Nigeria, this Sunday ritual went beyond class or economic power. “People lived their lives with intention and a natural extension of that is to express themselves through what they wear. They put their best foot forward – no matter what their income bracket is.”
Today, a concept that stemmed from a traumatic history, a way to proclaim Black worth and combat the stereotype of Black people being unkempt, has become a source of inspiration and celebration for many creatives. The designer Christopher John Rogers used his SS19 collection to pay homage to the extravagant church ensembles he witnessed during his childhood in Louisiana, US. In her collection (Always) Wear Your Best On A Sunday, South African photographer Alice Mann examines the relationship between fashion and worship in the Black diaspora. London-based photographer Katie Waggett also captures the cultural codes of dress and religion in her book Sunday Best. And Aida Amoako’s As We See It – a book that explores the concept of the Black gaze across photography and art – prominently features Dario Calmese’s images of Lana Turner, a Harlem socialite and prominent member of Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.
For the Black community however, Sunday Best is no longer limited to church. Rather, says Akerele, “Sunday Best has become a way of life.”
Yelena Grelet is a London-based freelance journalist
The New Cult Classics: How A London Film Collective Is Championing True Representation On Screen
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The Way I Work... Angela Santana
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, journalist Marie-Claire Chappet spoke to the contemporary artist about everything from her workspaces to her creative process
The Swiss-born artist Angela Santana is attempting to reframe how we view the female form in art. After training in her native Zurich, Santana moved to New York, where, along with major shows in Europe, she has exhibited widely. The last seven years have been devoted to a major body of work on women’s bodies, which formed the backbone of her first major solo show this summer in London’s Saatchi Yates gallery.
Here, Santana exhibited large-scale depictions of women, brilliantly rendered from pixelated online images frequently found on illicit sites. Through her clever blending of digital images and oil painting, Santana distorted the female form to challenge the male gaze, which has dominated the art world for so long.
She sat down with Service95 to share how she works, and what gets her creatively motivated…
On The Importance Of Space… My studio is on the top floor of a beautiful warehouse in Brooklyn. I also do etchings and experiments from a print studio nearby. All my paintings begin as a digital painting, so lots of time is spent painting digitally, in hundreds of layers, creating intricate compositions. I am looking into building a garden studio; imagine painting surrounded by nature! It’s incredibly fascinating and inspiring. It also takes me back to my childhood, when I painted on large paper rolls in the garden from the moment I could hold a brush.
On Music… I’ve got a very eclectic record collection, ranging from contemporary electronic composers and ’60s-’90s rock and pop, to shoegaze, psychedelic and African records from the ’70s. I love Motown too. I am massively inspired by music. I often focus on the composition of a song, taking the layers apart in my mind, imagining the building blocks that create a particular sound, and being inspired by the narration or elegance of a story that can be told within a song, like poetry. I’m always astonished by the freedom and experimentation that goes into creating and recording a song.
On Dressing The Part… When I paint, it feels liberating to wear boiler suits, [so] that I can focus on the work and strip everything else to the essentials. I don’t want the clothes to hold me back, I want to feel free. For openings, I love dresses. Sculptural shapes and textured details. I love wearing sustainable clothes that last forever, by Rachel Comey or Mara Hoffman, not only for their designs, but for what they stand for, and their powerful message. Beyond the special shapes and gorgeous materials, I love that I feel like me, and there are many versions of me that I like to celebrate.
On Signature Scents… I like wearing essential oils, such as the ones from Babylonstoren. Or [fragrances] by Bottega Veneta, Guerlain and Hermès. And I have a thing for incense. Awaji Incense by Astier de Villatte is my favourite. A friend also brought me incense from a Japanese monastery years ago that I still treasure, and both help me focus and get into the flow when working.
On Travel… Landscapes are very inspiring to me, be it the beautiful foothills of the Himalayas (that surprisingly resemble Switzerland where I grew up), or the lush and mossy hills in Scotland. I would also count South Africa’s Cape region to be one of the most incredible places and, of course, Italy and Greece with all their splendour and art history.
On Seeking Inspiration… I take a lot of inspiration from other art forms, such as film and TV. Sisters With Transistors by Lisa Rovner shines a light on female pioneers in electronic music; their radical experiments in the 20th century redefined the boundaries of music. I also love Boccaccio ’70 – a satirical masterpiece. It’s based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s novellas written in the 14th century, and directors Fellini, De Sica, Monicelli and Visconti reimagine these themes set in Italy in the 1960s.
On Art… As an artist, of course, I take inspiration from other artists. For me, it has to be Willem De Kooning and Cecily Brown for their untamed brushstrokes and for oscillating between figuration and abstraction. I also love Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cahn, Meret Oppenheim, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas and Tschabalala Self.
On Digital Habits… My favourite Instagram accounts are @Heba_Kadry, @Williamcult and @Republicofnowhere. When I’m on my phone I’m on Brian Eno’s Bloom, the Pantone colour app, BBC Sounds and any travel app that gets me around the city. But I try to spend the least time possible on my phone!
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
Island Life
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On our radar this week…
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From The #HotAnxiousGirl To #TheSadGirlAesthetic: The Risks Of Romanticising Mental Illness On Social Media
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On our radar this week…
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The Way I Work... Tati Compton
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, journalist Marie-Claire Chappet spoke to the LA-based stick-and-poke tattoo artist about how she works and what inspires her
Tatiana Kartomten, better known as Tati Compton, will leave her art on your skin. The self-taught tattoo artist uses one of the most traditional methods – stick and poke – to create her signature styles; intricate, delicate and often dominated by goth, female and queer imagery. Compton has been drawing ever since she was little but gave her first ever tattoo the first time she received one herself – as a teenager, listening to Metallica with a friend, the pair inked each other with a sewing needle tied to a pencil.
Compton’s technique has improved since then, and so has her reputation. The Central Saint Martins graduate is now a formidable presence in the industry, a leader in the field of stick and poke, with a huge social following, her own book and clothing collaborations and (naturally) a long waiting list of people wanting to get inked by her…
She sat down with Service95 to share her work process and creative inspirations…
On The Perfect Working Environment… I work at tattoo shops around the world because I love to constantly change my environment and visit my friends in all the different places. I like to listen to metal when I work because it helps to keep me tattooing fast(ish), considering I do stick and poke. This way of working suits me so well.
On Style And Scents… I don’t like exposing my legs or feet when I’m tattooing so I’m usually found in comfortable jeans, a T-shirt and boots. For me, clothes are like dressing as a character or an expression of how I feel.
I try not to smell too strong when I work because I am in such close proximity to people. I hate chemical perfumes and colognes. Instead, I stick to natural oils that are in my everyday products, such as lavender.
On Inspiration… I love to travel and everywhere inspires me, in every regard; the buildings, the doors, the streets, the trees, the flowers, the people, the smells, everything.
Everywhere is so different but also the same. People love to say ‘It’s such a small world’, but it’s not, it is a huge world with billions of places and people, and the exploration is never-ending. In terms of the culture I consume, I sort of weirdly despise TV, but I love film. I take a lot of inspiration from Alejandro Jodorowsky, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Stanley Kubrick films, mostly for their atmosphere and eye for design.
I also take inspiration from people and, as a tattoo artist, all my co-workers and cohort, and all the real-life people and artists I have met on the way inspire me the most.
I think I never need to feel inspired though. That seems counterproductive. I don’t push inspiration; I respect it and it comes and goes as it pleases.
On Online Life… I’m rarely on Instagram but when I am, I like to laugh. I’ll follow [anything] that has crazy shit happening. Honestly, [that is] one of the main reasons I still go on social media. It sounds basic but my favourite app on my phone is [Google] Maps because it helps me find where to go and I’m always on the move.
On Her Most Prized Possession… It constantly makes me sad that the prized possession of humanity is money. My van is currently my favourite thing I own because I live in it, and it drives me places. I guess my other favourite possession, though it changes a lot, is my denim vest.
On The Best Career Advice… OK, so he didn’t say it to me but David Bowie once said something that I totally live by. He said: “Never work for other people at what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside you that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself or how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that. If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
New York, I Love You
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The limited-edition buys to have on your radar
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The Good Buys
Introducing the new Service95 franchise where we share three things that have caught our eye this week
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“We’re Essentially Being Told That We Don’t Exist By The People That Are Meant To Be Protecting Us”: Munroe Bergdorf On Trans Issues
“We’re all talking about the wrong things,” says the model and trans activist Munroe Bergdorf. She says it resignedly, with the exhausted sigh of someone who has had these conversations – the wrong ones – far too often. We are talking on Zoom one Wednesday morning and, somehow, quite without either of us meaning to, we end up slipping into exactly one of those conversations. “But there are gender-neutral toilets everywhere!” She says with an exasperated laugh. “Have people never been on an aeroplane?”
Through her heartrending memoir Transitional, Bergdorf wants to get the conversation about trans lives back to actual trans lives. Part autobiography, part polemic, the book is a thoroughly absorbing journey through the joys and devastations of her life. “I feel like I’ve just been inside your head,” I say. “Good,” she replies. “That’s the point.” Because, of course, that is the point. How many people screaming about toilets have been inside a trans person’s head? Empathy, perhaps, is Transitional’s biggest takeaway.
“I wanted people to realise that transness is a human experience. Gender is a human experience,” she says of the book’s palpable grounding in universality. “The confines we are expected to live within are man-made, so we can transition out of them. That’s something that is for everybody, not just trans people.”
Bergdorf’s own ‘transition’ – her journey – is remarkably relatable. She depicts an idealised early childhood in the English village of Stansted Mountfitchet, the typical trappings of infancy and there are gorgeous passages about the menagerie of insects she collected. As a reader, you feel as crushed as she is when puberty seemingly destroys everything and brings with it cruel realisations about the realities of being the only mixed-race family in the village and being the only queer person of colour she knew. External forces brutally pushing their way into an internal world will become a repeated, traumatic refrain in Bergdorf’s life.
She is brilliantly erudite about the intersectionality of those forces; the misogyny at the root of so much of the violence inflicted on her, the racism, the homophobia. On the subject of governmental responsibility for this, she is unequivocal. “They are essentially advocating for genocide,” she says simply. “What else do you call it, when we’re being disenfranchised, pushed out of spaces, denied health care, denied love and dignity? If we’re essentially being told that we don’t exist by the people that are meant to be protecting us, that is going to – and is – causing people to die.”
For Bergdorf, finding her voice in this way has been as essential as shaping her true identity, yet she speaks with refreshing honesty about the unwelcome chaos activism brings to her life. “It has brought me peace and it has also taken away peace,” she admits. “For such a long time I was the only Black trans model out there, representing all of us. I look forward to the day when trans people can be hired, just for who they are, not the identity they represent. Like, I want a trans woman presenting an ordinary gardening show, you know?”
She laughs and it is a glorious invocation of the joy she has fought so hard for all these years. Even the process of writing the memoir (which took over five years and included a Covid-19 lockdown and a revelatory stay in rehab) has seen her reach a whole new place in her life – one of clarity and, as her final chapter states, purpose. “I’m a different person from when I started writing,” she says with a smile, knowing I am about to say the same thing. “Yes, I know. Another transition!”
Transitional: In One Way Or Another, We All Transition by Munroe Bergdorf (£14.99, Bloomsbury) is out now
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
Rediscovering London
The Way I Work... Solange Azagury-Partridge
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, journalist Marie-Claire Chappet spoke to the London-based designer about her process and creative heroes
The first piece of jewellery Solange Azagury-Partridge ever designed, back in 1987, was her own engagement ring. Since then, the self-taught creative has become one of Britain’s cult jewellery designers, founding her eponymous brand in 1990 and working for three years as the creative director of the historic house Boucheron. Many of her pieces are featured in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Les Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Here, she tells Service95 about her work process, her creative idols and her new perfume, Kiss My Lips, based on her now-iconic Hotlips rings…
On her working day… I like to get up and have my coffee in bed, read the news and do a Wordle before answering some urgent emails. If I’m meeting a client, I like to take them out for breakfast, either to Granger & Co on Westbourne Grove or somewhere down Golborne Road. If not, I’ll go for a walk in the park or around Portobello Road and then head to my office for 10ish. I try to leave around 5pm and regroup to do my final calls and emails from home. That time to myself at the beginning and end of the day is really important to me.
On music… I can’t work with any music on, I need silence, however, the inspiration for my new perfume is the first record I ever bought when I was a little girl. It was Sugar, Sugar by The Archies, which has lyrics about how sweet a kiss can be. For me, the Hotlips woman generally has a funny, cheeky, happy, joyful spirit. I really wanted the perfume to have that happiness about it.
On her inspirations… I try to use abstract ideas as a basis for inspiration rather than something that already exists. For one collection I used the physical manifestation of mathematics and how beautiful that is. This is despite the fact I am terrible at maths!
On her signature scent… I always wear my own perfume, Stoned, which I created about 15 years ago. It just feels like it’s part of who I am. I think scent is such a great partner to jewellery; you wear it on your skin in the same way. It’s another means of accessorising.
On her work uniform… I’m a big fan of finding a style and sticking with it. For me, that’s great blouses in every colour. My favourites are from Tucker NYC and Alice + Olivia. I’m not an experimental fashion person, I leave that to my jewellery.
On travel… I really enjoy travelling for work; I think it’s almost more fun than travelling as a tourist, where I feel you only see the surface of things. When you travel for work, you meet locals and get down into the nitty-gritty of the place. My favourite places to visit are India, Morocco, New York and LA.
On other creatives… I’m a massive reader, so the people I really admire are writers. I love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Martin Amis and Hanya Yanagihara. As a huge art fan, I have always wished I could devote more time to painting myself. As it is, I have some great pieces. My favourite is a massive Matthew Day Jackson. I would save it from a fire… if I could lift it.
On recharging… I like to literally stay in bed for 24 hours. Read, sleep, eat and watch TV from bed. That is my dream way to recharge.
On career advice… The best thing I was ever told was about self-belief. In order to succeed, you need to have confidence in whatever you do.
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
Jennifer Daniel: The Woman Ushering In The Next Generation Of Emojis
Jennifer Daniel has a job title that sounds made up. She’s chair of the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium. This means she decides on new emojis and monitors what these symbols add to our online lives. Significantly, considering past emoji designs have been accused of sexism, she’s the first woman in the role.
Daniel, who took on the title in 2020, acknowledges what she calls “some very obvious broken experiences”, but her approach to inclusivity has been to simplify.
“My instinct wasn’t to go more specific, but to be less specific,” she says, pointing to the ‘hand with index finger and thumb crossed’ emoji, sometimes known as the ‘finger heart’. “It was designed to be multiple things to multiple people for multiple reasons. If we had added a little heart at the top, it wouldn’t have had the flexibility.”
These tiny hieroglyphics have been with us, in one way or another, for around 40 years and their meanings are endlessly debated and changed; the thumbs up, seen as passive-aggressive by Gen Z, the nail polish emoji holding different meanings across generations (displaying an air of nonchalance to some and getting glammed up to others) and there are also the ones used in a way the Emoji Subcommittee did not intend. See the coffin for hilarious or the infamous aubergine. But Daniel is effusive in her enthusiasm for these moments. “I just love it,” she says. “[It shows that] language is infinitely creative.” Hence her favourites are not so much emojis understood by many, but the more intimate ones. “I talked to a couple and [they said] sending a heart emoji to each other was a little too serious. But they both love pizza, so that [became] their way of saying they cared about each other.”
In 2020, Daniel helped to create Emoji Kitchen, which allows users to blend two emojis together, portmanteau style. “You can hit the heart face and then [the] angry face to say, ‘I love you but I don’t like what you’re saying,’” explains Daniel.
While this seems like it could spell the next gen of emoji, Daniel says the future is actually a nod to the past. “If you go further back, [to] illuminated manuscripts, [you’ll see] text and images were blended… And now it’s coming back together. I think that’s really exciting.”
Lauren Cochrane is senior fashion writer at The Guardian and author of The Ten
Why Vivienne Westwood Was So Much More Than A Fashion Icon
As London Fashion Week kicks off next Friday (17 February), Dazed’s Lynette Nylander pays tribute to one of the UK’s most influential artists and designers
As a young and naive follower of fashion in my teens, Vivienne Westwood was an idol of mine. In fact, her clothes were my first designer purchase. When the world lost her in December 2022, at the age of 81, I started to ponder on her legacy after putting aside my immediate feelings of sadness and nostalgia. Of course, there are the clothes; extreme platform heels, denim with distorted crotches, tweeds and tartans in bright, saturated hues (a nod to her working-class northern England roots) and, of course, her signature corsets (taken from her love of the 18th-century stalwart that stood its wearer tall, their bust out)... But it was her ability to thread the needles of the many subcultures, countries and people that interested her that resulted in one of the most expansive and incredible design catalogues fashion has ever seen – one that connected with both die-hard Westwood-ites and Gen-Z alike. Westwood spoke of her life, her journey, her story.
When she moved to London and embedded herself alongside the burgeoning punk movement with her then-partner Malcolm McLaren, she set in motion a cataclysmic idea of what dress could be, what it could represent and who could be involved. Their shop at 430 King’s Road celebrated an idea of otherness and doing away with the rigidity of the status quo that, while perhaps not intentional from a designer who was more acting in the moment than thinking about the future, set a blueprint for designers to embrace their own messages. In short, perhaps you aren’t for everyone, and that is OK.
Westwood also challenged what a designer can use their platform to celebrate. In the latter years of her career, she became more and more politically and environmentally outspoken. She encouraged consumption mindfulness with her famous phrase ‘Buy Less, Choose Well, Make It Last’, long before the word sustainability became part of the public lexicon. She called into question the fracking practices of oil and gas conglomerates and encouraged the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – all while being in the second half of life, resplendent in the same hair, makeup and fuck-you attitude of her 1970s self.
I think about my own teenage self, saving up for the black bowling bag with the Vivienne Westwood orb embroidered on the side. While I didn’t know her entire story at the time, perhaps what connected was seeing a designer, a woman, so comfortable with being herself. I was no punk rocker, but I felt a kinship with wanting an example of the road less travelled. Through fragments of history, and an astute ability to story tell through her work, she taught me that everything has an interconnectedness and can include all our personal stories. Design may have been her medium but freedom was her power, and as an activist, anarchist and feminist, that will last forever.
Lynette Nylander is the London-born New York-based executive editorial director of Dazed and a former deputy editor of i-D magazine and Teen Vogue
The Final Girl: A Brief Explainer
The Way I Work... Michèle Lamy
In our series where we look at the things, places and people that inspire a creative’s working life, journalist Marie-Claire Chappet spoke to the indefatigable multi-disciplinary artist about everything from her artistic inspirations to the best career advice she’s ever been given
How does one begin to describe Michèle Lamy? The septuagenarian creative has led myriad lives, each more fascinating than the last. In her native France, she was a defence lawyer in the ’60s and ’70s, before taking a turn as a cabaret dancer. She was a fashion mogul and restaurateur in LA and an icon in her own right, with her distinctive tattoos and unique style. Now, the multi-disciplinary artist, who splits her time between Paris and LA, is best known for her design work with her husband, Rick Owens, and her art, fashion, jewellery, and furniture.
The utterly unique renaissance woman sat down with Service95 over a cigarette and cup of tea to share her rituals, dreams, and love of creative chaos…
On working rituals… My thought has always been that I never wanted to be the sort of person who is waiting for holidays or waiting for their retirement. I make sure I enjoy my work. I mostly work and live between Los Angeles, Paris and Italy. In Paris, in our place on the fifth floor [of our building], there is a big bathroom [with] a hammam. I go there for my traditional start to the morning, followed by cigarettes and a cup of tea. That is where I get all my ideas. In LA, I live in a bungalow at Chateau Marmont, which opens onto the garden and pool. I get ideas there too because there is no one there in the morning. It is peaceful and looks fantastic. For breakfast, I always have oeuf à la coque.
On music to work to… I don’t like the quiet, but I will start the day with no music. When I start [working on] something, I like to listen to internet radio – usually a French one. For me, it has to be techno, with no words, and no artist or song that I am really into at that time as I need to concentrate.
On her artistic inspirations… I love Jean-Luc Godard and I am smoking so much right now because of him… because he [recently] died. Voices inspire me; Bob Dylan is so important in that way, [as is] the work of Langston Hughes. But what was truly music to me was the voice of Gilles Deleuze. There was seduction to the words when he would speak to me. It was like surfing.
On her work uniform… I obviously wear Rick Owens. But I don’t believe in ‘work’ clothes. I believe in gym clothes, I believe in boxing clothes, and I believe in the energy change in different clothes, but I like something you can wear all day to everything.
On her signature scent… At the moment that is my Rick Owens LAMYLAND perfume, which we have been developing for a while. But in general, I like perfumes that smell like the sun and camel piss. I do very well in the perfume souks in Dubai, which are gorgeous. I also love Sables by Annick Goutal. Smell is such an important thing. It’s very evocative and always reminds you of moments. My smell is all over my clothes. It’s how I can recognise which is my sweater and which is Rick’s sweater!
On her love of travel… I like being a nomad, like a Berber, which is why one of my favourite places is North Africa. But I also love London. I love being there. It is why I think I am cursed with my accent because I think in English but when I speak it sounds like theees! At the moment I am most excited about my travels to Japan. I am doing some work with artist Ryoji Ikeda, which is incredible, and I am in love with Japanese culture.
The best career advice she’s ever been given… I am very comfortable with what I am doing now, but other people would call it chaos. I guess the advice was just to follow my own path but make sure my spirit was good enough to see a blank page and say: what are we going to do here? I like the chaos. If I wasn’t doing this, [do] you think I could be a brain surgeon? No, I think I would just be a nomad in the desert; someone who tells stories about the sky.
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
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My Hometown: Sarah Diouf’s Dakar
“You know that feeling when you know you belong to a certain place?” Sarah Diouf says of her home city of Dakar. The seeds of her love for the place were planted in childhood. She was born in Paris and spent her early years in Ivory Coast; however, both her parents are half-Senegalese. “I used to come here with my parents to visit but I never stayed extensively,” Diouf explains. In 2001, she left Ivory Coast to return to Paris where she studied and later worked as a fashion stylist and editor. “One of my best friends, whom I met in business school in Paris, is fully Senegalese. In 2013, when she went back to live in Dakar, I went to see her, and this was the first time I visited the city in a non-tourist way. This was the most incredible three weeks of my life.” Her own move to Dakar didn’t happen until a year later, but this experience was the catalyst for her brand Tongoro.
“The global perception around African goods has been very bad for such a long time. I wanted to help change that. So, while still in Paris, I started playing around with fabrics and got local tailors in Dakar to make my clothes.” During Paris Fashion Week, her outfits were noticed by street style photographers, editors and friends, “as well as friends of friends of friends,” she recalls with a laugh. Many people began asking her to make clothes for them and Tongoro officially launched in 2016. From the sourcing of materials to the actual creation of the pieces, everything takes place in the Senegalese city. (Tongoro has since been discovered and worn by many high-profile names such as Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Burna Boy.)
The city itself has also recently had a starry moment. The good and great of fashion and celebrity recently descended on Dakar for a prestigious Chanel show. That said, Diouf’s unfailing love for her city runs much deeper than its current fashionability. “Dakar is such an amazing place. We all get to a stage in our lives where we are mentally, physically [and] spiritually seeking a peaceful kind of experience. Dakar is that place for me. It is so chilled, sunny most of the time and surrounded by the sea. The country is mostly Muslim [but] everyone lives peacefully with one another; when it’s Easter, everyone celebrates Easter, and when it’s Eid, everyone celebrates Eid. That, for me, is such a beautiful thing.”
This is why, despite growing up in another African country, she is unequivocal about being rooted in Senegal. “I mean, my name is Diouf [a popular Senegalese name] and look at me,” she says with a laugh, “I look like a Senegalese woman. Also, there is no way I could have children and not be in complete possession of my cultural heritage. So,” she adds with finality in her voice, “while Ivory Coast is my home country, Dakar is where I belong.”
Sarah Diouf’s top Dakar recommendations…
- I love the work of painter and sculptor Alioune Diouf. You can see his work at the Selebe Yoon gallery. It is one of my favourite places for art.
- Seku Bi is an old building that the owner transformed into a boutique hotel, which has views over the sea – and the food is amazing.
- Copacabana Surf Village is where I go surfing, and you can eat and chill. The beach is great, and it just has a really good vibe.
- Try thieboudienne, a national dish prepared with fish, rice and tomato sauce. The place to go for that is a very low-key restaurant downtown called Chez Loutcha. They make the best one.
- You cannot leave Dakar without visiting the markets. Sandaga is well known. Here you can pick up fabrics that you can take to a tailor who will make you something very traditional, very cheaply. There are also brilliant inexpensive jewellers that can make something specifically for you that you will cherish forever.
This One Thing... Beauty Papers
If, like me, you are bored and frankly exhausted by society’s ever-present messaging – you know, the one that dictates who and what defines ‘beauty’ and why we all need to pursue it – then you will love Beauty Papers. Founded seven years ago by ex-makeup artist Maxine Leonard and creative director Valerie Wickes, this biannual ode to beauty – but not as you know it – was born out of a rejection of the singular ideal. Speaking about the genesis of the brand, Leonard says, “The beauty industry was not inclusive or playful or even inspiring. I was frustrated by the dangerous message that one size fits all.” This is why, if you buy the magazine expecting to read about the joys of contouring, slugging, or glass skin, then look away now. Beauty Papers pulls together leading writers, artists, cultural commentators, and photographers to explore thorny issues – be it female body hair or fatphobia – that flip mainstream beauty on its head.
Their covers have featured the likes of South African artist and queer rights activist Zanele Muholi, 77-year-old British artist Maggi Hambling, hermaphrodite twins Eva and Adele, and Shirin Neshat in a controversial take on Muslim representation (it got the magazine shadow-banned by Instagram and many retailers took it off the shelves). Though few and far between, every so often a celebrity will make an appearance but, in classic Beauty Papers style, it will always be unexpected; think Cate Blanchett reinvented as Andy Warhol, and a bare-chested Harry Styles sitting cross-legged on a chair wearing fishnet tights. Quelle surprise, the Styles issue sold out. But just as well. For every copy sold, a percentage of the sale price went to Haircuts4Homeless, a UK community-based charity where hairstylists give rough sleepers a wash, cut and style to boost their confidence. “Our desire,” explains Leonard, “is to create a different narrative and, ultimately, to create change.” And Beauty Papers is doing exactly that.
Funmi Fetto is the global editorial director of Service95 and a contributing editor at British Vogue
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The Way I Work... Joy Labinjo
The acclaimed artist speaks to journalist Marie-Claire Chappet about everything in her working life, from her studio soundtrack to her daily inspirations
London-born, of Nigerian heritage, 28-year-old Joy Labinjo is one of the most celebrated rising stars on the British art scene. Her often-large-scale paintings with abstract influences and use of bold colours overflow with storytelling, frequently using family photographs as source material, foregrounding narratives around Blackness and identity, power, and community. She has exhibited widely, from London to Lagos. Since November 2021, her first ever large-scale public art piece 5 More Minutes – portraying an Afro-Caribbean hair salon – has been on display at Brixton Underground station in London.
She tells Service95 what her working day is made of…
On her routine… I always wake up at 5.45am and go to the gym. That sounds early but I need it to be because I dilly-dally so much! I have a coffee in bed, leave an hour for the workout, have a slow breakfast, and don’t get to my studio in north London until 8am. On a busy day, I tend to leave at 8pm, but I work in ebbs and flows. When I was at university, the artist Dexter Dalwood came to speak to my class and he said, “put the weird hours in”. That’s always stayed with me. The morning and evening are when I am the most productive but if I’m really feeling it, I will stay late for those ‘weird hours’.
On listening habits… I always have something playing when I’m working. I have Confessions by Sudan Archives, Prickly Pear by Portico Quartet and Wildfires and Little Boy by Sault on repeat, which almost feels like meditation. Those ones have stuck over the past few years. I can’t quite describe why… it’s just a feeling. I also sometimes listen to podcasts. My favourite is Gilmore Guys, a hilarious one about Gilmore Girls, which I love. I don’t get a lot of work done when I put that on!
On finding inspiration everywhere… I think creative people are like sponges who get inspired by so much. I’ve found titles for my paintings in the comments section on Instagram. I resolved an issue with an artwork when I saw a clown in an episode of Gilmore Girls… I find stuff in the weirdest places.
On fashion and beauty… I wear loose T-shirts and men’s cargo trousers every day in the studio. I like them because they’ve got lots of pockets to hold my brushes, and as I like to wipe the paint on my legs, with those trousers it doesn’t go through to my skin. When I’m not painting, I like a tailored silhouette; I love Cos, &Other Stories and Ganni. I like how fashion can help you feel like a different person each time you change your look. What I don’t change is my signature scent: Narciso Rodriguez’s For Her.
On travel… I have made a vow to travel more. In 2020, I was lucky enough to be working in Athens for six weeks. I had friends visit and stay with me and we would hop off to the islands. I would paint all day and have dinner with them late at night. It made me realise I want to live like that more. It was such a magical time. Next up, I am going to Mauritius, which I am so excited about, and Paris, where I haven’t been since I was a teenager. I can’t wait to go to all the galleries.
On fellow creatives… I admire any artist who has had a long career, such as Alice Neel, Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson. To keep working for over 40 years and still have something to say… I wish for a career like that! I have two Claudette Johnson prints that are my prized possessions. I have never put them up, but I just bought a house and am so excited to finally hang them.
On her fascination with houses… I love @themodernhouse on Instagram and have always been obsessed with houses. If I wasn’t an artist, I would want to be an estate agent. You get to look at people’s houses all day!
Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar
