THE PEOPLE’S

PRINCESS

ICE SPICE
SHOOTING
STARS
 OFF THE WALL

SOPHIA DAWIYE
 CRTZ OF
LUNDUN

CLINT
 ART
ATTACK!

JUST STOP OIL

 A GIRL
LIKE ME

ZAYA WADE
 AMERICA’S
SWEETHEART

AZEALIA BANKS
Spring Summer 2023
Photographed by David Sims
loewe.com
Spring Summer 2023
Photographed by David Sims
loewe.com
carhartt-wip.com @carharttwip
AKONI SS23 VISIONS IN TECHNICOLOR
 THE
G RE AT E S T
S T O RY E V ER
WO RN

LEVI.COM
 Chapter 103

This is the true story

of some very precious cargo. Of fishing

boats sailing to the states in the 1970s

and retur ning to Kingston with barrels

full of blue jeans. Yes, the 501 ® jean

arrived in Jamaica packed alongside

rock ‘n’ roll records, Wester n films

and as much American pop culture as a

barrel could hold. But for all that was

imported, what came next is the real

story. Jamaicans exporting their style

back to the world by the metric ton. A

revolution that reverberated from the

dance halls to every cor ner of the globe.

And that's one influential island in the

greatest story ever wor n.

SS23 CAMPAIGN
SELENA FORREST
PHOTOGRAPHED BY HEJI SHIN
CONTENTS

76 – 84 STARTERS 150 – 157 ICE SPICE

From British-Congolese photographer Bernice Mulenga to Stockholm photography BRENT MCKEEVER
artist Stella Explorer, we meet spring’s most exciting new creatives Swapping opps for exes with her pop-savvy spin on the Bronx drill scene,
Ice Spice is the people’s princess we all need right now
86 – 88 FEELING SCENE
Faces from NYC’s creative milieu drop a pin in their favourite 158 – 167 ART ATTACK!
hidden hangouts photography HARLEY WEIR styling IMRUH ASHA
In this surreal collision of art and activism, the soup-lobbing legends of
90 – 92 HYPERSCRIPTURE Just Stop Oil join forces with fellow climate campaigners to explain why
Escaping our IRL hellscape, digital natives are finding God in the guiding the world won’t wait for change
hand of the algorithm
168 – 177 ZAYA WADE
94 – 95 GIDA JOURNAL photography RENELL MEDRANO styling MARIKA – ELLA AMES
photography FREDDIE ODEDE ‘Levelling up her iconic- ness’ in her first-ever cover feature, Zaya Wade
The pan-African print journal spotlighting new creative talent talks shutting down the fashion front rows, interviewing Michelle Obama,
from across the continent and the importance of a foundation rooted in love

96 HIJAB BUTCH BLUES 178 – 187 NU ROMANTICS

NYC activist Lamya H’s new memoir is a queer manifesto and radical photography JACKIE NICKERSON styling FELIX PARADZA
affirmation of faith pulling from stories in the Qur’an
188–195 FLO
98 – 99 THE O-ZONE photography CORENTIN LEROUX styling ANDRA AMELIA BUHAI
Online relationships guru Oloni talks us through her guilt-free guide Undeniably now and unmistakably then, FLO’s embrace of the R&B
to sex, The Big O sounds of their childhoods feels weirdly like the future

100– 105 YOUNG, FRESH & NEW 196–207 CLINT

photography KAYLA CONNORS styling KYANISHA MORGAN photography GABRIEL MOSES styling FELIX PARADZA and MARK MUTYAMBIZI
Meet the new soul boys spearheading a renaissance in R&B-adjacent On the fifth anniversary of Corteiz, the man pulling the strings at Britain’s
sounds, and demolishing stereotypes around the genre fastest-growing streetwear cult gives a career- defining interview

106 – 107 THELONIOUS STOKES 208 – 227 SECRET SUNSHINE

photography ALESSANDRO MANNELLI photography MIKAEL JANSSON styling IB KAMARA
The Florence-based artist tweaks the old masters’ noses to illuminate
‘the gentle truth that’s inside all of us’ 228 – 243 HOT SHOTS!
photography PAOLO ROVERSI styling IBRAHIM KAMARA
108 – 109 BORDERLANDS: CROSSING EREZ Meet the new-world photographers revolutionising the medium
A powerful dispatch from the frontiers of the world’s largest prison, Gaza, – frame by exquisite frame
on the fifth anniversary of the Great March of Return
250–259 FRESH CUT
110–113 AGENTS OF CHANGE photography PHILIP –DANIEL DUCASSE styling NELL KALONJI
Forensic Architecture is the crack team of investigators adapting new
tech to solve cases of state-sponsored violence old and new 260 – 273 SCENE STEALERS
photography LESLIE ZHANG styling AUSTIN FENG
114–125 WHERE DO WE GO NOW?
photography WINTER VANDENBRINK styling MIRKO PEDONE 274–287 RECORD BREAKERS!
photography ANDREA ARTEMISIO styling IMRUH ASHA
126–135 AZEALIA BANKS
photography CAMPBELL ADDY styling IB KAMARA 298 – 303 THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
After heartbreaks, setbacks and stints spent living in storage, photography ANTON GOTTLOB
the most talented rapper of her generation is back to break her Anna Cafolla goes back to school in this tender and heart -wrenchingly
‘karmic cycle’ with a truckload of new music funny conversation with the kids of Generation Alpha

photography photography photography photography photography photography photography

BRENT MCKEEVER
Ice Spice wears all clothes
TOMMY JEANS SPRING 2023,
all jewellery her own
GABRIEL MOSES
styling
FELIX PARADZA and MARK
MUTYAMBIZI
Clint wears faux fur coat SAINT
LAURENT BY ANTHONY
VACCARELLO, denim blazer
and trousers OFF-WHITE,
cotton tank top AMI, brass,
metal and glass crystal cross
necklace and gold-plated brass,
rhinestone and glass necklace
DOLCE & GABBANA, all other
jewellery his own
HARLEY WEIR MIKAEL JANSSON
styling styling
IMRUH ASHA IBRAHIM KAMARA
Phoebe wears silk and Sophia wears satin dress
cotton cardigan LORO PIANA DEL CORE, lace and satin bra
Cocooning Collection, GUESS, tights stylist’s own,
jewellery their own. brass and glass stones earrings
GIAMBATTISTA VALLI, leather
and grosgrain slingbacks
CHANEL
PAOLO ROVERSI
styling
IBRAHIM KAMARA
Top to bottom row, left to
right: Brent, Nadine, Justin,
Will, Gabriel, Hugo, Thibaut,
Campbell, Clara, Rafael, Renell,
Malick and Lea wear all clothes
and accessories BOTTEGA
VENETA SUMMER 2023
RENELL MEDRANO
styling
MARIKA-ELLA AMES
Zaya wears all clothes and
leather boots MIU MIU SS23,
vintage necklace and ring
RELLIK LONDON
CAMPBELL ADDY
styling
IBRAHIM KAMARA
Azealia wears terry sponge
dress DOLCE & GABBANA,
tights stylist’s own, silver and
brass ear cuffs HUGO KREIT,
all other jewellery her own

DAZED
 editor-in-chief editorial director art director group editorial director
IBRAHIM KAMARA KACION MAYERS GARETH WRIGHTON JEFFERSON HACK
ib.kamara@dazedmedia.com kacion.mayers@dazedmedia.com gareth.wrighton@dazedmedia.com

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©2023 DAZED CBP002438

published by WADDELLLIMITED
registered address: 2nd Floor,
1 Surrey Street, London, WC2R 2ND
T: +44 (0) 207 549 6803

ISSN NO: 0961-9704

DAZED is published in the UK four times a year

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without permission from the publishers. The views expressed in Dazed are those of the respective
contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. The magazine welcomes ideas and new contributors but can assume no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustrations.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owners of the images in this issue. If you can help identify the copyright owner of an uncredited image, please get in touch with the photographic department.

DAZED
 NEW
ISSUE, WHO
DIS?
Every time spring starts, the world seems to open up and stretch its wings.
Like a flower in bloom, a feeling of newness and possibility hits the air, and
we all get excited to be outside and embrace the full richness of life again.
‘New’ is a notion that we constantly think about at Dazed. Every time we
close the book on an issue and start the next one, we ask, what is truly new
this season? What kinds of thoughts, songs, flavours and fashion will define
the coming months? Maybe it was an idea that we never saw coming, or
a concept remixed and made fresh again. Whatever ‘new’ means when it
arrives, it is always exciting and lays fresh creative tarmac for us as a team.
The beauty of magazines in 2023 and beyond is that you get the chance to
capture newness with more depth and scope than ever – and we hope to
have achieved that in this issue.
When the young climate activists Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup over
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” last winter, they asked: “What is worth more: art
or life?” It was a statement that felt like a bolt of lightning through the global
movement for change, pitting our core human values against our thirst for
creativity and expression. It felt like a new form of protest and, as we began
to develop an issue themed around newness, we reached out to the group
immediately alongside a handful of vital global voices such as Vanessa
Nakate and Genesis Butler. Across an epic cover editorial, Imruh Asha and
Harley Weir team up with the radical soup-throwers to add a Dazed twist to
the viral stunt, reappropriating iconic artworks from the Mona Lisa to the
Girl With a Pearl Earring.
Clint of Corteiz has always grappled with the limitless possibilities of
newness. In his debut cover feature and first tell-all interview, he explains
how his new Nike drop felt like the natural escalation of his self-made
empire, and how his obsessions inform his skewering of the London
underground. Elsewhere, Azealia Banks returns more than ten years
after her condom-splitting Dazed cover to discuss the ways she manages
her often misunderstood public persona in an epic and truly magnificent
profile, photographed by Campbell Addy.
It felt right to marry a New York rap icon with one fresh out of the
gate. Photographed by Brent McKeever, Ice Spice brings a bubblegum
femininity to Bronx drill, and her sound has hit the scene like an earthquake.
Born at the click of the millennium on January 1, 2000, she is the perfect
cover star for an issue exploring all forms of newness. “By the time the
Bronx started popping up, I was already in the booth, plotting,” she tells
Matthew Trammell. For our Hot Shots! cover story, McKeever is one of 13
photographers profiled for the fresh techniques and perspectives they
bring to image-making in 2023. Shot by Paolo Roversi, the pioneering leg-
end whose photography has inspired them all, we bring these unstoppable
talents together to celebrate their unique styles.
Finally, it wouldn’t be Dazed if we didn’t hand over our pages to the
young people whose future burns brightest of all. In another cover debut,
trans hero Zaya Wade reflects on the importance of standing your ground
and staying true to your core, taking questions on gender positivity from
Gen Z voices who have also challenged gender norms. And from Z to A, the
kids of Generation Alpha take writer Anna Cafolla back to school, as the
next wave of youth culture share their hopes for the future.
In our fashion cover story, shot in Senegal by Mikael Jansson, I wanted
to explore the beauty of the continent and tell the stories near and dear to
my heart. We hope you enjoy our New Issue – and feel just as excited about
the future as we always do.

IBRAHIM KAMARA, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

DAZED
production VARYLAB
 STARTERS
What’s new and what’s
next for our pick of
the names pushing
ESEOSA OHEN
culture forward

artist and director

Like a young Hype Williams or Chris Cunningham, Eseosa
Ohen is making music videos that matter. He co-founded the
filmmaking project SOB alongside his creative partner, Joe
Shaw, whom he met on a graphic design course at Central
Saint Martins. Using dutch tilts, blurred lenses, mad angles
and psychedelic pixels, the pair have made game-changing
clips for future-soul singer Collard, and for the likes of Griff
and sustainable outdoor fashion brand Houdini.

DAZED
BERNICE MULENGA
artist and photographer
By their own admission, Bernice Mulenga does nothing but
ask questions. You can almost hear the British-Congolese
photographer’s inquisitiveness in their intricate, carefully lit
prismatic portraiture, which documents themes of community,
sexuality and identity. Mulenga’s ongoing series #friendsonfilm
takes us into their intimate inner circle, a keyhole into the Black
queer nightlife they have explored since 2015 at iconic London
nights like BBZ and Pxssy Palace.

77
 CHLOE GEORGE
Chloe George’s music is all about moments that take you back
in time, to the points in life that define youth and true love.
The Bay Area-born, LA-based songwriter was raised by a
drummer father and a music teacher mother, and began her
music career co-writing for the likes of Normani and Dua Lipa.
But it was her haunting and nostalgia-coated pop cover of
Kanye’s “Ghost Town” that jumpstarted her solo career,
clinging to the top of the TikToks for weeks. A creative
outsider making a home in our hearts, George and her pop
time machine will dominate 2023.

DAZED
 FERANMI ESO
artist and image-maker
Dubbed the ‘future of fashion’ by Vogue in 2020, Central Saint
Martins BA communications student and model Feranmi Eso
has already found himself on the set of a Dazed cover shoot
as an assistant casting director, on the pages of Models.com
as a ‘face of the minute’ and in a spring/summer campaign for
avant-garde label Sage Nation. With his finger on the pulse
and his ear to the ground, when asked what he loves most
about his time at CSM, he replied simply, “The lessons I learn
from casual conversations.”

DAZED
 WILLIAM WALSH
art adviser
You may have seen a suited blonde man standing next to your
favourite artists this year, from Virgil Abloh collaborator Slawn to
Heron Preston. Art adviser and enigma William Walsh has had a
hand in some of the most influential creative projects of recent
times, and, like a wizard or a pop culture prophet, seems to exist
at least six months ahead of the art world at all times. Keep a tab.

DAZED
 STELLA EXPLORER
musician
The Stockholm-based producer and singer named her summer
2022 debut EP Dorkay House after the South African community
centre her musician father found refuge in during apartheid.
Like his journey of escape, Explorer’s music feels like a flight
from reality, where acid-washed synths and futurist hyper-
ballads reign hard, and lay new paths for pop music.

DAZED
BLUMARINE.COM
text GÜNSELI YALÇINKAYA

FEELING SCENE
Faces from NYC’s creative milieu
drop a pin in their favourite places to hang
TYLER BAINBRIDGE
The founder of cult newsletter
Perfectly Imperfect is shining a
spotlight on downtown’s new guard
of emerging tastemakers
BEST PLACE
TO GRAB FOOD
Noodle Pudding, a charming
neighbourhood staple in Brooklyn
Heights. My landlord has owned
it for over 20 years and he’s one of
the nicest people I know. The man
makes a mean Sunday sauce.
BEST PLACE TO SHOP
I’m a big fan of the curated vintage
designer clothing and art tees that
Kathleen Sorbara keeps stocked at
Chickee’s in Williamsburg. Most of
my favourite pieces are from here.

BEST UNDERGROUND GEMS BEST VIEWS OF THE CITY AND

BEST CLUB NIGHT
/ PLACE TO GO CLUBBING
My friend Harrison (AKA The Dare)
hosts the Freakquencies DJ night at
Home Sweet Home, where you can
always count on sick electroclashy
dance music and a cool crowd.
/ HANGOUT SPOTS
It’s not exactly underground, but one of my favourite
bars in New York City is Brooklyn Social Club. It’s not
trying to do a whole thing or sell you overpriced cock-
tails, it’s just a charming bar with a pool table and kind
employees who greet you with a smile. Just don’t sit
at the corner table, that’s mine.
/ OR PLACE THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT
I like to drag friends to Red Hook to get some Hometown
Bar-B-Que, a few beers at Sunny’s, a mini key lime pie
from Steve’s to eat as the sun sets behind the Statue of
Liberty, and maybe stop at Ice House on the way back.
The perfect Sunday afternoon.

BEST GALLERY
My fave gallery is Galerie Perrotin.
They recently showcased one of
my favourite artists, ob. Definitely
check them both out.
CLIP
BEST PLACE TO SHOP
The internet It girl shaping the city’s sound Best place to shop is honestly
with her logged-on take on sad-girl rap everywhere; I’m fortunate that
I have so many friends in New
York who make clothes and
I love supporting their talent.
BEST PLACE TO GRAB FOOD Also the Rick Owens store,
Yaya Tea is the best place to grab food. There’s a of course.
couple of locations but my fave is the one in Chinatown.
Salmon rice balls are my go-to whenever I need a
quick yummy meal.

BEST CLUB NIGHT

/ PLACE TO GO CLUBBING
Four Irving Avenue (AKA Heaven)
is the best place to go clubbing.
Not only are the lineups always
fire but it’s such a welcoming, cute
vibe – always a fun time.
BEST UNDERGROUND GEMS
/ HANGOUT SPOTS
Best hangout spot has to be Off Record studios. I don’t
really like to hang out, I love working, so being able to
pull up to Off Record to make music and run into friends
and then end the night on good vibes is always great.
BEST VIEWS OF THE CITY AND / OR PLACE
THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT
The best view of the city is my friend’s rooftop in
Harlem. You can see it all and it’s really quiet up there,
which is rare for New York. I love going up there when
I need time to myself to come back to Earth. I would
share where it’s at but that would mean doxxing my
friend so I’ll have to gatekeep.

CTRL+C REALITY
Peer to peer at New York’s club night
for the eternally online
Entering ZeroSpace, a cavernous
multimedia warehouse located in
Brooklyn, is like stepping into a virtual
funhouse, where head-spinning
mixed-reality AV performances and live
music by some of the internet’s most
charismatic talents combine to generate
one of the craziest live experiences
on this side of the metaverse. We’re
here for Diskokina, a one-of-a-kind club
theatre co-presented by ZeroSpace,
sibling-led image studio Team Rolfes and
extremely online music collective Club
Cringe. For one night only, attendees are
given the chance to Ctrl+C reality and
dive headfirst into digital disarray, with
five hours and five acts featuring the
likes of former Dazed cover stars Frost
Children and PC Music affiliates GFOTY
and Lil Mariko.
The metaverse has garnered a
less-than-positive reputation this past
year for being dull and sanitised. But
ZeroSpace represents an exciting new
prospect: imagine what a large-scale
digital event could look like if it was
run by actual artists, not tech corps.
Described by event organiser and
artist Sam Rolfes as a “metaverse
parody”, running around Diskokina is
like stepping into your phone, a wacky
and immersive spectacle packed with
3D and AV live shows, where scripted
theatre bumps up against live motion
capture, interactive game-design
and VR puppetry.
“In the name of the father, the
son and the holy cunt, welcome to
Diskokina,” the kink-positive, vibrator-
wielding artist known as Von welcomes
the crowd. She introduces us to an
animated flying sprite named Kina,
dubbed “the world’s first AI superfan”,
who acts as the night’s host. Refusing
to take itself too seriously, Diskokina
can be thought of as neo-slapstick,
peppered with tongue-in-cheek Skype
appearances from Club Cringe’s Angel
Money and a nine-to-five millennial work
skit featuring Lil Mariko beefing with a
cowboy spambot. Yes, it’s absurd,
a sensory overload rendered in 5G,
but lean back and embrace the chaos.

DAZED
 BIANCA PEREZ
BEST GALLERY TO VISIT
The terminally tapped-in meme admin I love the classics, of course:
behind the esoteric yet extremely popular Gagosian, Guggenheim, the
account @yung_nihilist New Museum. There was a great
show by Tirzah at the Sculpture
Center this year. Shoot the
BEST CLUB NIGHT Lobster, Housing, Anonymous,
/ PLACE TO GO CLUBBING Lubov and The Hole are also some
As far as NYC goes, it’s a tie between Paragon and great smaller galleries that cater
Nowadays. I’m obsessed with the renovations made to up-and-coming artists.
at Paragon. The chequered ballroom is very Eyes Wide
Shut-core and the basement is super well-lit; you feel
like you’re in a Lynchian club scene.

BEST UNDERGROUND
BEST VIEWS OF THE CITY AND / OR GEMS / HANGOUT SPOTS
PLACE THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT Pier 36 in the Lower East Side has
Personally, I think cemeteries are hugely great views of the Brooklyn Bridge
underrated. Green-Wood in Sunset Park has epic goth and these huge industrial swings
vibes and there’s a ton in Queens that I’d love to visit. that are fun to hang out on. I also like
BEST PLACE TO SHOP the vibes on Little Island in Hudson
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big shopper – in fact I’m in dire River Park and Riverside Park.
need of a whole wardrobe change. I’ve shopped my fair
share of thrift and retail but it’s still pretty hard to come BEST PLACE TO GRAB FOOD
across unique pieces in plus sizes, even in our current I hope this doesn’t make the wait lines even longer
era of body positivity. What excites me the most in than they already are, but I’m a huge fan of Ichiran ramen
fashion right now is the influx of ‘ironic’ DIY brands that chains. It’s the most solid bowl of ramen in NYC without
just sell via Instagram DM. I’m super inspired by the cult being ridiculously overpriced. The music, the booths
popularity brands like @ogbff_ and @bodycitated have and the general atmosphere are unlike most places.
been able to build from a sewing machine in their rooms.
BEST PLACE TO SHOP
Lucky Jewel, Big Ash,
Lara Koleji, James Veloria.
THE DARE The downtown classics!
Leading the downtown club scene with his musical project
The Dare, Harrison Patrick Smith is one of the breakout BEST UNDERGROUND
stars of NYC’s indie sleaze revival GEMS / HANGOUT SPOTS
Can’t give mine away or else
they won’t be underground any
BEST PLACE TO GRAB FOOD more. People are calling Times
Essex McDonald’s. But if you’re flashy, any of Keith Square the new Dimes Square,
McNally’s restaurants: Pastis, Minetta Tavern, so maybe go there?
Balthazar. Beautiful lighting.

BEST GALLERY BEST CLUB NIGHT

BEST VIEWS OF THE CITY
AND / OR PLACE THAT NO
ONE KNOWS ABOUT
Crossing the Williamsburg bridge
on the JMZ.
/ EXHIBITION SPOT
Triest, Gern en Regalia and Theta.
The big three of the underground
art scene (to me) – and my friends
either show at or run them.
/ PLACE TO GO CLUBBING
Freakquencies, which is the club
night I host every Thursday. The
drinks are cheap, the music is loud,
and people go crazy.

REN G BEST VIEWS OF THE CITY

The frontwoman of DIY duo Club Eat is tearing up the city’s AND/OR PLACE THAT NO
nightlife with her angsty take on electroclash ONE KNOWS ABOUT
The Seneca Avenue M train
BEST CLUB NIGHT platform. You can catch a really
Club Eat, duh! We began as a club night before scenic view of the city from most
becoming a band and still throw parties to this day. BEST PLACE TO SHOP Metropolitan Avenue-bound M
It’s our space to book our favourite artists and Lucky Jewel, a newly opened shop in Chinatown platforms after Myrtle-Wyckoff.
test out our new trax. featuring clothes from the eponymous brand as well as
selects from other up-and-coming brands.

BEST PLACE BEST GALLERY TO VISIT BEST UNDERGROUND

TO GRAB FOOD
Joe’s Italian in Ridgewood. Classic
Queens Italian food. The best
portions for the best price! Highly
recommend for a celebration
of any kind.
Gandt gallery is the freshest
gallery in the city right now… and
it’s in Queens! We’ve been fans
ever since the space opened
in 2019 with Adam Martin’s
stunning show C.E.M.
GEMS / NIGHT CLUBS
Rash in Bushwick, one of our
favourite spots to perform and DJ
at. It was destroyed by an arson
attack last year but is said to be
opening up again soon.

DAZED
text GÜNSELI YALÇINKAYA
How digital natives learned to tune out the IRL and
find God in the guiding hand of the algorithm
It’s January, and I’m sitting in the smokers’ area of a
south London club as a guy tries to convince me that
the silver crucifix around his neck is spiritual protec-
tion against the night, which he claims is a “pagan
reverse psy-op”. We’re here for gr1n, the latest in
a series of experimental nights in the city exploring
the relationship between technology and the
spiritual. Ravers dressed in white robes and chains
encircle an electric chair that’s positioned in the
centre of the dancefloor, as they move in time to
the wobbles of bass. There are wires everywhere,
and a performer in head-to-toe Cyberdog dances a
new age dance as the audience watches on. “See!”
says crucifix guy, pointing to the chair as proof
– and I think he actually believes it.
Earlier that month, while the internet was busy
debating the intricacies of Schiaparelli’s faux-taxider-
my animal heads, Rick Owens had debuted his AW23
collection at Paris Fashion Week. Inspired by ancient
Egypt, he described the season’s low-slung leather
pants and ab-baring capes as carrying “a whiff of
sleazy 70s pseudo mysticism”. The previous season
had also seen designers like Chopova Lowena, Paolo
Carzana and Simone Rocha take a similar approach,
drawing on the healing properties of essential oils
and crystals, both core components of the new-age
arcana of the 1970s. In his cruise 2023 show for
Gucci, Alessandro Michele also turned to the
ethereal, staging a lunar eclipse on the celestial
grounds of a 13th-century castle. The collection,
he said, was his attempt “to launch the narrative of
the House into the stars”; the fantastical garments,
starry iconography and attention to cosmic detail
only bolstered the sense of mysticism.
From IRL fashion shows and club nights to social
media and Reddit threads, people are tuning in and
dropping out as people turn to the mystical to make
sense of the chaotic world around them. Sliced up
and repackaged into post-ironic bytes, millennia-old
ideas are being slammed, remixed and fragmented
into memes and online ephemera.
While some turn to ancient religions – gnostic
symbols, cabbalistic charts and pagan iconogra-
phy – many online posters are embracing ‘trad-cath’
aesthetics, while others are choosing to see God
in the computer. Sometimes it’s a mix. Either way,
it’s becoming increasingly apparent that there’s an
esoteric spiritualism in the air.
It’s not that we’re operating on a higher frequency
than before, although the frantic pace of information
might make it seem that way. Rather, the internet has
DAZED
created space for arcane beliefs to multiply and fester
during a time of social and political upheaval. This was
no doubt accelerated by two terminally online years
of pandemic in which billionaires jetted off to space,
the economy plummeted and people felt betrayed by
modern science and its promises of a better, fairer
world. During this time, private internet spaces and
meme channels, also known as ‘the Dark Forest’,
thrived as consensus reality evaporated, with people
turning away from official news sources and towards
fringe beliefs (as seen by the uptick in conspiracy the-
ories surrounding QAnon and the New World Order).
“There are all these ways [in which] the concrete
sense of being somewhere has evaporated, and
into these gaps run all these idealisms, mysticisms,
rumours of God,” says Erik Davis, the author of
Techgnosis and High Weirdness. “Because human
worldbuilding is hackable, you can throw more
weird possibilities, constructs, propositions,
systems, conspiracies, and it will actually start
producing the sense of another world.” When paired
with the overarching feeling that we can no longer
condense the complexities of our feelings into
scientific frameworks (for example, the death of
therapy-speak) and the poor living conditions of late
capitalism, this hyper-networking results in a vibrant
experimentalism, where identities are performed
and mythologised. On TikTok and Instagram, users
inhabit their own realities as magical thinking or
Larping acts as a portal to new imagined worlds,
while the algorithm guides our interests in mysterious
ways, like a higher power guiding our every move with
an invisible hand. There’s a feeling that material and
virtual reality has broken down to such an extent that
everything is post-truth, everything is a Larp, so we
turn to myth-making to fill in the blanks.
Scrolling down my feed, I encounter a multitude
of spiritual beliefs condensed into UI-friendly content,
from sorcerous Wojaks and lion-headed serpents
to pagan sigils and the numograms created by the
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an exper-
imental wing of the Warwick University philosophy
department blending cybernetic theory with a
fascination for the occult in the late 90s.
This isn’t God-talk in the traditional sense, but
a choose-your-own-adventure, spirituality edition.
“What we’re seeing is remix culture on spiritual ster-
oids,” agrees Davis. There’s WitchTok and new- age
revivalists, neo-pagans and heaps of freaky IG pages
untangling the writings of old mystery cults from
ancient literature. Elsewhere, purple-pilled memes
featuring cyber angels and celestial waifus with
captions that read “god’s little soldier” attract the
sort of tumblr-adjacent girlblogger who believes
angel numbers are a sign that the universe is on
your side. “We can now go into these esoteric texts
that are available online and pull out super intense,
mystic language and put it into the context of
post-irony,” Davis elaborates.
Within online music circles, and particularly
among the Soundcloud rap scene, Drain Gang’s
gospel spreads like hellfire across Reddit and 4chan.
The Swedish group have masterminded countless
cryptic music videos, posts and lyrics that draw on
esoteric mythology, and often include icons, numbers
and symbols such as GTBSG, d9 and holy number 3,
which play into the group’s extensive lore. From meme
to myth, drainerdom has acquired pseudo-spiritual
weight since the pandemic, with fans unpicking a
multitude of references from gnostic mysticism to
folklore, the occult and paintings by visionary Swedish
artist Hilma af Klint. For its logged-on fanbase, the
sermon of Bladee is more than just an AutoTuned call
to “confess your sins”: it’s scripture.
Whether people actually believe in the occult
forces of r/sadboy threads, or the divine protection
of 11:11 screenshots on an iPhone screen, is unclear
and, for the most part, irrelevant. “The world sucks
and young people in particular must be really suffering
with the sense of a closed-out future and the upper-
crust polarisation of money in our society, which is just
gonna get worse,” says Davis. There’s an absurdity to
the content which reflects the nihilism we feel, where
it’s easier to post images of Jesus delivering a sermon
on a mound of microplastics, or a bimbofied Stacy
strutting into the Pure Land, than it is to question
the conditions that created such an atmosphere of
disassociation and unreality to begin with. “If people
are really suffering then there is sometimes a real
earnestness to where you turn, whether it’s astrology
or the meditation pillow or a Franciscan retreat.”
But it’s also cool to see God in the machine.
There’s something about the mix of edgy symbology
and contemporary internet references that, as an
aesthetic, feels based. Posting images of CCRU
numograms overlaid with images of neo-chibi angels
won’t actually make us any wiser, but the effect is
akin to the feeling of having read A Thousand Plateaus.
This is presumably because the internet itself holds an
innately spiritual quality. “If you squint hard enough,
DAZED
you can start tracing these parallels between heaven
and the digital, and then you can see the angelic
nature of what it means to be online,” says Nate
Sloan, cultural theorist and meme admin behind the
Instagram account @vitruviangrimace.
The digital realm is abstracted from reality; it’s so
vast that it’s incomprehensible, which only adds to the
sense of the divine. “I think people have realised that
the internet works as a portal, a temple and a place
of comfort. It’s a place where we can manifest how
we show ourselves and act [in] the world,” says the
anonymous user behind the meme account 3rd.world.
elite, who posts mock-inspirational quotes overlaid
with esoteric symbolism and Templar crosses. It’s not
surprising that a lot of nu-spiritual content online has
ties to 90s cyberculture: when heading the CCRU,
philosopher Nick Land, who later reemerged as a
prominent fascist thinker, famously compared lines of
code to spells to highlight the idea that you can shape
your own reality – a sentiment that also fuelled the
basis of 60s counterculture.
“If you understand God as the sum total of human
reason, a way of abstracting humans’ ability to act on
its environment, and reshape itself or its environment,
the internet is an attempt to speed up and make that
God come into an increasing degree of self-aware-
ness by hyper-accelerating the minds’ abilities to
communicate with each other,” explains Sloan.
Schizoposting – an unfiltered approach to sharing
information via unintelligible text walls, memes and
videos – promotes a similarly fast-paced and formless
style of communicating, and is ubiquitous among
these online communities, while the internet’s capac-
ity to derealise and dissociate is arguably the most
accessible way to reach religious ecstasy. Combine
this with ketamine as the drug of choice for a genera-
tion of young people post-pandemic, and it becomes
the perfect potion for accessing the sublime.
But at what point does the content stop and the
real practice begin? “If it’s just meme play, there’s a
point where the rubber does not hit the road,” warns
Davis. “Whatever’s animating religious or spiritual
practice has to have an element of actual practice
with your mind, body and spirit as you interact with
the world.” Just as posting memes about touching
grass isn’t the same as going outside and touching it,
no amount of magical thinking will alter the conditions
that made us want to transcend the IRL plane to
begin with. You have to make the meme a reality.
92
photography FREDDIE ODEDE
East meets west in Gida, the pan-
African print journal spotlighting

AL
new creative talent on both sides
of the lens. Here, founder and
creative director Momo reflects

N
on the homecoming that led to its launch

UR
JO – and the people and places that inspire her
DA
GI
text SENI SARAKI
The struggles for African passport-holding travellers to visit almost any
western country are well-documented. Last year alone, more than 50%
of Nigerian citizens’ Schengen visa applications were denied, preventing
not just tourists from visiting Europe, but artisans, fashion designers and
musicians, too. The part that isn’t quite as spoken about, though, is that
sometimes it’s just as difficult for Africans to travel and collaborate within
their own continent. Today, capital cities across west and east Africa still
do not operate daily direct flights, and the pandemic has deepened the
already glaring divide between these estranged relative nations.
It’s a gap that young, vibrant creative communities springing up across
cultural hubs such as Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Nairobi and Kampala have
succeeded in bridging over the past five years. From music to fashion and
their surrounding industries, there has been more collaboration than ever,
a boom that’s been driven and encouraged by polymaths like Momo.
From as early as she can remember, Morinsola Hassan-Odukale – known
to her friends and collaborators simply as Momo – has always wanted to
explore where she was from.
Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, Momo has
moved back to her native Nigeria, where she has dedicated herself to nur-
turing the links between creative communities across the continent – and
the seeds she started planting five years ago are growing. With a back-
ground in styling and creative direction – she has worked with acclaimed
Nigerian artists such as Asake, Tems and Ayra Starr as well as brands like
Nike and Lagos Fashion Week – Momo built a full-stack creative agency
and print magazine, Gida, developing a close-knit creative community with
local talents whose stories, she felt, weren’t being heard.
What started as a passion print project to illuminate the visual artists
and storytellers around her quickly became a platform straddling east and
west Africa, telling stories at the intersection of travel and fashion. Its first
edition, released last year, saw the creative director visit six major cities,
working with 60+ creatives across west Africa. As she embarks on its
second issue, focusing on east Africa, we caught up with Momo from Lamu
Island in Kenya to discuss how Central Saint Martins shaped her artistic
identity, and what’s in store for the future.
What education, formal and otherwise, did you receive in the creative
industry, and how did these experiences shape your creativity now?
I went to Central Saint Martins and I would say it is
probably the best place from which to go on to do what
I am doing now. [You’re] around people who are going
for what they want and what they love, and are express-
ing themselves first and foremost. That was important
for me. There’s an energy [there] but at the end of
the day, the university is really what you make of it.
[It’s about] looking around and being able to find inspira-
tion everywhere with so many people, so many cultures.
Ultimately, the experience allowed me to be confident
enough just to go for it.
It’s a prestigious school with lots of connections, so why did you
choose to come home to a developing fashion industry?
I think it was feeling like there’s more out there. Where
I’m from holds a big place in what I thought my purpose
was in life and where I wanted to make a change.
I’d been so fortunate to learn from so many people: even
if I was interning and feeling like I was being used, I still
felt like at least I was learning things. Obviously, fashion
is still developing on my continent and it’s not near
where it needs to be, but I always felt very connected to
[it] so I made a choice to come back home.
Having spent so many years being educated in the UK, how does that
impact your affinity for African exploration?
From a very young age, I’ve always wanted to explore
Africa. The things I’m interested in are so widespread;
It’s really just all sorts of things that I’m trying to bring
together. I’ve always wanted to be able to do shoots
with stylists and photographers here. There’s nothing
like being able to live, work and travel on my continent.
Many Nigerians are not well-travelled within Africa,
which I always found quite strange. I feel like in other
parts of Africa [people] travel a lot more than we do, and
I don’t get why. My best friend since I was 11 is Kenyan.
We always spoke about travelling and working across
the continent. So even though I did grow up in the UK
I was still around people like her. We would constantly
speak about coming back to work here.
Why is travelling so important to you?
Travelling is important because I just feel so at peace,
especially [when I’m] discovering new cultures and
places. I like to soak in new environments and I think
that I’m able to get inspiration from them. I don’t like
being stuck in one place, because I guess my inspiration
really derives from exploring.
Tourism doesn’t play a big role in the Nigerian economy, is that some-
thing you have noticed to be true?
For sure. I don’t think Nigeria cares about tourism, not
as much as we could or should. It’s like, when people
come and visit your country, how do you want them to
feel? What do you want them to see? I guess Nigerians
don’t treat their country well enough to care about
tourism. I wouldn’t advise tourists to come to Nigeria
unless they knew people personally – and that’s
when I feel like it’s safe to come. It’s quite sad.
There’s so much that could be done, so much that
hopefully will be done. I’m definitely hopeful.
What’s it like being a Nigerian tourist in east African countries?
[A lot of the time] I’m just like, ‘Wow, I can actually go
to a place that’s in Africa and it’s safe.’ I’m a bit jealous,
if anything. But I guess it makes me proud to be African.
Every country is obviously different in how they treat
tourists, but in all the countries that I’ve been to people
have been very respectful and welcoming. So yeah,
it’s great.
In your experience, how does this differ from tourism in the west?
Well, like I said, everyone’s different, but it’s almost
more homey than with tourism here. You feel welcome
in a way that’s not too superficial, if that makes sense?
They take a lot of pride in their culture, their food.
Ultimately I would say it’s just different, I guess.
Gida feels powered by a specific set of experiences that you share with
your collaborators. How did you come up with the concept?
I founded Gida because I’ve always loved styling and
I’ve always loved travelling. I’m [based in] Lagos but at
the end of the day, I wanted some things that, for me
personally, had a bit more impact and would go a long
way, and help other people – that was really important.
I’ve also always been a huge fan of print. I’m definitely
one of those people [who] will keep print alive forever,
as much as I can. If people think print is dying, I think
the opposite. So I just asked, ‘How can I work with other
people? And how can I – as well as bringing African
fashion to the forefront – also bring the creatives
and the artists?’
Why do you think Gida is important now?
I feel like a publication like this never really existed
before – [at least], not that I know of. This is just the
beginning; we have so many ideas of where we want to
take it. For me it was about doing things I’m doing now
but making something out of it that has higher value and
higher impact, not just for myself but for other people.
Hopefully [it’s] promoting travel and tourism. I genuinely
do see people travelling a bit more because of me – peo-
ple told me that! It’s important because we have such
amazing creatives doing such amazing work here that
need to be documented, and also [because] we in Africa
need to be able to see what other people around Africa
are doing. It’s not just about the west seeing what
we’re doing, it’s about us growing our infrastructure
together as a whole. I think that Gida [can] be a platform
where African artists feel like they can bring their work
to us – where their work is valued, and they’re able to
get jobs and collaborations from being a part of it. It’s
almost like an agency in print.
95
text SHIRI SHAH
Exploring stories from the Qur’an through a non-binary lens,
activist and adopted New Yorker Lamya H’s memoir
is a queer manifesto and a radical affirmation of faith
The first time I encountered Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s seminal
1993 novel about lesbianism in America, I was enamoured by its tenderness.
This year’s Hijab Butch Blues, a memoir by essayist and activist Lamya
H, takes Feinberg’s work further and adjusts the lens. The opening pages
of this queer Muslim opus find the author as a 14-year-old in Qur’an class
considering a lesbian Virgin Mary (Or Maryam, as she is known in Islam),
before the book develops into part-autobiography and part-reinterpretation
of Islamic and Middle Eastern lore. In this coming-of-age story following the
author from their birthplace in south Asia to the Middle East and eventually
New York, where they are now based, Lamya’s strength is pulled from the
mythologies they discover in the Qur’an.
Hijab Butch Blues might be Lamya H’s first work of autobiography, but
they have been publishing essays on queer Muslim subjectivities and prison
abolition since 2014. Moving from
academic longform to first-person
narrative was a learning curve for
the writer. Trust and faith are major
themes in the story, and Lamya
parallels the necessity of trusting
ourselves and others during periods
of doubt and isolation to the physical
and spiritual journeys prophets
undertake to achieve enlightenment.
In Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya takes us
on a trip through time and space as
we follow their complex relationship
with sexuality and gender.
When we connected on a video
call, the anonymous New York-
based author kept their camera off,
switching my focus to the cadence
of their voice – their dialectical shifts
hinting at the different places, and
personas, they’ve lived.
Your narrative structure makes me think about both geographical
displacement and the displacement of desire – themes present in
many religious texts, by way of spiritual and bodily transition.
There’s a freedom that displacement offers, in the
sense that it allows you to invent yourself anew. And I
think there are ways in which, at least in my experience,
it made it possible because I was so used to moving
around a lot. I felt like I could be queer in the ways that
I wanted to, and if things didn’t work out, I could move.
It’s also interesting because I think displacement is
also such a big theme in Islam. So many prophets were
displaced. Musa [Moses], for example, moving with his
people across the Red Sea to a different land, and even
Prophet Muhammad moving from Mecca to Medina.
That’s such a theme both in Islam and in my life. And I
think it definitely relates to queerness. In the sense that
it made it possible for me to live my queerness in ways
I don’t necessarily know I would have been able to [if I
was] living in the same city my parents were in, or even
the same country.
I think that’s what relates your work to spirituality. When you’re true
to yourself, you might need to define your own moral compass. That’s
a huge responsibility, because you’re figuring yourself out outside of
a context that people have defined for you previously.
Yeah, and I think what’s really hard about that is that
we don’t, as queer people, necessarily have models
in the same way. I think of myself ten years ago, not
knowing a lot of queer elders, or just not knowing
DAZED
what the possibilities were for my life. That’s also part
of why I wrote this book, because it felt like a way to
put stories out there into the world about alternative
ways to live. I think about that a lot. The fact that we’ve
had to chart our own way, and do it without models.
This is also where some of the Qur’an stories come
in for me. Once I started seeing all these prophets as
flawed characters who make somewhat questionable
decisions, and you know, are possibly queer and have
their own difficulties and stories, it felt more possible
to have them as models, as opposed to these saintly
figures who never do anything wrong.
It’s like the chapter for Maryam [Mary]. You positing her sapphism was
great, because Maryam is so often desexualised. Lesbians and queer
women, unless they’re commodified within a pornographic framework,
are desexualised too. I love that you reintroduced sexuality to Mary,
who is positioned on one side of the dichotomy a lot of the time.
I just keep coming back to those lines over and over
in the Qur’an, where this handsome man comes up to
Maryam, and she’s just totally unfazed. She’s like, no,
thank you. Please leave. I just so viscerally remember
reading that at 14 and being like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s
something here,’ even if I didn’t have the words for it.
I think the idea of seeing these prophets as living,
breathing people is important to me in terms of the
stories I want to model my life around or carry with me.
I was struck by the way you write characters in the book and how
you celebrate your love for friends that you made when you moved
to New York. I love the descriptions of your first trip to a Muslim
LGBTQ+ meetup, especially.
I remember that moment blowing my mind because
I didn’t even think you could pray like that. The way
being in the mixed-gender line felt so right. A few
times we tried to do that at the Islamic centre [in New
York] as well, with varying degrees of success. I think
another aspect of the community thing is also really
just building communities of queer Muslims that are
able to practise in ways that feel more expansive
and queer and not gender-segregated, for example.
Where critique and questioning is not only allowed but
welcome, and is done in ways that feel like they expand
possibilities. I think those are the things that have
really saved me in the end – having access to commu-
nity, and feeling a part of something that feels like it’s
building towards justice.
What, for you, is the moral of this story?
I want the audience to come away with the sense of how
messy faith is, but how that mess is also generative.
And not just faith, actually, but queerness, race – all
these things are messy. The lived experience of these
things is never linear, never simple. But complexity in
and of itself is something to aspire to, because it makes
space for different kinds of lives. It makes space for
queerness, among other things. It allows an expan-
siveness that is important to me. It’s taken me a while
to realise that, but it’s something I wanted to convey.
And also just this idea of love being more than romantic
love, and expanding out to the love you can have for
your community, your chosen family, your partner, the
people around you. [It’s about] expanding the notion of
love and queering the idea of love itself.
THE
O-ZONE Ladies,
shall
we have
women own their sexual narrative, fielding the frank
sex and relationships podcast Laid Bare and appearing
in Netflix’s Sex: Unzipped documentary in 2021. In
fun? September, she will release her first book, The Big O,
When Dami which will help readers and their partners rid them-
Olonisakin – selves of stigma and achieve the widely misunderstood
better known female orgasm – apparently, Cardi B is gagging for a
as Oloni – kicked copy. Here, Oloni lays out her meaty manifesto.
off a Twitter thread
in search of hilarious Was your sex education at school centred
and salacious around pleasure?
sex stories from It was definitely centred around what would make my
women across vagina fall off.
the globe back in
2021, Can you remember the formative conversations you
had around sex?
My favourite chapter in the book (The Big O) is the one
on virginity, because I had to remember all the conver-
sex sations we had as young women who were still finding
became ourselves and the conversations we’d have around boys
a more open, like, “It wasn’t sex because it didn’t go in.” But you’re
honest and pleas- giving him head or he put it in your arse! It made me real-
urable topic to discuss ly look at the concept of virginity and the misinformation
around that because what does this mean for lesbians?
Are they virgins?

Your book tackles the ‘orgasm gap’, what is that and

online. Since the tweet,
the passionate sex educator and
media personality has amassed
an engaged following of
over 500k followers
across her
raucous
social
media
plat-
forms,
and her influence was felt and
appreciated generationally.
With sleek locks, feline eyes and a
penchant for lingerie thirst traps,
Oloni is a far cry from my octogenarian
PSHCE teacher at a Catholic secondary
school, who warned us of all the ways sex can
do us harm. When Oloni talks about sex, nothing feels
like a taboo: no STD is too embarrassing, no story is
too slutty, and every viewpoint is analysed through
a mature and nuanced lens. “I’m just glad to final-
ly share with the world the sex that everyone
should be having,” she says. Considering
sex is as old as humanity itself, it’s a feat
to have carved out a space to say
something genuinely new. Since
2008, when she started her
website Simply Oloni, the
sex-ed advisor has steadily
built a platform which
continually moves
the needle on
how Black
why is it happening?
Statistics tell us that straight men are more likely to
orgasm in comparison to a woman but this isn’t the case
with women who have sex with women. There are still
men who say they don’t want to go down on women,
even though they expect women to go down on them.
There are only 25% of women who actually climax
through vaginal penetration; the majority of us need
clitoral stimulation. However, there’s a huge focus on
the penis and penetration because men have been told
that their penises are full of tricks. The book is basically
about stopping miserable sex for women.
So really you want men to pick this book up?
Yes, they need to be open to communicating. He can’t
go into the bedroom believing that he knows everything
about your body when he really doesn’t.
A lot of people will read it to learn how to cum or
to make someone else cum, but the first four or so
chapters are sociopolitical history lessons. You could
have just printed a modern Karma Sutra-style picture
book, why did you choose this structure?
We need to unlearn before we can have any pleasure.
Those first chapters undo misinformation and stigma,
and take you through the history of how women’s
bodies have been viewed.
Why is ridding ourselves of stigma the first step to
achieving regular orgasms for all?
I feel like the stigmas we already carry are why people
feel they can’t truly express themselves or why they
don’t feel comfortable. Take HIV, for example: because
of the stigma a lot of people don’t understand that living
with it today is very different to living with it in the 80s;
you’re still a sexual being. I want women to bring the
topics I talk about on my page up in their group chat so
we can advise each other without judgment.

DAZED
text KEMI ALEMORU
Here to help bring you to ecstasy
with her book The Big O, Oloni is
the online relationships guru the
thirsty internet needs right now
What was the moment you decided to dedicate your life arrest-
to talking about sex? ed for sex
I worked in a sex store in my early 20s, so I was always trafficking.
comfortable talking about that and I realised not It’s telling that
everyone was. When I started talking about it I was women
inquisitive and was really learning as I went. It’s been want-
a journey with my followers as we’ve all been finding ing to
ourselves along the way. I’ve explored everything from know
crazy sexcapades to women who have experienced their worth
FGM. People usually tell me the work inspires
them to be sexually curious. I just enjoyed
watching that grow.

Why do you think there are still so few sex

and relationship writers who are Black women? scare
In the UK there’s like 3% of us so naturally there’s that sort of man.
going to be a smaller percentage. But in addition to
that we also have culture, religion, and a lot of Black
people grew up with very rigid rules that [sex] was just
for marriage and procreation. We’re not taught to be
open about it. When you’re socialised to think that way
you’re not going to make a public career out of creating
content about sex.

In the book, you write that Channel 4’s Sugar Rush,
the Brighton-based teen drama about a schoolgirl
who is secretly in love with her best friend, made you
question your sexuality. I think basically everyone
who watched that show felt something stir within
them, to be honest.
I’d never seen anything like that and I definitely had
a crush on Sugar. I’ve met a lot of lesbians who say
the same thing – I was sneaking and watching that
in my bedroom.
Which of the Twitter threads you’ve started is
your favourite?
I loved the one where women shared their most scan-
dalous stories. I loved it because it made men upset
but also it was a window into women’s sexual fantasies
and they were being truly honest about their behaviour
and appetites. Women are really having sex like that;
these are real confessionals from real women, and I
meet women in the bathroom who tell me they sent me
details of their own escapades and I have to pretend to
remember. The other one that sticks out was the one
where I asked women to tell us all the examples of bad
male hygiene they’d encountered. There are a lot of
men with bad hygiene and then women go to through
waxing, shaving, making themselves clean from top
to bottom and there’s not that same standard for men.
Women put up with a lot.
I knew a guy who got so scared by that Twitter thread
about hygiene scare stories that he had a shower
after every single shit of the day.
[laughs] We’re not putting up with it any more.
Isn’t it weird that women are looking to people like
you as a guide to sex and self-love and men are look-
ing at Andrew Tate? Why is there so much terrible
male advice out there?
I try to avoid incel content. Some people have compared
them, but I am talking about agency and consent and
he is literally disrespecting boundaries and has been
Heterosexuality is
in a dark place
right now,
some
men are
really being
radicalised.
I do get worried when I think about
what some men are watching and
women tell stories of seeing men’s
views change because of that. It’s
scary that there’s a movement
to teach misogyny.
Obviously, Twitter has been very good for you – but when
you recently announced your engagement it exposed a
severe lack of reasoning skills on the platform.
As a Black woman who speaks about sex, I am so used to
it being misunderstood and men getting upset. But I feel
like along the way – I don’t know when – there’s clearly
been an agenda to present my feminism as a synonym
for never wanting to be in a relationship with a man.
I’ve always been open about my relationships. Just
because I’m empowering women doesn’t mean I
am anti-men. I was genuinely too busy celebrat-
ing to pay attention to people who were mad on
Twitter – I was like, “I’m in Dubai!”
Why do you think society has such
bizarre reactions to women
who like sex?
We’re so used to the idea of sex being
something that men do to women.
It’s like we’re not supposed to
take too much pleasure from it
and it’s supposed to be about
catering to their enjoyment
but I want women to enjoy
it for themselves.

99
photography KAYLA CONNORS styling KYANISHA MORGAN

YOUNG,
FRESH
& NEW

For years neglected by an industry that failed

to nurture its potential, UK R&B is finally getting
its shine thanks to an eclectic band of up-and-
comers bringing fresh new perspective to the
scene – and dismantling stereotypes around a
Jim wears all clothes and
genre that has never stood still for long accessories his own
text SOPE SOETAN Legxacy’s ability to explore multiple styles is something that could only
have been possible by someone of his generation and background. As a
Gen-Z Black British male from Lewisham with art school credentials,
it’s not surprising to hear that his reference points are so encyclopaedic:
he says he is equally influenced by Hannah Montana, Bon Iver and
Paramore as he is JPEGMafia, Headie One and Nigerian gospel group
Infinity. The landscape today is kinder to artists like him, p-rallel and John
Glacier than the one which greeted one of Britain’s most unsung “weird
n***as” Denzel Himself just a few years ago.
On paper, Legxacy’s kaleidoscope of genres shouldn’t work. But the

JIM LEGXACY secret to his flawless marshalling of sounds can be explained by a resolute
understanding of each genre, he explains: “The essence of drill beats is
On a mission to make Black Britain simply 8O8s and hi-hats. Jersey club beats are usually all kicks; what I do is
replace them with snare sounds that you’d hear in Afrobeats but still keep
‘weird’ again, the south London art- the rhythm. And I use the guitar to bring it all together.” Despite his clear

school grad’s eccentric mix of styles desire to be “genreless”, Legxacy recognises that all genres, to an extent,
have fixed characteristics that can be manipulated, allowing him to merge
sounds like no one but himself the sounds tastefully.
The new project doubles down on Legxacy’s renegade streak.
This desire to twist free of the musical possibilities typically levied on
young Black men is a reflection of not only his artistic growth, but his
personal growth, too. When Legxacy made his presence known with the
release of his first two projects, Dynasty Program: A Metrical Composition
Inspired by the Nights Spent as the Raiider (2019) and BTO! (2020), he firmly
rooted himself in the field of alternative UK rap, filling his songs with
musings on familial trauma, poverty, substance abuse and xenophobia.
“Black Britain is entering its weird n***a phase and I want my music to com- It was heavy subject matter born out of his experiences coming of age in
municate that the mandem can make whatever.” A statement that fills me Lewisham, home to the biggest purpose-built police station in Europe, but
with intrigue when I speak with multi-disciplinary artist Jim Legxacy over as he’s matured he has realised he’s exercised enough of those frustrations
video chat on a warm winter afternoon. First on the agenda: his forthcom- in his music. “In my younger years, I was really trying hard to be the person
ing Homeless N***a Pop Music LP, a body of work that, much like most of his I saw in my head as opposed to being myself,” says Legxacy. “Part of that
past discography, is an ambitious and sprawling affair with a point of view was thinking I had to be an MC, mostly. I know the experiences I’ve gone
very specific to Black London life. through, and I don’t have to try and project that outwards and make people
The album’s striking collage artwork was designed by graphic designer see me for just that.”
L0wi, one of Legxacy’s closest friends who let him stay with her when, for a It’s a line of thinking that has undeniably crossed over to his visuals and
short spell, he was homeless. “She was extremely tapped in when it came become a strong motif. Together with his creative partner, fidel, who has
to making me personalise it,” says Legxacy. “I used pictures of my family directed a large share of his videos, Legxacy is debunking the stereotypes
but more than anything I wanted the mandem to see it and say, ‘Oh, rah, this attached to the borough that’s near and dear to him. “Growing up there was
is London. This is our culture.’” mad at times, but culturally there’s so much to pull from and a [real] mix of
The four entrees released until now – “Eye Tell (!)”, “hit it light it twist it”, people,” he says. “There’s a lot going on, but there’s beauty too, and that’s
“candy reign (!)” and “dj” – are a forecast of the direction pop music could what I want to explore with fidel.”
take in the coming years of this decade. Across these four songs alone, Increasing engagement with the radical and political framework of
Legxacy taps into the worlds of Afro-pessism – a school of thought examining the ways in which slavery,
indie rock, emo rap, drill, Jersey colonialism and apartheid continue to define Black experiences – would
club, Afrobeats and R&B, overlaying also play a significant role in this transition. “I’ve seen how the system has
these sounds on to cleverly repur- broken down my parents and my friends,” says Legxacy. “I don’t have the
posed samples from Soul for Real, energy to have those conversations for sport any more. I’m burned out.”
Skepta and Unknown T. The release of his debut album, Citadel, in 2021 marked a creative
Legxacy’s decision to name turning point for Legxacy. An artistic leap that was mellower in mood and
his project Homeless N***a Pop more eclectic in its lyrical scope than before, the release allowed room
“Black Britain is Music to many would be bold.
Still, in reality, it’s reflective of
for the artist to express vulnerability, yearning and softness. There was
noticeably greater reliance on singing, with Legxacy adopting a tone which
entering its weird the musical innovation the Black at times recalled Tracy Chapman. Well aware that he’s not a vocalist in the

n***a phase and diaspora at large has been forging

over the past few years. (Legxacy
I want my music is a second-generation Nigerian
born in Lewisham.) Cruel Santino,
to communicate Amaarae and Prettyboy D-O have
traditional sense, his performance on tracks like the Afropop-inspired “cold
lewisham roses” and the folky “the day I broke my bike” still made for an
authentically affecting listen. “The barrier to entry for singing is much lower
now,” says Legxacy. “I love to experiment, and singing allows me to push my
music further and more freely. Rapping is still my first love.”

that the mandem verified there is more to west

African music than just Afrobeats
can make with their unorthodox music and
imagery. In the US, Denzel Curry
whatever” and Pink Siifu continue to fly the
flag for post-Odd Future hip hop.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, there
is a growing conversation about
recognising Cat Burns and Rachel
Chinouriri as nothing else but indie
pop artists who happen to be Black.
The case Legxacy makes for the
Britain’s impending “weird n***a
phase” is convincing. “There will be things that they [fans] recognise but the
music is so left,” he says. “I want to show man that things are changing and
that you don’t always have to make the same style of music.” It’s a change
he proudly proclaims on new track “block hug”, where he crystallises his
transition into singing: “This year I’m a singing n***a like I’m Bobby Brown.”
As he has evolved into an artist whose vocalising has become almost
as important as rapping abilities, Legxacy’s name has started to be thrown
around alongside the new class of R&B singers. He understands why the
genre tag is imposed on him, but doesn’t believe it wholly denotes what he
does. “I won’t ever get mad at someone because everyone’s got their own
references, but there will never be a time where I specifically call myself an
R&B artist,” he says. “I’m just Black with corn rows.”
Nonetheless, Legxacy is open about the fact that elements of R&B echo
through his music, especially on “candy reign (!)” and “i don’t like how stars
treated john boyega”. “I’ve sampled plenty of R&B artists like Tatyana Ali
and Jon B,” he says, “but the only ones I actually can credit as influences
are Drake and Frank Ocean – the ones people would question if they’re
even R&B.” The two kingpins, who were instrumental in the first wave of
so-called ‘alternative R&B’ in the early 2010s. But where these artists had
stronger ties to R&B’s traditional roots, successors like Legxacy have
moved further away from the genre’s confines, while retaining its core
essence and the intangible emotions it yields. It’s the very key symbolic of
Legxacy’s artistic practice: the art of extraction.

101
YOUNG, FRESH & NEW

Exec-producing Stormzy’s
new album before he’d
even released a note,
the east London singer is
writing a new gospel for
British R&B

Tendai wears leather jacket ACNE

STUDIOS, t-shirt and ring his own
TENDAI “Every time I say this people look at
me like I’m mad, but I only listened
to five songs last year: ‘Man I’m
Only Human’ by The La’s, ‘Teardrop’
by Massive Attack, ‘Sweet Song’ by Blur, ‘Lady (Hear Me Tonight)’ by Modjo
and ‘DARE’ by Gorillaz. I really limited my ears.”
On a mission to pluralise what mainstream pop music can be is loud and
proud east Londoner tendai. His parents, immigrants from Uganda, were
also musically inclined, releasing a cappella gospel albums in their youth.
“It’s only recently been put on YouTube and streaming services, it was
mainly just in everyone’s homes back in Uganda,” he says. “They weren’t
widely recognised at the time.”
While studying at the prestigious Elam school in Bow, he sharpened
his skills as both a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, writing and produc-
ing in addition to his piano and guitar-playing. This was where he started
performing with a band, giving him his first taste of directing the sounds
he wanted to create and “the structural ways in which music moves”.
Signing a deal with 0207 Def Jam, he released his debut single
“Not Around”, in 2021, an ominous and ambient track he wrote and
produced all by himself. At 22, he would one-up himself when asked to
be an executive producer on Stormzy’s latest album, This Is What I Mean.
“The prestige of that project and who I was working alongside gave me
a framework for how rich my own music can be. Those sessions were
really powerful,” says tendai.
Appetites were further whetted with a smattering of divine releases,
“Infinite Straight”, “Lately”, “Pressure” and, most recently, “Time of Our
Lives”. Each track sits in its own universe, causing one to marvel at tendai’s
impressive craftsmanship. With new music on the horizon, tendai muses
on the need to resist the typecasting put on artists who look like him.
What can you tell us about your upcoming music?
I’ve spent the last year being observant and emotionally
connected to everything around me, and towards the
end of the year it all vomited itself out of me through
music. You can expect a really striking sound as it was
created in a time of anger and frustration. Music that
sounds like it’s almost breaking apart and combusting.
There are songs with a smooth feel that lends itself to
Prince or Michael Jackson, but I’m also tapping into UKG
and rock sounds.
You contributed to Stormzy’s latest album as a featured vocalist and
instrumentalist, but also as one of the executive producers. How did it
feel to be given such responsibility?
It was initially overwhelming because when he asked
me to work on it I hadn’t put any music out. I knew that
I could do it, but I was wondering if it made sense for me
this early in my career. But it was truly a pleasure and
an invaluable learning experience. It gave me a context
for how much richness music should and can have.
It allowed me to connect with Tom Misch, Sampha,
Little Simz and Damon Albarn. Even though they may
not have known who I was, there was a respect I felt I
was being [shown] about my art and my contributions.
Stormzy was interesting to work with because, on one
hand, he can be quite fluid and accepting of things, but
he’s also very particular. Even if everyone else in the
room liked something, he was adept at putting his foot
down and letting us know when there was more that
could be done to generate a certain warmth or feeling.
What are your thoughts on the narrow expectations and assumptions
put on Black British artists?
I think, to a large extent, the Black British experience
is not symbiotic with the expectations of Black British
culture. That expectation doesn’t just come from our
non-Black counterparts, it also comes from us, but the
taste level in our community is quite wide. We have the
superpower of being consciously aware of and exposed
to many sounds. Whether it be amapiano, Afrobeats,
rock, blues, jazz or folk. There’s so much that our expe-
rience as Black people can speak to genre-wise. There
are real moments of anger, loneliness and sadness, as
well as joy and happiness. Those emotions can be trans-
lated into genres that are so varied. That’s the reason
why my music goes here, there and everywhere.
You were raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist and grew up sing-
ing with your family in the church. How did that environment
influence your artistry?
The mark of the Seventh Day Adventist Church is that
they try to be Bible scholars in that they follow to the
wire what the Bible actually says. There’s a level of
reverence, especially within service. The church I grew
up in didn’t have drums or a bass guitar. We just had a
piano or an organ, and sometimes we wouldn’t even use
them. The focus was on everyone singing a cappella and
harmonising. Gospel music made me understand that
you can score spirituality. Even if we just think about
what the musicians play when the pastor is speaking.
They create an air of meditation and spiritual upliftment.
Whether it be “Infinite Straight” or “Lately”, you manipulate the vocal
performance on each of your songs with enormous dexterity. It’s as if
you’re adopting a new persona or character each time.
Joni Mitchell once said, “I’m an actress, not a singer.”
My understanding of music deepened when I heard that
because what that meant to me is that, as artists, we are
responsible for conveying emotions. My approach to
singing is like being an actor. It’s not about being a differ-
ent person because it’s all me. It’s more understanding
that specific songs require the conveying of specific
emotions. It’s about finding the best way I can sing a line
that can make you feel exactly what I want you to feel.
There’s so much range you can tap into when you under-
stand that it’s more than just singing a song. Actors like
Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio are more of
a vocal reference to me than singers have been.
“Pressure” is your most R&B-influenced track. Who are the singers
that came before you who you feel pushed the boundaries of the genre?
I would say Ne-Yo, especially for his songwriting. Tank
was a big influence on me as well. Growing up, I liked
Jamelia a lot too. In my opinion, there’s a difference
between people who have made R&B songs and those
who are R&B artists in general. So I’d even say Gary
Barlow; he’s a bad boy. Man can’t make “Back for Good”
and say R&B doesn’t influence him. I’d also say Elton
John because what his ballads say and want to say are
rooted in R&B in many ways.
You cite Sade as one of your key musical heroes. What is it about her
career that’s really impacted you?
The thing I love most about Sade is the understanding
I have of her as an artist. Perhaps more than the actual
music, but my favourite song of hers is definitely “Like a
Tattoo”. The reason I specifically mention her is because
she’s a band – Sade is the band. When I think about
myself, I think the same way – tendai being the name
of the band is how it is in my head. The music is made
isn’t just me and a laptop. There’s a real family behind it.
We’re a family and collective who create music.
What are your long-term ambitions in terms of commercial success?
All artists want their art to be recognised. I think my
music has the potential to define a generation more
than anything else. There’s a specific earlobe that
hears what a commercial record sounds like in this
country for someone who looks like me. I think I have
the potential to reshape that somewhat. I’m in pursuit of
big-sounding songs and songs that sound like they’ve
always existed. There’s a real pursuit of a classic that
will always translate no matter the time period.
As a self-considered student of film and sound, what does the future
hold for your wider creative vision and practice?
Expanding what it means to be a student of sound looks
like greater incorporation of musical composition. [It
could mean] scoring a film or just releasing pieces of
music that aren’t necessarily ‘songs’. I love the idea of
having a piece of music in a gallery next to the Mona Lisa
or the statue of David. That’s something I really want to
do in the coming years.
103
YOUNG, FRESH & NEW

Tottenham’s self-styled ‘hood R&B’ star

switching effortlessly between sweet-boy
anthems and street politics

Nippa wears all clothes PALACE,

shoes his own

Hair NAT BURY, photographic

assistant DAIKI TAJIMA,
styling assistant OLIVER
FRANCIS, production assistant
DAZED MILLY HEANE
NIPPA Jordan Adebiyi, better known
as Nippa, is blazing his own trail
as a soulful conduit between the
streets and the masses who seek to
pathologise and appropriate those cultures and experiences.
As a self-proclaimed “hood R&B” artist, Nippa joins a long tradition
of streetwise R&B lotharios from Jaheim and Donell Jones to Lyfe Jennings
and August Alsina. Vocalists who, with equal dexterity, could wax lyrical on
the turbulent realities of inner-city life while delivering sweet-boy anthems
catering to the sensitivities of women.
“Squeezin’ Ya”, “Change My Tone” and “Ride or Die”, tracks soaked in
the romantic aesthetics of R&B’s imperial phase, were welcome introduc-
tions to a new talent, but it was the gritty realism of “Situation” that became
his breakthrough in 2021, announcing Nippa as an observant artist with a
singular perspective underrepresented in music by singers. “The street life
is represented in drill loads, but it’s my life too. I’m just expressing it through
a different artform,” he explains.
Almost overnight, his profile had elevated; suddenly Drake collaborator
Boi-1da was in his DMs and a swarm of offers from record labels began
to pour in. Two EPs, Nippa and Not a Statistic, soon followed to nurture
and capitalise on the sudden interest. Merging nostalgic R&B sounds
with elements of drill and trap, the projects house and juxtapose implicit
commentary on class, masculinity and youth culture with light-hearted
bravado and swagger. “I’m still figuring it out but I know my tone is very
specific,” he says.
With new single “All of Me” just released, Nippa ponders the ways he is
bridging the gap between singing and MCing.
Your last EP, Not a Statistic, was in some ways a clapback to the
assumptions people have of young Black men. What are you hoping
people took away from the project?
Not a Statistic is a collection of songs with messages
that give insight into my life and who I am. Trying to
show regardless that I’m not a statistic when it comes
to anything. Where I come from people would assume
I do drugs, get caught up in gang life or end up dead by
23 – but I’m not any of those things. I hope people listen
to my music and understand that you can beat the odds
and that we’re all individuals. We can’t let the system
make us fall victim to all the things put in our pathway
[which seem] destined to destroy us.
Tottenham is famed for birthing some of grime’s greatest MCs.
What was it like growing up in the same area as the likes of Skepta,
JME and Wretch 32 and watching them succeed?
It was empowering. You don’t really think that people
can make it out of ends. Even though they were way
older than me, seeing them do it was inspiring. People
who were once like me, rolling around Meridian Estate
and looking grubby. I remember seeing them at
Tottenham carnival and dabbing them all up when
I was very young.
Because you’re a singer and people are mesmerised by the melodies
and harmonies, people can ignore that you are touching on gritty real-
life situations with consequences. How’s life in Tottenham now that
you’re becoming more visible?
Keeping it a buck, it can be flimsy. I’m not a millionaire,
nor am I super-paid. What it is now is that I’m just bait.
It’s not like I can go around with a driver with tinted
windows. It can be hard to deal with because you’re now
more noticeable to people who may not have liked you.
It’s easier for them to carry out any negative agendas
they had against you. It’s a hard middle ground to
navigate when the fame comes quicker than the bread.
It’s just about staying out of and avoiding trouble.
Who were the R&B artists that gave you the confidence to
pursue singing?
Drake has been my biggest influence ever since he
released “Best I Ever Had”. I’ve studied his tone and rap-
style singing in massive detail. PartyNextDoor made
me fall in love with music, he brought a different sound
to R&B and made it cool for guys like me to sing. Brent
Faiyaz is the one who inspired me to abandon rapping
and start writing songs. When I heard “Talk 2 U” and
“One Night Only”, I said to myself that this was some-
thing I could do. Man like Usher, Ginuwine, Trey Songz
and Chris Brown are all Goats. I love their music but they
come from a different lifestyle to me. They’re all wedge
and wear unbuttoned shirts. I can’t do all the grinding
and handstands.
Would you say that people who primarily listen to the likes of drill,
grime and Afro-swing will be able to relate to you more than some of
your R&B contemporaries because they look at you as someone they
can identify with?
I guess so, because I look like them. Man who are
listening to primarily drill are from where I’m from.
Of course, they’re going to be more open to listening
to me because I don’t look like I’m about to drop vocals.
It’s an advantage, but I didn’t plan for it to be. If I could
rap, I’d probably be rapping too because where I come
from, singing is corny. I had people telling me I was
wet because I was singing about gyal.
There’s been a lot of discussion surrounding the lack of music-industry
infrastructure for British R&B artists. It’s been suggested that UK MCs
invite more singers to feature on their tracks and boost their visibility.
What’s your take on that?
They probably could do with having more singers on
their hooks for sure, but the ‘UK scene’ as we know it
is still pretty new. When you think about our current
UK Goats like Stormzy, Dave, J Hus, Central Cee or AJ
Tracey – they’ve only popped off and started having
real hits in the last five years or so. If you look at when
US hip hop first started, it was just rappers doing their
thing without any singers for many years. We’ve got to
go through our own stages because we are still at the
beginning. Don’t be fooled by the age of technology and
how things seem to speed up. Skepta’s been around
since I was a baby, and it’s only in recent memory that
“Shutdown” became a hit and he secured that A$AP
Rocky collab. Patience is key.
After the release of “Situation”, you started gaining a lot of attention
from record labels but turned down their offers – why?
I’ll probably sign to a major label once I’ve done more
work in the streets. When “Situation” dropped, I was
still in uni. I didn’t really understand what a record label
even was. The only thing a record label can offer me
right now, to be honest, is a fucking bag. But it’ll be in
exchange for them taking away all my creative control
and rights to my music. With record labels, you’re
bringing in people who probably don’t understand the
culture, so I’d rather keep it more grassroots for now.
A label can fast-track things which aren’t always good.
You’re managed by one of your friends and the wider team around you
are also friends. How has that been? Have there been any challenges?
I’ve known my manager since I was 12. Everyone around
me has been with me since primary school. It’s calm, but
at the same time, you’re going to have disagreements.
I’ve had scraps with them, but at the end of the day we’re
brothers, so we want the best for each other. Once you
hash it out it’s like, “I love you. You love me. Let’s get
back to work.” It’s better to keep everything in house
because when I reject these label offers I’m stopping
my manager from getting paid. Any manager that just
wants a quick cheque is just going to make you sign
anything, because their focus is on money rather than
the long-term vision.
Do you see yourself as a sex symbol?
I’m going to try to be a sex symbol but right now, I think
I’m just a face with two silver teeth. I’m just an aver-
age thug from the ends. It’ll take some time but I’m
working on it.
105
photography ALESSANDRO MANNELLI

DAZED
text ELISHA TAWE

THELONIOUS
STOKES ‘Blackwashing’ figures from
the Bible in his magnetic and
macabre work, Thelonious Stokes is the Florence-
based artist tweaking the old masters’ noses to
illuminate ‘the gentle truth that’s inside all of us’

Consumed by various paranoias and anxieties surrounding the coming
week, I’m surfing the web on a Sunday night. My pupils are fixated on my
Mac, rapidly consuming the works of artist Thelonious Stokes. In typical
early-20s ‘aspiring creative’ form, I have left all my research until 24 hours
before our call. I fear these digitised renderings may not do his artistry
justice, but scroll on. Fortunately, Stokes’ artistic footprint is fairly easy to
trace online. There’s an immersive texture to his oeuvre, a poetry to the de-
lirious world moulded by the multidisciplinary artist. His canon is magnetic
and abrasive, consisting of macabre yet beautifully composed paintings,
films, songs and performances. The works are marked by a religiosity,
a romantic commitment to the furtherance of Black pictorial traditions.
They paint an image of an artist grappling with the events that shaped his
world growing up as a Black man in Chicago.
Stokes is currently working out of his studio in Florence, Italy, where he is
a drawing professor at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design. On our call,
he appears jovial and lively. “Florence is extremely traditional,” he teases.
“Here, I wake up, smoke a cigarette and start painting. It’s a ritualistic city.
Living here has sort of turned into a research moment. I’ve been learning a lot
about the role Italy and the Roman
Catholic Church played in the
attempted colonisation of Ethiopia.”
Stokes has taken an unconventional
route to get where he is as an artist.
When asked how he landed on
painting as a medium, Stokes
shares the story of a night in Chicago
which serendipitously culminated
“I’m looking to at a party in a painter’s house:
“I saw these paintings of some punk
produce images rockers doing drugs at this party
stretched over his wings, blood seeping out from an arrow wound in his side.
“I pull from some of the greatest paintings ever and fuse their energy with
someone of African descent around me,” says Stokes. “I actually referenced
this old Salvator Mundi [image of Christ] I found recently. Looking at the
gestures and the poses and making them Black. I design a lot of the drapery
and jewellery in my paintings in my head. I’m always looking at stuff but it’s
profound what can just come from your imagination.”
Stokes cites jazz musician Donald Byrd’s record A New Perspective and
American theologian James H Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree
as north stars for his conceptualisation of To the Last Page. But it’s filmmak-
er and playwright Kathleen Collins’ analysis of the saint-or-sinner dichotomy
laid out in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet that springs to mind as I engage
with his latest body of work. In her 1984 lecture at Howard University,
Collins articulates how western society’s Judeo-Christian foundations
have sculpted Blackness as an ontological category.
To Collins, the west has fostered a culture in which one must be a sin-
ner or saint. To shift the mental anguish associated with the identification
of evil in one’s own heart, notions of sin have been projected on to Black
people, manufacturing us as those in whom this evil resides. Though the
argument could be made that Stokes’ work still operates within this binary,
his focus on the ‘Blackwashing’ of Judeo-Christian figures augments them
with an intriguing dimension. Through his reaffirmation of their ethnic roots
and his ability to play with the visual trappings of power, he offers counter-
images which reconfigure our collective understanding of the saintly.
I sense a sliver of delight in his tone as our conversation turns to his
recent trip to Ghana for Black Star Line Festival. “It was my first time in Af-
rica,” he says. “I was among a lot of artists and having these Pan-Africanist
conversations. At a conference, this girl – I wish I knew her name or who she
was – said, ‘We are people of the water,’ which hit me because the water is
so vast, and there are so many layers to explore. I saw a lot of depictions

that future and searched around the house

for the artist. I asked them if they
grandmas can could teach me how to paint.
The next day I had my first lesson.
have in their Growing up in Chicago was fairly
of white Jesus out there too. My goal is to produce a Black Christ that you
can identify and spread globally. Being a Baptist on the south side of
Chicago was just part of the culture. Church on Sunday, Bible study on
Thursday. I’m looking to produce images that future grandmas can have
in their living rooms.”

living rooms” violent, but there are wonderful lev-

els of community. There are insane
artistic movements. Controlled
chaotic rhythm is totally a part of
my practice.”
Stokes has just wrapped up his
latest body of work, To the Last Page,
which made its debut as a solo show
at the UTA Artist Space in Atlanta,
Georgia, over the winter. The
exhibition took its name from the artist’s desire to gain a more holistic under-
standing of the Bible. Many of the works feature Black depictions of figures
from the Abrahamic religions, a practice Stokes refers to as “Blackwashing”.
The influence of the old masters whose works fill the halls and streets
of Florence can be seen in the compositions and well-rendered surfaces of
his latest paintings. We encounter a group of Black children connected by a
meandering gold chain, languishing on buttermilk-blue clouds, gazing into
space in “3 Kings, 1 Chain”. In another work, “A Love Letter From 1 Negro Angel
off 79th Street, Saint Sebastian”, we see what appears to be the artist as an
angel against a brownish-red landscape, his back arched in pain and his arms
The Baptist milieu that framed much of the artist’s early life shines
through no brighter than in Stokes’ closing remarks. Our conversation ebbs
and flows in the mercurial and erratic manner you would expect from an art-
ist working across this many mediums, eventually arriving at Stokes’ plans
for the future of his practice. Excitedly, he delves into his recent impulse to
create more performance works, a desire which directly correlates to the
Baldwinian framing of the Black Church as a form of theatre: a theatre where
the tension between the real and the imagined takes centre stage, where
one responds to one’s flesh and blood, and we recreate one another.
“My main practice right now is painting, but public performances are almost
parallel,” Stokes explains. “I wasn’t gelling well with the route of perfor-
mance required to go to high school consistently because, you know, all of
this is just a performance. So I ended up dropping out to learn how to paint.
I’m planning on getting very deep into my performances. I want to tackle
race relations a little more. I want to expand and develop in that realm.
I want to display the gentle truth that’s inside all of us.”
ELISHA TAWE is a writer, audiovisual artist and one half of the creative duo
GRAY417C. He is currently based in London

107

I’ve always been fascinated by
borders and checkpoints. As a
humanitarian worker for the UN,
I have seen how these places work
to bring down the fantasy of the
right to freedom of movement,
a symbol of how arbitrarily we
determine who has the privilege of
travel and who doesn’t. They are
also sites where state power most
visibly penetrates one’s personal
and bodily freedom, with all the
trappings – including police brutali-
ty – that come with it.
The same is true of Erez, the
crossing at the border which has
cut Gaza off from the world since
Israel’s land, sea and air blockade
on the strip began in 2007. Five
years ago this month, the Great
March of Return began with
protests demanding an end to the
blockade and the right to return.
The location of the protests was
potent: Erez is a bottleneck where
the hopes and dreams of a return to
ancestral land come to die.
Thanks to the draconian
permit policy – only 17,000
Gazans currently have a permit
to leave – Gaza is effectively the
world’s largest prison. The Israeli
government argues that the
blockade is necessary to prevent
smuggling and terrorism; a 2020
report for the UN denounced it as
“collective punishment” prohibited
under international law. Today,
more than two million people share
just 365 sq km of land; 1.4 million
of them are refugees, displaced in
collective expulsions following the
formation of the state of Israel in
1948 and the six-day war in 1967,
in which Israel annexed much
of historical Palestine.
For those with a permit, most
cross through Erez, which is no
simple matter. Posters list items
that Palestinians are banned from
carrying, such as suitcases with
wheels, painkillers, toothbrushes
or electronics (including their
phones). Without any sense of
when their loved one might arrive,
family members sleep on the grass.
DAZED
BORDERLANDS:
CROSSING
Minibus drivers shout their des-
tinations as workers wait, visibly
frustrated, for the buses to fill
before they can set off. An Israeli
soldier, perhaps no older than 21,
screams at two old men in broken
Arabic, “I told you: two small bags,
like that woman,” pointing to a lady
holding a flimsy plastic bag. The
men look ruefully at their bags, filled
with presents. They sit on the floor
and discuss what to leave behind.
After hours of questioning at
passport control, I’m sent down
fenced corridors with barbed wire
atop. On either side is no-man’s
land, where, incongruously,
donkeys graze on small mounds of
grass under barbed wire strewn
across the ground. It’s here that I
wait for a truck to take me the two
miles to the Palestinian borders.
I’m the only one entering Gaza, but
there are around 150 men queuing
to enter Israel, waiting for an armed
soldier to rifle through their papers.
“I normally spend the early
hours of Sunday here waiting,”
one man told me. “Today I arrived
at 1am. Most times, I manage to
cross by 4pm. Then I work in Israel
all week, go back home to see my
family on Friday night, and begin
it all again on Sunday.” He looks
exhausted; in fact, they all do. None
of them has anything on them – I
feel embarrassed by my suitcase
(with wheels, no less). “Before the
siege, we could bring things with
us, like food or water,” another man
says. “We used to return home
after work and see our kids. Now
that’s all stopped.” It’s jarring to
hear them describe spending half
a day queueing at the border, just
to reach somewhere equivalent to
the distance between a couple of
London neighbourhoods.
The Israeli government argues
that, since they launched their
policy of disengagement which
saw the dismantling of all 21 Israeli
settlements on the strip and the
removal of the on-the-ground
military presence, Gaza is no longer
occupied. In reality, this is a fan-
tasy. By all accounts, Gaza is still
occupied, with Israel controlling
all imports and exports, all borders
and freedom of movement. There is
also the shelling: my first glimpses
of Gaza are of craters left behind by
the most recent round of conflict, in
May 2021, when 254 Palestinians
were killed by Israeli rocket strikes.
Each of the craters is filled with
mounds the height of buildings of
personal items discarded at Erez
– perhaps a gift, medicine, or an
item of clothing.
The poverty here is also strik-
ing. In the middle of the school day,
children drive carts led by donkeys
or horses, taking agricultural items
from place to place. Other kids rifle
through the rubbish for plastics and
metals they hope to sell for pennies
by the kilo. Erez kills by forcing
people to take unsafe passage, by
making them wait for months for a
permit to seek medical treatment.
But Erez also kills silently. For a
territory connecting the riches
of Egypt with the trade of the
Levant, 65% of Gazans live below
the poverty line, and more than
60% are unemployed – a shocking
statistic for an area that boasts one
of the world’s highest literacy rates,
with only 3.3% of Palestinians
unable to read.
Despite it all, some of my col-
leagues tell me how much safer
they feel in Gaza. “It’s calmer here,”
one tells me. “At least when there
are no escalations, we are left to
our own devices.” I don’t comment
on how habituated he must be to
the occupation for him to describe
the situation in Gaza as ‘calm’. But
I do see what he means. The West
Bank, an enclave which now forms
the bulk of Palestinian territories,
is separated from the Gaza Strip by
what is modern-day Israel. Here,
where Israel maintains an extreme-
ly heavy-handed military presence,
the threat is all around, at every
checkpoint and every massacre on
a refugee camp. But in Gaza, the
threat is exclusively from the sky.
I’m reminded of my colleague in
the West Bank, a man I had always
assumed was older than my father
until he told me he was 20 years
younger. He would pick me up on
the way to work, which I had always
assumed was part and parcel of
Palestinians’ incomparable culture
of hospitality. One morning he said
that, though he wouldn’t let me go
to work alone, he also felt more
comfortable when I was in the car.
“You don’t know what they could
do to you,” he said. “I lived through
times when they would force you
to strip at the checkpoint, in front
of your wife and kids, and make
you wait there in the sun. At least
with you here, there’s a witness
if something happens to me.”
My cheeks flushed red, hot with
shame at what he had endured.
My Gazan colleagues are happy
that such incidents are long in the
past for them; Gaza has its own
history of checkpoints before Israel
withdrew its military presence.
 Five years on from the Great March of Return protesting the Israeli
text TIARA ATAII
blockade, the Gaza Strip remains the world’s largest open-air prison.
Our writer crosses the border at Erez, a place where
EREZ dreams of freedom come to die, to discover a people
whose refusal to forget is an act of resistance
One of them drives me along Salah
Al-Deen Road, the ghost of a settle-
ment evacuated in 2005 as part of
Israel’s disengagement policy.
“I still don’t feel comfortable com-
ing here,” he says. “Hamas doesn’t
like it either – you’re not allowed
to take pictures or stand around
for too long.” As with the Great
March of Return, which began at
the border, this checkpoint was the
site where the second intifada – a
Palestinian uprising beginning
in 2000 – broke out. “It was the
natural place for us to protest.
The checkpoint was the symbol
of the occupation.” He drives
on to Netzarim junction, where
he pauses. “This was where the
checkpoint used to be. You know
Muhammad al-Durrah, right? His
father is a friend of mine.” Of course
I do – the scene is unforgettable.
Al-Durrah was the 12-year-old boy
filmed being shielded by his father
as they hid behind a barrel, caught
in the crossfire at the checkpoint.
He was fatally shot by the Israeli
Defence Forces on the second day
of the Intifada.
Later on, my friends take me
to the Port of Gaza, another site
of border massacres. There is a
memorial to the Turkish activists
who were killed by Israeli sol-
diers as they attempted to break
the siege on Gaza by bringing
humanitarian aid. But despite it
all, the wounds of occupation and
blockade everywhere, families
are enjoying sitting by the sea.
They buy corn cooked on open
coals and smoke shisha, while
others hire boats that take them
a few metres out from the shore,
stopping just short of the bounds of
the sea blockade.
Several days later, I return to Erez.
I wait at the foot of the turnstiles
with a Palestinian man on business
travel. I’m let through while the
man is left waiting for instructions
from one of the border workers’
managers. “You’re not allowed
through,” he says, from behind the
metal. “Why?” “I don’t know, that’s
what the manager says.” “But I have
a permit.” “They say you specifical-
ly are not allowed through. You have
to apply again from the beginning.
Go home and enjoy Friday lunch
with your family.” There is some-
thing deeply uncomfortable about
the fact that all the workers at
the border are Palestinian. Later,
I tell my driver, and he responds
with an Arabic saying: “A piece
of bread soaked in blood.” He
goes on to explain: “When you’re
starving, you have to find work,
no matter how demeaning it
is.” Heartbreakingly, due to the
abject poverty the occupation has
wreaked upon many Palestinians,
they are forced to build the
infrastructure of occupation.
Being Iranian, I am put in what
I assume is the high-security lane,
separated from internationals and
Palestinians. I realise I am being
watched from above through
bullet-proof glass, with soldiers
paging down to the workers below.
One of them steps out on to a
diamond-shaped balcony, where
he shouts something at me. I ask
the worker to translate, and he tells
me to go through a small door that
clicks shut. That door’s light goes
red and, five seconds later, the one
ahead clicks green. I go through
smaller and smaller spaces until I
enter what looks like a holding pen.
Twenty minutes later, I stand and
stretch my hamstring, bending
my leg. A soldier rushes to the
balcony, pointing his machine gun
at my head. I hold my hands up
and sit down again. I realise my
front is covered in donkey excre-
ment, which I must have spread
on myself carrying my suitcase
from no-man’s land. It is humiliat-
ing – and just a modicum of what
Palestinians go through.
A door eventually clicks green
and I pass into a cage where the
floor, ceiling, and walls are made
out of wire mesh, apart from a win-
dow through which I see five female
Israeli soldiers holding machine
guns. Above the window are the
words, “Body searches are con-
ducted with complete discretion
and dignity in mind. Body searches
are conducted with members
of the same sex as you,” which I
find myself obsessively rereading.
My first thought is whether I will
bleed into my white trousers if
they conduct a cavity search.
After a few minutes, a soldier
comes through and taps my groin
with one hand, making me spread
my legs and arms. Her other hand is
poised on the trigger of her gun.
I remain barefoot with the wire
mesh cutting into my feet, covered
in donkey excrement, watching
them observe me for some time
before they search me.
After they are done I am let
through. One of the Palestinian
workers brings me tissues to clean
myself, then tells me to wait as
they are still searching my luggage.
Eventually, it comes. Presents I
have bought for my family, such as
perfumes, have been unwrapped
and sampled. My dirty under-
wear is spread across the trays.
Disconcertingly, some rubbish that
isn’t mine has been packed in with
my luggage.
Leaving Erez, it dawns on me
that this experience was a privilege.
Palestinians in Gaza would give
everything, despite the indignity of
Erez, to see family, access medical
treatment and find work. I think of
Aisha a-Lulu, a five-year-old whose
parents were refused an exit permit
to accompany her for life-sav-
ing brain surgery in Jerusalem.
Aisha’s doctor recalled her feeling
“abandoned and betrayed” as she
came out of surgery, unable to
understand why her family wasn’t
present. She died a week later.
The UN said in 2012 that, by
2020, Gaza would be “unlivable”,
and they were proven right.
Tragedy after tragedy, and little
changes. But Palestinians are
also indomitable. There is frenetic
building everywhere, rebuilding
infrastructure and buildings which
have been levelled from repeated
shelling. Despite limitations on
imports, I buy some beautiful
ceramics in traditional Palestinian
patterns, sandalwood perfumes,
candles shaped like oranges made
with essential oils from nectarines.
Moreover, Palestinians refuse
to forget, which in of itself is an act
of resistance. Everywhere there
are murals of children looking out
to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem,
to ancestral lands they fled
from 75 years ago and have not
forgotten. I am reminded of my
colleague’s words when talking
about Muhammad al-Durrah’s
father. “Strangely, when something
like this happens to you, it makes it
clear you have to continue. You can’t
give up. That’s what they wanted
you to do all along.”
109
 AGENTS OF
CHANGE Pushing back
against the post-truth
era, Forensic Architecture’s use of cutting-edge
technology to uncover cases of state-sponsored
violence across the globe has become a vital tool
in the fight for social justice

Tucked away in a quiet corner of Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross is a

tight little cluster of rooms, each filled with iMacs, posters, projectors and
folders; inscrutable whiteboards and 3D statues of bomb clouds; awards,
books, vape pens and coffee mugs. Arranged on each bank of desks are a
sweep of young researchers, heads buried in their screens, writing intricate
scripts of code and running countless simulations: gunshots entering and
exiting virtual bodies, teargas filling public spaces at differing concentra-
tions. The low murmur of constant
discussion reverberates off the high They are slippery to define. You could call them an art collective, a media
ceilings as you step through into the platform, a newsroom or a detective squad, and find yourself mostly in the
main office. These are the head- right, but not quite. Who they are becomes easier to establish not through
quarters of Forensic Architecture, their label, but their output: they take official stories from governments,
and over the last decade, they have from police forces, from armies, and push at them until they fall apart. To do
emerged as one of the world’s most this, they have built a global network of investigators from every imagina- Weizman is, in every sense, the
powerful forces for social change. ble field, from lawyers to oceanographers and software developers, who driving force behind Forensic
use the tools of their trade to tear into cases of injustice from an all-new Architecture: he coined the term,
perspective. “We’re not trying to tell definite stories of our own,” founder laid out its theoretical underpin-
Eyal Weizman tells me, “we’re trying to poke holes, create fissures and nings, and then put said theories
cracks within the story of the state. It’s an act of deconstruction.” into practice after founding the
organisation in 2010. He is fiercely
intelligent, seemingly tireless,
and still dependably well-versed
on every one of his cases (88, at the time of writing, with several more to
come). He has seen his agency grow from a small cluster of researchers
funded by a grant from the European Research Council to a 25-strong
team in New Cross, with a sister agency, Forensis, in Berlin, and outposts
in Palestine, Ukraine, Mexico, Colombia and beyond. A spot on the team is
notoriously difficult to achieve.

“At the beginning, it was not clear exactly what we were doing, who we
were,” says Weizman. “But now, to get a job with us, you have to compete
against hundreds of applicants from all over the world.” He notes a similar
theme across a lot of new applicants: a sense of calling, and a desire to It’s not enough to be a technical
do something of substance with their talents. “I’m so encouraged to see savant or a fearless journalist, you
how ethical and political these young graduates are. They’ve had enough have to bring something more to the
of the creative industries, being sucked in by entertainment and culture. table to join Forensic Architecture.
They want to do things that matter.” “We want people that can bring
the right life experience, the
knowledge about struggle, political
commitment.” The end result is
what Weizman terms a “centre of excellence”, full of sharp-minded, skilful
researchers who are totally committed to their cause, and alarmingly
capable of turning their hand to any problem that comes their way.

DAZED
text KIERAN MORRIS

The group only works on commission, Weizman tells me, “not financial
commissions, but requests from people that are struggling for justice
somewhere.” Once they take a case on, they break their approach into
three in the style of a police forensics team, looking at an injustice in the
field (its location), the lab (their location) and the forum (our location).
Then, they lay out the official narrative into one fixed timeline, and get to
work chipping away at every last moment of it, looking for the slightest
inaccuracy to
zoom in on. To compile their timelines, they draw not only from court reports and news
accounts, but a vast repository of clips, fragments and snapshots pulled
from social media: one small benefit of the modern habit of recording any
and all public commotion. Standing alone, these clips might not offer very
much, but a dozen short videos collaged together can help you pinpoint
time, place and space: at Forensic Architecture, they describe these little
snippets as ‘flotsam’, and in many senses the day-to-day work of the agen-
cy is dredging as much of it as possible to hunt for case-breaking clues.

“We always say that it takes us one year to establish one second,” Weizman
says. But that meticulous process pays dividends. When Forensic
Architecture partnered with the lawyers for Mark Duggan’s family in their
civil case against the Metropolitan Police, it was the comprehensiveness
of their findings that forced the Met into offering a settlement out of court.
Once the matter was settled, they then took to the public forum on the
wishes of the Duggan family, exhibiting their discoveries in the Guardian,
a book, a film, and an exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
“Those 50 milliseconds between Mark Duggan exiting his cab and being
shot by police were an enormous, unresolved gap in London’s history,”
says Weizman. Thanks in no small part to Forensic Architecture, that Not every case ends with a concession like that.
gap has now been closed: there can now be no doubt that the Met’s first Weizman concedes that there are plenty of countries –
account of Duggan’s shooting was false. some of which he can no longer visit – that reject,
deny and dispute their findings, in an effort to do some
unpicking of their own. One such case, about collabo-
ration between German police and neo-Nazi groups,
has prompted particular pushback. “There are some in Germany who think
that some of our materials, the helicopter footage, were illegally obtained,
but our lawyers are completely contented,” he says. “You need very good
lawyers fighting your corner.”

111
This sense of self-assuredness is why Forensic Architecture attract the
grants and awards that they do. It might look strange that they can exhibit
themselves as comfortably in a gallery as a cinema, a phone screen or a
courtroom; that they can win a Peabody and be nominated for a Turner
Prize, or collaborate with the world’s biggest newspapers and still evade
categorisation. They’re art, journalism, agitprop, activism, legal argument
and multimedia storytelling all at
once, but above all else, they’re in
the business of establishing the Often, this means applying more than a little ingenuity
truth, and will go to any length to their approach. While they’re well-funded, trained
necessary in order to uncover it. and connected, they still lack the bottomless budg-
ets and cutting-edge surveillance of an actual state
forensics unit. So, in lieu of that access, they come up
with their own, taking hardware and software from
all manner of fields, from gaming and animation to
film production and camera techniques. A lot of those
efforts are, I’m told, led by Nick Masterton, an in-house
researcher and “general technologist”, in his own
words, who specialises in ‘spatialisation’: the art of “In many cases,” says Masterton,
establishing the who, what and where of an open case. “we find ourselves using tools
in ways that are not quite how
they were designed [to be used].”
As such, they are able to navigate
themselves out of cul-de-sacs that would stump a less creative investiga-
tor. To give one example, in the Mark Duggan case, Forensic Architecture
found themselves repeatedly testing theories on the shooting, trying to
find out whether police officers could have possibly seen Duggan with a
gun in his hand, or throwing a gun over the bridge, before they discharged
their weapon. They had a 3D model of the scene laid out, all the way down
to the motion of the cars and the mechanics of the gunshots, but ran up
against a problem: their computer screens.

“Usually, we pull something up on a 1080px screen and

examine it that way, making the three-dimensional
space into a two-dimensional image,” says Masterton.
“But when you look at a screen, your field of view has
its limitations.” So, to fully ascertain what each police
officer could have seen in the moments before Mark
Duggan’s death, Masterton and the team deployed
virtual reality headsets to completely immerse
themselves, and actual police officers, in the recon-
structed scene. “We could recreate that moment in 360
degrees, to interrogate whether or
not the gun would have been visible
to each officer.” Once the officers Beyond the headsets and 3D models, they have recently started experi-
of the Independent Office for Police menting with the most famous bit of video game software in history, the
Conduct (IOPC) had experienced Unreal Engine: the power behind Fortnite, Gears of War and countless Agata Nguyen Chuong, the
the scene, the original narrative other games. Once more, Forensic Architecture have identified the researcher most involved with the
became even harder to defend. killer capability that makes the engine so good for games building a software, has been using Unreal to
world in extraordinary detail and turned it towards justice; in this case, help reconstruct a vision of Namibia
postcolonial justice. from a time before its colonisation
by Germany in the late 19th century.
“This is a very different project to
what we usually take on,” Chuong
tells me, “because of the timescales and the lack of media to work with.
We’re looking at 1904 to 1908, and so the only images we have are from that
time, taken by the colonisers, with no metadata.” To locate where these
images were taken, Chuong works from a reconstruction of the Namibian
bushlands, built with the Unreal Engine, using the scant visual clues provid-
ed in the picture itself: the placement of the sun or an incline from
a particular angle.

Third from top and second from bottom: Koloniales Bildarchiv, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt/Main
(Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022). All other images courtesy of Forensic Architecture

DAZED
Once they’ve placed a pin where those photos were
taken, they are then able to interrogate those patches
of land over a century of degradation and colonisation
by European settlers. All of this is being done to support
a case of historical genocide against the Herero,
Mbanderu and Nama peoples, in which the affected
families are still seeking reparations more than 100
years on. “We’re in this process because that genocide
led to a mass land grab in the country. Seventy per
cent of arable land in Namibia is
owned by the descendants of those These kinds of immersive worlds are useful in investigating modern
settler colonists.” Through using atrocities too, helping to prevent acts of violence from being lost to an
this software, they have been able overabundance of information, rather than a lack of it. For Nour Abuzaid,
to reconstruct what was nearly an advanced researcher and web developer from Gaza, this has led to
a completely faded vision of the building a click-through online platform where users can walk around “These kinds of techniques allow
recent past, in the fight against an the Palestinian settlement of Sheikh Jarrah, which has faced continual you to adopt the perspective of the
injustice that could just as easily encroachment and displacement from the Israeli government. Along with perpetrator,” says Abuzaid, “as well
have been lost to the sands of time. Shourideh Molavi, Abuzaid is one of two Palestinian team members at as guiding users to move between
Forensic Architecture, and both members take the lead on cases concern- point A and point B, following their
ing violence against Palestinians. own narrative and not just the one
we lay out.” As Abuzaid takes me
through another as-yet-unreleased
and even more immersive model, you can see once
again the signature collages gathered from all the
photos and videos taken from this keenly disputed
territory where buildings, businesses and homes are
situated, how they relate to one another all explorable
on your screen through a regular web browser.

These clever little uses and models for modern tech-

nologies are by no means a trade secret for the agency.
Open sourcing is a pillar of their philosophy; they want
to be copied and to share their techniques and findings
with other “civil detectives”, as Weizman calls them.
“We see so many organisations using techniques we’ve
developed — the Washington Post
with their forensic video depart- Masterton even recalls the police being impressed by
ment, the New York Times, all the what their agency is capable of. “When they came into
way down to grassroots organi- the office over the Duggan case, they said, “We’re here
sations,” Weizman says, “and we to steal as much as we can from you.” I thought that was
always help them set it up.” very telling; I was surprised they were coming to us for
their technological expertise.” But while their tech-
niques may be transferable to organisations on both The staff at Forensic Architecture
sides of the battle for social justice, the mindset they are trained to keep pushing at the
have cultivated in a generation of young staff is perhaps cutting edge and, as technologies
their single biggest asset, and their most impactful gift. keep advancing, new cases keep
emerging and more bright talents
are drawn to their cause, you can
trust that they will continue causing
issues for states with something to
hide. “We don’t stop digging,” says Weizman, “and the
further we zoom in, the more abuses of state power we
uncover, from the molecular to the macro-cultural frac-
tals within fractals. We always find something.”

113
photography WINTER VANDENBRINK styling MIRKO PEDONE

฀฀
LOEWE

ROYLANCE LEVI’S
GUCCI ฀
LOEWE
ROYLANCE AMIRI

฀
LOEWE ROYLANCE
฀฀฀ ฀ PLACEHOLDER DOLCE &
GABBANASIM
QUISTDIESEL ฀ ฀ ฀
CULPARIBUSAM PRADA
฀ SA
฀ ฀
CRAIG GREEN ฀
CRAIG GREEN
ADIDAS ORIGINALS
DAZED BY CRAIG GREEN
Where Do We
Go Next?

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 ฀฀฀ ฀ PLACEHOLDER
SIM
QUIST ฀
CULPARIBUSAM
฀ SA

DAZED
 ฀ ฀฀

ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD

SAINT LAURENT BY
ANTHONY VACCARELLO
STEFAN COOKE
LOUIS VUITTON

฀฀
TOMMY JEANS

ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD

YOHJI YAMAMOTO
LOEWE

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 ฀฀
ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD,
฀
DOLCE & GABBANA
FURLA

฀ ฀฀

LOUIS VUITTON
ROKSANDA × FILA DRIES
VAN NOTEN ฀

LOUIS VUITTON
FERRARI
NATIONAL THEATRE
DAZED COSTUME HIRE
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 ฀฀฀ ฀ PLACEHOLDER
SIM
฀ QUIST ฀
BURBERRY
CULPARIBUSAM UNITED
COLORS
฀ OF
SA BENETTON
FERRAGAMO
MOSCHINO
LOEWE GUCCI
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY
DAZED
VACCARELLO
฀ ฀
TOMMY JEANS
ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD
UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON
DOLCE & GABBANA ฀

TOMMY JEANS
ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD

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CARHARTT WIP,

DRIES VAN NOTEN, leather trousers

ANN DEMEULEMEESTER
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY
VACCARELLO
CHOPOVA LOWENA, leather shoes DOLCE &
GABBANA
CARHARTT WIP
PRADA
WILLY CHAVARRIA
AKONI MOLLY GODDARD.

฀ ฀฀
฀ JUNYA WATANABE,
LORO PIANA ฀
ALYSSA MARIE
GROENEVELD
DSQUARED2

DAZED
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VALENTINO ALYSSA
MARIE GROENEVELD
BALENCIAGA AKONI
ALAÏA
LORO PIANA
DIESEL

฀ ฀฀

฀฀ PALACE
HAIDER ACKERMANN
× FILA
DIOR
GIVENCHY GUCCI
DIESEL ฀
GUCCI
CARHARTT
WIP
ALYSSA MARIE
GROENEVELD ฀ ฀

PRADA
GIVENCHY GUCCI
AKONI
FURLA

฀ JOHN ALLAN L’OREAL

PROFESSIONNEL CRYSTABEL
RILEY JULIAN WATSON AGENCY
TATA
฀฀฀ ฀HARPER
PLACEHOLDER SEOYEON LEE
NEXT RACHAEL
SIM CARRUTHERS STORM
SHANEQUIST
STEVEN IMG ABS ฀ EL FARJANI
SUPA FELIX ALLEN
CULPARIBUSAM MOHAMMED
AWWAL
฀ AZEEZ
SA MODELS 1
BRIGITTE KOVATS, NADIYA HASSAN, LEA
ZÖLLER VALENTINA GROSSO
TEMI ADELEKAN, TINA
KHATRI PHOEBE ASKER
DAZED IRENE MANICONE
125
photography CAMPBELL ADDY styling IBRAHIM KAMARA

WHO’S AFRAID OF
AZEALIA BANKS?

DAZED
It’s been over a decade since Azealia Banks
blew up, in every possible sense, as the
most provocative rapper of her generation.
But her unfiltered approach to fame
revealed hypocrisies on both sides of
the argument. Can the Harlem-born
rapper ever outrun the past?

127
 Previous spread: silk slip dress
PRISCAVERA, silver and brass
earcuffs HUGO KREIT, necklaces
and rings worn throughout
Azealia’s own

This page: all clothes DOLCE &

GABBANA, metal and lucite earrings
STERLING KING

DAZED
text CONNOR GAREL
The year Azealia Banks finally decided to give up on living in Los Angeles,
the wildfires were so apocalyptic that the whole sky turned blood orange.
“I remember opening my door one morning to get an Amazon package,”
she tells me one night in late January, “and there was, like, soot, falling on
my tongue.” Her Californian friends were puzzled by her distress. This hap-
pens all the time, they promised, optimism superseding fact. Never mind that
she couldn’t breathe, or go to the weed store without getting a funny look.
“I was just like, ‘I need to move to the wettest part of the fucking country,’”
she says. A drought is no place for a self-styled mermaid. So, Florida.
Where everyone owns guns, and so everyone minds their business.
It seems strange and strangely fitting that Banks, who is as New York as
they come, should feel at home in the heart of the American unconscious,
what Joan Didion called the nation’s “psychic centre”. Shit gets weird in the
most mystical American state. It’s like all the loucheness and weirdness of
US culture drips down and gathers at its southernmost tip. Some credit the
absurdism to the yearlong humid summers, others the wild diversity of 21
million people stuffed together on an electoral battleground, and still oth-
ers the golden promise of laissez-faire living. Dysfunction is the governing
logic, or illogic. Carl Hiaasen, our foremost chronicler of Florida’s “amiable
depravity”, once referred to it as a “magnet for outlaws and scoundrels”.
And how else to describe Banks without first acknowledging her
roguishness, her lawlessness, her aversion to convention? The rules have
never seemed to apply, or even occur, to her. She works against trend,
smuggling into hip hop her glitchy, rave-friendly sounds with such virtuosic
ease that you forget to question how bizarre the songs really are. “I do have
some house songs, but a lot of my category is technically electronic music,
and people really do gloss over how great of a traditional rapper I am,” she
says. “I’ve done everything. I’m singing opera on ‘JFK’. I’m doing dembow on
‘Salchichón’. I’m doing bossa nova with that cover of ‘Chega de Saudade’.
I put out a fucking Christmas record. I just like music.”
Banks’s discography is playful and energetic and deeply original.
It has the gilded sheen of invincibility. It’s brash, raunchy, intoxicatingly
confident. She’s a technical wordsmith who foregrounds cleverness, and
arranges her verses with a preternatural ear for nursery-rhyme assonance
that doubles down on its often nonsensical, juvenile humour. On her latest
single, “New Bottega” – which, last autumn, had everyone and their gay
mother yelling “New Bottega, Prada-da” – Banks affects an Italian accent
over a thumping electroclash beat, lovingly reciting a list of high fashion
labels before delivering a characteristically Banksian bar:
“I put the boy in Galliano, now he’s a fuckin’ model / I’mma make him famous,
rename him, I’m icin’ out his chain and / Still grippin’ the stainless, stay dangerous,
’cause most of these n***as is brainless…”
She’s always at home on any house beat, but Banks is also impressively
chameleonic. She can glide from acid house and post-disco to surf rock and
bachata, all within the space of a single track. “I make up my own genres
a lot of the time,” she tells me with casual indifference. Say what you will
about her: The only person who sounds like Azealia Banks is Azealia Banks.
But the ferocity that charges this command over language is, not at all
coincidentally, the same ferocity that gets her in trouble. When the New
York Times profiled Banks in 2012, the first line in the piece made reference
to her “filthy mouth”. “I grew up in America,” she says matter-of-factly,
“I grew up watching South Park and All in the Family. Like, I grew up reading
US history textbooks.” When people talk about her, they tend to lapse into
the conditional: “She’s so talented,” they begin, “but…” Press headlines
have for years been marked by loose adaptations of “Azealia Banks is mak-
ing enemies again”, be it record-label executives or bloggers or discarded
managers or other musicians, and the hip-hop blogs have made it their
collective mission to anatomise every single beef the rapper has ever lived
through, cashing in clicks on her passionate sparring and then harkening
back to it whenever she releases new music. One downside of modern
celebrity is that you can never outrun past versions of yourself.
There was a point in time when Azealia Banks was the promising ‘young
new face’ on the block with her pick of the litter on record deals, a wide-
eyed LaGuardia dropout getting flown out to perform at Karl Lagerfeld’s
birthday party in Paris, a 21-year-old force of nature with awestruck
cosigns from hip-hop legends like Nas (“She has incredible star power…
the total package”) and a then-still-golden Kanye West (who, early on, was
keen to sign her). There was no shortage of industry professionals who
would have publicly proclaimed Banks as the future of music. She seemed
inevitable. Now, she’s regarded as some kind of radioactive element.
No fashion label would agree to sponsor this cover story.
Banks belongs to a lineage of artist-critics who, despite the conse-
quences, have no qualms in voicing their displeasures with the grand
betrayals of the rotting, patriarchal, white supremacist culture they’ve
found themselves born into. And because she doesn’t mince words,
the focus sometimes lands on her language as opposed to her argument.
“It’s just like, the audacity of these white millennials who are maybe one
or two generations removed from a grandparent who would have had me
hung from a tree for drinking out of the wrong water fountain,” she says.
“The nerve of you to call me a bigot because I am making use of the lan-
guage that I have been made to assimilate into.” The art has never suffered.
But Banks is caught in a double bind where the qualities that fund and
make possible her music are simultaneously the ones that thwart and
complicate her career.
She’s also a Black woman with bipolar disorder working in an industry
that fails, at every turn, to offer her any support. “There was a point in time
when people didn’t want to book me,” she says. “I had n***as stealing my
royalties and all type of shit. Like, there was a point in time when I was so
fucking broke that I was sleeping in a storage space. You know, famous
and broke.” It’s true that she has said some deeply regrettable things – her
occasional transphobic remarks have been particularly jarring – many of
which she has apologised for. Neither she, nor her fans, are unaware of
these missteps. It’s equally true that tabloids have often elided her queer-
ness when describing instances in which she has been ‘homophobic’.
And there’s a failure to acknowledge the ways in which the ballroom scene,
where shade is the lingua franca, has inflected both her sound and how
she wields language to read other queer people. Some of the frustrations
that Banks’s fans have with her are profoundly warranted. But it could be
argued that her greatest trespass is refusing respectability, demanding to
make music and exist on her own terms, and broadcasting her unfiltered
inner monologue as if the world were a small room with a locked door and
some close friends inclined to read
her in good faith.
“I can be a little messy,” says
Banks. “Everybody makes a bad
joke sometimes. Like, who cares?
Quentin Tarantino gets paid $500m
to make really bad jokes all the time,
“There was a you know? Come on. Let me get
my shit off.”
point in time
when I was so Azealia Banks was born in Harlem
in 1991, to two older sisters and a
broke that I was mother who worked long hours
at a retail store on 57th Street.
sleeping in a Her father died of pancreatic can-
storage space” cer when she was two, and in the
only mental image she has left of
him, he is lying in a casket. “That’s
why I sound like a Dominican,”
she says. “Because I was raised
by Dominican caretakers. My
mom would throw them a couple
thousand dollars and just disappear
for five weeks.” (On songs like “Gimme a Chance” and “Salchichón”, Banks
sporadically slips into perfect Spanish with the unexpected confidence of
Ben Affleck.) Her mother never told her where she was going, never gave an
explanation. “I would just be in my head, like, ‘Does my mother not want me
any more? Is she coming back? Is she alive?’”
She also developed her musicality in part because of her mother, who,
when she was around, would do chores around the house naked while
listening to Rachelle Ferrell, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer and Whitney
Houston. Banks was ten when her mother was diagnosed with schizophre-
nia, but their relationship was volcanic long before that. She had to grow
up quickly in a home where she was forced to develop a kind of emotional
armour. “She would brag about how she did witchcraft and killed my
father,” says Banks. On mornings when she had to ride the bus to school
after physical altercations, she would listen to Destiny’s Child’s “Happy
Face”, and do her best to stop crying so the social workers wouldn’t put her
in foster care. By 14, when she began studying acting at LaGuardia, she had
moved out of her mother’s home and in with one of her sisters.
“I was always being told that I was a bad person, and I guess I kind
of just accepted it as the truth,” she says. “And I think a lot of that early
indoctrination, especially during my fundamental years, followed me into
the music industry – where you would see me lashing out at people and
just, like, being bad. Because that’s who I was told I was. When I came into
fame and I had all these people showering me with love and admiration,
[telling me] I was good and they liked the things I was creating, it was really
uncomfortable for me. I didn’t know how to accept any of that. Nobody ever
told me that I was pretty when I was little.”
129
Banks didn’t grow up dreaming of being a rapper. It happened naturally.
She did grow up with dreams of being famous, but she always assumed
it would be for acting, and was genuinely disappointed when she turned
14 and still hadn’t landed a show on Nickelodeon. “I just started rapping
because I had some boyfriend who rapped, and all his friends rapped, too,”
she says. “And I thought it was so cool.” Writing rhymes became an outlet
into which she could funnel her disaffection with the acting career that
wasn’t materialising. “I would always come and try to butt into the cipher,
and it would be some wack-ass shit. They would just snatch the blunt out
of my hand and skip me. And I would just say to myself, ‘One day, I’m gonna
come back and I’m gonna get all y’all n***as. Watch.’”
Eventually, that day did arrive. She spent two months writing to a
Ladytron beat and, when it was finally ready, she came back to the cipher
to spit the verse a cappella:
“I’m not the don diva / I’m beyond you don skeezers / I get cake from quick
chicks with long heaters / One-seven hot stepping like Tekken / I’mma be a main
bitch in the game like Nina.”
The verse oozed with the confidence, defiance and provocation that
makes Banks such a joy to listen to, and when she rapped it, nobody
snatched the blunt from her.
“The fake ID don’t got a mistake / Miss Banks keeps these n***as caught up
in a teen angst / They’ve been trying to look, trying to fuck / Since I first came
through with the triple-A cup / Now I got hip slip tips in the butt / Now I’m on radar
like warm weather fronts.”
The room burst into cheers; it was clear she was a natural. This was
her first time actually writing a verse, and already she was miles ahead of
her boyfriend and his crew. Her friend Johnny Five convinced her to record
the song, and she put it on Myspace under the name Miss Bank$. And she
kept on writing, kept on recording
her demos. Every day after school
at 4pm, she would go home, get
on Myspace and send the songs
to everyone she could. Eventually
they reached Diplo, who became an
instant fan, and she signed a devel-
“I can be a little opment deal with XL Recordings,
Odd Future courted moral panic and, in its place, found love. Listening
to their music was as macabre and as fascinating as witnessing a car
crash. The world they conjured was bruised, violent and nihilistic, pushing
vulgarity to the very limits of what it could contain; women, when invoked,
were typically in the process of being abducted, raped, killed and/or
dismembered. The group liked to refer to themselves as “Black nazis”, and
made frequent use of childishly scrawled swastikas. In high school I owned
one of their t-shirts, black with a giant inverted white cross emblazoned on
the back. Labels started bidding wars to sign them; even Steve Rifkind, who
launched the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep and Three 6 Mafia, participated
in the madness. In 2011, XL beat out Interscope to land Tyler’s debut studio
album, Goblin, and I distinctly recall reading a review in NME that counted
213 instances of the word ‘faggot’ and its variants across the 73-minute
runtime. (It didn’t, but the figure stuck.) Odd Future was hypermasculine,
brutal, antisocial, stomach-turning – and beloved.
Banks, conversely, was too much to handle, though she was just as
brazen and destabilised. “It was some misogynoir shit,” she says of her
treatment by the label. Her online outbursts and refusal to sublimate her-
self didn’t earn her the title of “self-possessed” or “boss” or “genius” that
might equip a man exhibiting similar behaviour. “I was still finding my voice
as a songwriter,” she says. Your art, never mind your image, is a lot to trust
someone with – particularly when you’re still a teenager. “I’m someone
who, if you want something from me that I don’t want to do, you have to pay.
And not, like, 20Gs. I’m not about to switch my whole personality up and
have you put this image of me out there for $20,000.” She pauses, laughing
in disbelief. “Like, come on. I’m from Harlem. Are you kidding?”
Maybe Banks really was being bratty, or amateurish, or demanding.
Maybe the label was just trying to mould her into their version of a profita-
ble star and make them all rich. Everyone was, as always, just trying to get
what they wanted. But it all soured in the end. XL didn’t reply to her email
when she sent them the Machinedrum-produced “L8R”, a filthy hip-hop cut
that ends with an ode to “ratchet bitches” and eventually turned up on her
critically acclaimed EP, Fantasea. The tension with Richard Russell reached
such a fever pitch that, when she sent him “212” – the song that everyone
remembers exactly where they first heard, the song she wrote from a place
of desperation and anger, the song that Rolling Stone named one of the best

messy. Everybody where artists like M.I.A., Thom

Yorke and Adele had made their
of the last century, the song that any music executive worth their salt would
go to war to get their hands on, he — and I am incredulous when she says
makes a bad joke homes. It seemed she was on her
way, until it didn’t.
this – dropped her from the label.

sometimes. Who It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the way Azealia Banks wants or

cares? Quentin The whole lofty, seductive promise

of a development deal is that the
Tarantino gets artist will receive guidance from
music executives who are, suppos-
paid $500m to edly, invested in harnessing and
needs to make her art is fundamentally incompatible with the structure and
demands of the recording industry. She is uncompromising. Since the ato-
misation of her development deal with XL, she has fallen out with a handful
of other record labels. In 2012, she signed with Interscope and Polydor
Records, and began working on her first, and only, studio album, Broke With

make bad jokes all cultivating their raw creative spirit.

They’re meant to shepherd a musi-
the time. Let me cian from being unrefined to a kind
of ultimate self-actualisation, which
get my shit off’” is to say the goal is to fashion them
into something genuinely bankable.
But any juncture where art and
business meet inevitably reveals
the faultlines of those competing
interests. The music business is
a capitalist enterprise, after all, in
which the artist obtains the status of product. And it’s often Black women
in particular who end up struggling against the definitions of profitability
– sex appeal, pop appeal – that are handed down to them by an industry
shaped by a white male critical gaze.
To hear Banks tell the story is to get the sense that XL didn’t really
know what to do with her. She didn’t like the beats that Richard Russell,
the label’s owner, was sending her, in part because they were often pulled
from the reject piles of other, more established musicians. The label
didn’t like the songs that she was sending them, in part because they
didn’t conform to the sound the executives had envisioned for her. “It was
surprising to me, because it was like, ‘I let you guys convince me to drop
out of high school to write raps about sex, but nobody is developing me,’”
she says. “I remember them signing Odd Future around the same time and
being very, very jealous. Because they were being mentored and I was left
by the wayside.” She felt like she was on the outside looking in. She couldn’t
understand why nobody thought to put her in the same room as Tyler,
the Creator, because they shared a kind of anarchic spirit, and she was a
fan of him and Earl Sweatshirt in particular. “I just wanted to feel like I was
part of the XL fam.”
Expensive Taste. The label spent $2m on the record. But when she turned it
in, they complained there was no hit single – nothing that would climb the
Billboard 100.
Listening to the project, it’s not difficult to understand their confusion.
BWET is a brilliant, psychedelic trip that treats genre like an all-you-can-eat
buffet. It’s a shiny, intricate mess of hip-house, R&B, UK garage, dubstep,
trap, dance-pop, bachata, jazz, drum & bass etc. The label wanted some-
thing with mainstream appeal, but Banks had instead set out to make
an album that was anti-pop. The project, like the artist, resisted easy cate-
gorisation. Somehow, she managed to get out of the deal with all of
her songs, and released the album with Prospect Park, once more to
critical acclaim.
Versions of this story surface again and again throughout the artist’s
career. When this profile was initially assigned to me in early January, part
of the premise was that Banks had recently joined Parlophone Records,
the same UK-based label that signed Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and
Radiohead. Nearly ten years had passed since she’d released BWET, and
another six since her second mixtape, Slay-Z. The new deal brought with it
the promise of new music, flickering on the horizon like a mirage coalescing
into something real.
But a couple of nights before our interview, Banks announced, via
Instagram, that she had severed ties with the label after just a few months
of being there. They clashed on ideas about the marketing for “New
Bottega”, and even though Banks had only signed the deal to find a home for
Fantasea II, the A&R team at the label remained noncommittal. “It was that
whole thing again I’d heard so many times before. They always come with
the whole, you know, ‘Just play the game, play this, play that,’” she says.
“But it’s like, what game am I fucking playing? The game of making white
people richer than I will ever get off my own shit, just to get it out there?
It’s like, no. Starve these n***as out.”

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The general consensus online, after the news of the split, was that Banks
had burned more bridges for no reason. But her comments instantly bring
to mind a conversation that the Long Beach rapper Vince Staples had last
spring with a reporter at Complex, who made a casual reference to “the
music game”. “But what’s the game?” asked Staples, with a knowing smile.
A game implies winners and losers. And in the business of music, there’s an
impression among label executives that they’re giving artists an opportuni-
ty, and so there should be no complaints about anything as base as project
ownership. “They don’t call any other genre ‘the game’,” said Staples.
“They call the rap game the ‘rap game’ because there’s a bunch of n***as
running around, and they don’t want to give Black people shit.”
Black musicians have for decades probed the mysteries of other worlds
in their art. In his poem, “Astronauts”, Robert Hayden once described the
moon as an “Absolute Otherwhere”, and it’s no coincidence that space
is the place where so many of our great Black escapists tend to go. To be
Black is already to occupy an alternate reality: you are forced to accept as
fact that which is not, by any accounts, real, but which still shapes your life
in undeniably real ways. “The impossible attracts me,” Sun Ra once said,
“because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.”
Is it any wonder that Parliament, OutKast and Missy Elliott opted out of the
merely ‘real’ or possible? Instead they built their own worlds, supplanted
the limits of history with the possibilities of biomythography. Which is
the difference, says Banks, between a true artist and an entertainer:
the former creates a universe for you to live in, while the latter just puts
on a good show.
I was 14 and feverishly scrolling tumblr when I first saw the cartoon
brown-skinned mermaid with the long aquamarine hair on the cover of
her 2012 mixtape, Fantasea. The character resonated with the nautical
Afrofuturist aesthetics of Detroit techno duo Drexciya, but Banks says she
hadn’t heard of them when she adopted the seapunk look. “I was blown
away when I found them. Because here you had these two guys creating a
myth around slaves who were thrown off slave ships and then grew gills and
evolved so their bodies could survive in those conditions. And I was like,
nah, we’re tapped in. All music geniuses are tapped into some primordial
database of knowledge that exists in the subconscious or the pineal gland,”
she says, her laughter dissolving into earnestness. “It gave me this sense of
validation, knowing there were other people who felt like that.”
I ask her what she means by this. There is a certain type of artist who,
confronted with a life that renders their basic survival tenuous, invents
a character who can endure and even transcend the precarity of their
circumstances. Did the myth of the mermaid spring from a desire to project
an evolved version of herself into the world? One who could not only
survive, but also thrive, amid the dangers of the deep sea? “A lot of people
don’t know that, when I say I’m a mermaid, it’s not just some cosplay thing,”
she says. Banks is initiated in Palo Mayombe, an African diasporic religion
that was brought to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade,
and identifies with the Yoruban deity Yemaya, a protector of women who
is often depicted as a mermaid. Like any other non-Abrahamic religion,
Palo tends to be derided and misunderstood in the western world. So when
Banks went on Instagram Live in late 2016 to show a room with evidence of
“three years’ worth of Brujería” – dried chicken blood – caking the walls, it
was almost a self-fulling prophecy that she was immediately written off as
insane. “That’s why it’s like, fuck you, I don’t want to hear anything about
animal sacrifice. Because this is where I’ve found identity. This is where I’ve
found comfort. This is who has been watching over me my entire life.”
Reporters are invariably plagued by the fear that their subject will
not share enough of themselves – that, when the recorder is on and the
“Who am I redeeming myself for?
You should be trying to redeem
yourselves for me”
questions begin, the star will become shy and reticent, retreating into
the comfort of their privacy, and the reporter will emerge from the inter-
view having learned nothing at all new. Banks is neither shy nor reticent.
She can’t help but bare it all. She’s always bringing her whole entire self,
as Carrie Mae Weems once put it, to the kitchen table. She can be com-
manding and authoritative in one moment and sensitive, almost fragile,
in the next. She speaks in the longform and never offers a one-word answer.
It’s a way of being I’ve encountered most often among people who desper-
ately want to be understood, and it surprises me that so few people seem
to understand her. What does it mean to be given the gift of language
and then told that you’re misusing it? To have so much to say and find the
people around you can’t stomach it?
Lately, Banks has been feeling good. She seems grounded, happy.
She has recorded around 50 songs for Fantasea II, and another 25 for
Business & Pleasure, the follow-up to BWET, which she says she doesn’t
really know how to describe. “It’s rap,” she says, noncommittally. There’s
some Spanish drill, and some R&B songs where she feels like she’s really
showcasing her singing. “My voice has definitely matured a lot, and I feel
really sexy when I sing now. When you’re younger, especially when you
come from theatre like I do, you’re kind of listening to yourself as you sing,
to make sure that you sound pretty. But I don’t care about sounding pretty.
Because I’ve realised that I’m fucking gorgeous.”
Banks isn’t nearly as online as she once was, and doesn’t really pay
attention to what people say about her there. Instead, she pours a sig-
nificant amount of energy into CheapyXO, the store she founded in 2017
that sells products like hydrosol mists, acupressure tools, herbal teas and
soaps to help alleviate haemorrhoids from anal sex. (There was a time when
gay men were tweeting her before and after photos of their literal assholes,
as though she was the fairy godmother of their colons.)
These days, her idea of success has more to do with maintaining a
routine. She has just moved into a new home, and is trying to get rid of some
of the clothes she has accumulated over the past couple of years. “Some
of these designers get mad and be like, ‘I’m never sending Azealia clothes
again, because she’s just gonna sell them to her fans,’” she says. She’s far
more secure now than she was in late 2017, when she was famous and
broke and living in a WeWork office lined by the clothes she was selling on
Depop. Now, she’s focusing on the small things: decluttering is one route
to peace of mind. Over the past year, she’s had a lot of revelations. “I’ve
realised that my existence is not a consequence – I am not somehow
cursed because I am of African descent,” she says. “My existence is part
of the natural phenomena of the planet Earth, of the flora and the fauna.”
She has been trying to break her “karmic cycle”, and reminds herself often
that she is, in fact, a good person.
At some point near the end of our interview, I recall that Banks was on the
cover of Dazed ten years ago. It’s a photograph of her looking prototypical-
ly defiant, with her trademark aquamarine hair cascading around the
sides of her face and her fingers lifted to her lips, inflating a red condom.
The issue was banned in seven countries. I begin to formulate a sentence
about her return to the magazine, but she misinterprets my phrasing as
an observation about a general comeback. “But I never left,” she insists.
“I’ve always been here.” Earlier in our conversation, she said something
similar, when she was in the midst of expressing her frustrations with
the way that her fans have spoken of her recently, and I swore I could hear
her rolling her eyes. “People are always like, oh, it’s the Azealia Banks
redemption arc. But who the fuck am I redeeming myself for? You should
be trying to redeem yourselves for me.”
133
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photography BRENT MCKEEVER

SPICE
WORLD Born on the January 1, 2000
with a superstar’s sense
of immaculate timing, Ice Spice is the new
people’s princess twerking the pain away with
her fluorescent spin on the Bronx drill scene

All clothes worn throughout TOMMY JEANS SPRING 2023, all jewellery and accessories worn throughout Ice’s own
DAZED
text MATTHEW TRAMMELL
To the rest of us normies, being born on January 1 seems like a Teflon
affirmation of chosen-hood. The new year starts with you, you set it off,
the surreal ceremony of the entire planet counting down to the day you
entered into it. It would be easy for anyone born on that day to have a
sense of their own importance, you figure. But talking to Ice Spice on a
mild January afternoon between video shoots, she offers up the more droll
reality beyond the appearance. “It’s so funny that that’s what people got
from it,” she says when I ask about the flurry of jokes that ran online on
New Year’s Day, when fans realised it was also the 23-year-old rapper’s
birthday, and clarifies that it can actually be kind of annoying. “Having a
birthday on New Year’s is so crazy because everybody is celebrating their
New Year’s, but it’s your birthday. So that’s always been my issue with
that. And usually, my Christmas gifts are also my birthday gifts.” But now,
post “Munch”, post virality, post permanent etching in meme-hood, the
day seems her birthright. “Now,” she says, “it makes sense.”
In November 2021, Spice’s video for “No Clarity” quietly knocked
around the emerging Bronx drill scene in New York. Signposting her fresh
take on the genre, the track balanced a brash, Bronx-bred confidence
with glimpses of vulnerability rarely heard in today’s dominant strain of
alpha-female rap. Commenters on the video cosmically recognise it as
“Twerking through her struggle” – Spice, in around-the-way girl-garb
of Jordan 3s and a puffer coat, wiggles and wobbles with attitude while
recounting an ex-boyfriend who broke her heart. On her “On the Radar”
freestyle, released a few months prior, she’s even more bold, spitting
from her deepest core about a complicated relationship the way male drill
rappers rap about besting their opponents in the street. Take the way she
twists one of drill’s signature catchphrases, “Graaah”: it’s meant to mimic
a gunshot sound but, in Spice’s hands, it’s often deployed between bars
about love and lust. For the rapper and other girls like her, matters of the
heart carry the stakes of life or death.
The New York drill scene that Spice is a product of is fundamentally
about violence. It has left New York hip-hop fans in a strange state: the
excitement around the music is undeniable, but it also highlights and seems
to encourage the saddest parts of life as a poor young person in the city.
Like many kids her age, Spice encountered drill as a sound uniquely of her
era and upbringing. The scene’s first true breakout star was the late Pop
Smoke, from Brooklyn, and Spice’s rise might resemble his most closely.
There are moments in her music when you can hear his trademark rapid-fire
delivery and bellowing breathiness. “I love Pop Smoke. He’s Goated,” she
says. “I was definitely bumping him every day before I started recording.
Sheff G too, of course. Sleepy Hallow. Bizzy Banks. It was a lot of people in
the drill scene.”
The sound soon delivered budding stars from the Bronx, New York’s
rawest and least-compromised borough, and upstarts sprouted up there
almost weekly. “I was already recording when I started hearing about [local
drill stars] DThang and Kay Flock,” she remembers. “By the time the Bronx
started popping up I was already in the booth, plotting. But hearing them
was definitely more of a motivation, too – just knowing that now we have
a spotlight in the Bronx. I feel like when there’s an artist buzzing out the
Bronx, that gives other people a chance to shine too.”
Most great Ice Spice songs soften drill’s edges with colourful, sped-
up pop samples courtesy of her producer, Riot, but her first proper hit,
“Munch (Feelin’ U)”, is uncut, all sub-bass and firecracker high-hats,
a menacing sound perfect for cutting a dude down to size. The week of its
release, Drake reached out; that nod, combined with an irresistible video
shot by drill director George Buford, was enough to make the song go viral.
The lore of hip hop’s beginnings at park jams sprung back to life before
fans’ eyes in post-lockdown 2022,
where kids who’d been in school
“I see the Bronx on laptops for nearly two years
could finally cut loose together
as being very true after class, in person. “I shot that
video in the park I went to every day
to its core, growing up,” says Spice. “It’s where
no matter what. I went after school. The people in
the video are friends, and it was a
I want every vibe, it was a fun summer day.”
Her appeal across the full spec-
Bronx native to trum of Gen Z audiences – from the
be successful hardest drill fanatics to the softest
make-up enthusiasts – made
and follow Spice a star by the end of the week.
Meek Mill dropped a freestyle, she
their dreams” popped up on streamer Kai Cenat’s
channel for one of her first extended interviews, and labels raced uptown.
Spice signed a deal with Capitol/10K, and on her TikTok trender “Bikini
Bottom” bragged about making “two milli for using a mic”, a requisite flex
for every newly crowned king or queen of New York. Soon, she was rocking
an iced-out cartoon image of her own face, curly crown included, and her
video sets were much bigger than the local basketball court. This January
she dropped a video for “In Ha Mood” that marked the growth. “It feels like
a movie now, making some videos, depending on what we’re really going
for,” she says. “That video did feel like a little movie set. People was yelling
‘action’, it gave that. It was cute, I love it.”
That teeter towards the centre is what makes Spice’s rise so magnetic
to watch. As the video budgets keep pace with her ambition, Spice is no
longer just sampling bright pop sounds from far outside the Bronx – she’s
fielding requests from those artists, too. PinkPantheress reached out for
a remix of her single “Boy’s a Liar”, and the two artists were soon shooting
Gen Z’s first true cinematic star crossover. “I’m so excited to be collaborat-
ing with her, because I’m really a huge fan, ever since I first heard of her I’ve
been a fan,” Spice says of the young British star. “So for her to ask me to hop
on ‘Boy’s a Liar’, I’m really excited. And the video is fire too. It’s unexpected,
but we still have a correlation to each other somehow. Even before the
record, fans really wanted it. There were already requests for that.” They
met for the first time on set, where they bonded about “being new artists
and just how crazy it is, having to develop so fast”, says Spice.
In our interview, Spice is poised and polished. She shows up camera-
ready, giving responses with a noncommittal grace that resembles the
beloved royal she has jokingly been compared to, Princess Diana. She
knows what to say and what not to say. Her comments are always positive,
even on the hyped Cardi B remix of “Munch” that was teased but ultimately
never released. (“It was a moment. I appreciate Cardi for even putting that
out.”) On her new EP, Like..?, you can hear the versatility in tone that all rap-
pers-turned-pop stars have to master. A former Barb herself, Spice at times
evokes Nicki Minaj’s ability to hint at totally different characters through
simple inflection shifts. On “Gangsta Boo”, for example, her Bronx lilt gives
way to a glimpse of coy valley girl: “Got a place we can stay for the night, but I’m
too shy to invite you,” she intones, the ‘shy’ hitting straight up and high, not
stretched off the to the side the way
a New Yorker might say, “You know
the vah-bes.” “It’s really the tone or
the mood that I’m trying to give off
that subconsciously affects how
I’m delivering,” she explains. I feel
like everything is about tone; that
“I’m excited to can tell you a lot about the feeling of
see the world a song. I just go with the flow really.
The beat usually lets me know what
and travel type of feeling I’m supposed to be
in. For ‘Gangsta Boo’, it was giving
more. I feel like me happy vibes, lighthearted,
2023 is gonna crush, cute, happy, butterfly stage.
So I hope I gave that.”
be Goated” Still, that poise, and her own
personal glow, is only the surface
above a Bronx background still
rooted in the underclass. As New
York continues to morph into some-
thing only recognisable in glimpses,
the borough she represents is at
once warmly familiar to natives and
a bit of a catch-22, left to its own devices but also lacking in the oppor-
tunities (or at least new facades) afforded by Brooklyn. Can one imagine
a future for the Bronx which doesn’t depend on transplants shifting the
culture but still offers something new to its natives? “I see the Bronx
still being very authentic, and true to its core, no matter what,” says Spice.
“I want every Bronx native to become successful and follow their dreams
and for them to come true. I want that for all my Bronx people, for real.
I have my people in my corner. I only keep supportive people around me,
motivated people.”
But for now, Spice has the rest of the world in her sights. “I’m excited to
hit these festival stages and put out more singles leading up to my album,”
she says. “I’m excited to do more collaborations with artists from different
genres” – she drops Tokischa, The 1975 and Rosalía as acts she’s bumping
at the moment, and was stoked to meet Spice (the dancehall artist) on
the BET awards red carpet. She celebrated her birthday in Mexico, but
otherwise hasn’t been out of the country much; she expresses genuine
excitement at expanding her horizons in all senses. I’m excited to see the
world and travel more,” she says. “I feel like 2023 is gonna be Goated.”
153
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special thanks MYLES XAVIER, KAYLA VEGA
photography HARLEY WEIR styling IMRUH ASHA

DAZED
text ELLEN PEIRSON-HAGGER
ART ATTACK! With their soup-throwing theatrics
at the National Gallery in October,
two campaigners from Just Stop Oil showed how to wake people up
to the climate crisis with nothing but a tin opener and nerves of steel.
Across these pages, climate activists from across the world reveal
why ‘hope is a thing we create when we take action’
The future belongs to the young. And while we are all already feeling the
effects of the climate crisis, it is those who have the most life left to live
who will experience its harshest consequences. That’s why it’s the world’s
youngest citizens who are fighting the crisis most ardently. They simply
have no other choice. As 26-year-old activist Vanessa Nakate puts it:
“Our future is scary. We have to do something about it.”
The Ugandan campaigner was first inspired to take action by Greta
Thunberg, the now 20-year-old Swedish activist whose fierce determina-
tion to make world leaders listen up has paved the way for a new school
of young climate advocates. But there is no one way to get into activism,
as these multifaceted, idiosyncratic protesters show. Mikaela Loach,
a 25-year-old Jamaican-British medical student, worked on migrant rights
before the concept of climate justice drew her towards environmental
efforts. For 18-year-old Autumn Peltier, it was witnessing local injustices
that made her a campaigner for the water rights of Indigenous Canadian
peoples. For others, such as 16-year-old Californian Genesis Butler,
the change came early, and hit personally: she was just six when she
became a vegan, and now helps other young people adapt their lifestyles
for the good of the planet.
And there is more than one method of effective action. These advo-
cates talk to world leaders, hand out leaflets, influence their peers on social
media and organise strikes. Some even risk their own freedom, such as our
cover stars, the brave young activists of Just Stop Oil. The controversial
UK group has become notorious for blocking roads, spraying paint and
gluing themselves to objects, all while demanding the government listens
to their climate plea.
For all these courageous young people, climate action is about seizing
back their future from the governments, fossil fuel companies and oppres-
sors who have stolen it from them – and from all of us. The question is: will
you join them?
JUST STOP OIL In the National Gallery on a Friday morning
in October, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland are flummoxed. They want
to get close to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting, but a group of
children on a school trip are in the way. All Plummer can think is: “We can’t
throw soup on children! They’re going to have to move!”
The pair mill around, trying desperately to get their bodies to remember
what normal, non-suspicious behaviour in an art gallery looks like. Growing
more and more anxious, they wonder how long they can bear to wait.
You know what happens next. When the kids are finally out the way,
Plummer and Holland take off their jackets, revealing Just Stop Oil (JSO)
t-shirts. They approach the “Sunflowers”, open cans of Heinz cream of
tomato soup and drench the painting. They kneel and glue themselves to
the wall, then Plummer asks, “What’s worth more: art or life? Is it worth
more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the
protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?”
It is a typically absurdist stunt from the climate coalition group.
Plummer and Holland will throw soup at a £76m painting, but definitely not
at the kids who happen to block their way. They will cover a painting in soup,
then their hands in glue, a substance whose stickiness feels intrinsically
silly, even childlike. They will – some would say radically, certainly cheekily
– subvert the idea of value, and in doing so, draw the public’s attention to
the government’s mishandling of the climate crisis.
Because above all, JSO want you to know the facts. In the summer of
2022, floods in Pakistan displaced more than 7.9 million people. Iraqi farm-
ers are dying by suicide after drought led to crop failure for three years in
a row. During two weeks where temperatures topped 40C for the first time
in the UK last July, there were 2,227 excess deaths.
JSO believe they have the solutions. They are calling on the government
to commit to ending all new fossil fuel development in the UK. The five
years’ worth of oil the country has in storage will give us more than enough
time to make the transition to renewables, which are now up to nine times
cheaper than gas. Meanwhile the Conservative government plans to issue
at least 100 new oil and gas licences and has given the go-ahead for the
country’s first coal mine in 30 years.
Plummer and Holland, both 21-year-old students, have been charged
with criminal damage over their soup stunt, and are awaiting trial. “For
every bit of nervousness I had in my body, I had twice as much excitement,”
Holland recalls of the day of the action. They are the quieter, less energetic
of the two, but in remembering that buzz they shake their head, grinning.
Even via a shaky Zoom connection, I can see their eyes light up. It was only
after they were released from custody that they learned a video of the
souping had millions of views online.
“Seeing the impact it had,” says Plummer, “that felt more crazy than
actually throwing the soup.” But not everyone was paying attention to
JSO’s message. A Daily Mail article detailing their court appearance made
no mention of their demands, “but it described what we wore to court.
They’re more concerned about the colour of my skirt than our crops
failing, than families losing their homes, than the 20 people who died in
an extreme weather event in California. And when the most interesting
thing they have to write is about the colour of a 21-year-old’s skirt – what
aren’t they telling you?”
Plummer speaks with the learned tact of a longtime political orator.
Even on a Monday night Zoom call with their three fellow JSO activists and
me, they use dramatic pauses and rhetorical questions in carefully paced
addresses. They have recently been released on remand after 28 days in
prison for climbing a gantry on the M25 in November, and still have three
crown court cases against them. But that isn’t stopping them. “We’re not
going to be intimidated by prison sentences when there’s so much more at
stake,” Plummer says stirringly, as if they were addressing a rally of thou-
sands. “When the only future I see for myself is one of mass famine, severe
droughts, flooding, wildfires and societal collapse, time spent in prison is
irrelevant. But that doesn’t mean it was a nice place to be or an easy deci-
sion to make. I’m furious that I’ve been forced into this position.”
Since April 2022, when the group began its blockade of ten oil facilities
across the UK, Just Stop Oil has become notorious. Alex De Koning, a
24-year-old science PhD student in Newcastle, occupied an oil pipeline in
May last year. He remained in the “filthy” pipe, 15 metres above the ground,
for 40 hours before he was arrested. Even today, he’s unsure how he found
the nerve to do it, how he slept up there, so close to the drop. “But in a weird
way, I knew it needed to be done,” he says, his mind focused on just one
thing: getting the government to wake up to the crisis.
Emma Brown, a 31-year-old librarian and artist, has also blocked
oil infrastructure, as well as spraying paint at a luxury car dealership in
Mayfair, London, and gluing herself to a painting at a Glasgow art gallery.
“Civil disobedience is about not being obedient to a system that is killing
us,” she says. She is the moral core of the group – the pragmatic, down-to-
earth organiser who uses the “empowerment” she gains from direct action
to reignite in others the urgency of their activism. Part of the way through
our call Brown has to dash off, “to make soup for my community”. None of
the others seems to notice the aptness of that particular dish.
In less than a year, these activists’ lives have changed irreversibly.
They are regularly called “cultists” or “eco-terrorists” in the tabloid press.
But they never expected to be liked. “We’re not doing this because we want
to, we don’t want to be blocking roads,” De Koning says, soberly. “It’s a
horrible thing to do to anybody. It’s a horrible thing for us to do ourselves.”
He had never even been to a protest before he attended his first JSO event.
“And yet, two weeks after my first talk, I ran in front of a moving oil tanker,
sat down for 14 hours and waited to get arrested.”
None of these four activists can tell me what makes them unusual
compared to the average person who is scared about the climate crisis,
or what gives them the courage – or perhaps recklessness – to do what
they do. In fact, a recent survey found that two-thirds of UK adults support
159
non-violent direct action to protect the climate. Yet for most of us, the idea
of risking our liberty – even for a cause so great – is unimaginable.
It’s at this point in the conversation I realise that the quartet’s meas-
ured approach, where each person knows which questions to answer
and interruptions are impressively minimal, is not simply because of their
professionalism. “Sorry, we all just laughed there a bit because we all simul-
taneously put in our group chat that we wanted to answer this question,”
says Holland. I have asked why they think relatively few people are willing
to get involved with direct action, and I’m just glad they aren’t laughing at
what they could have perceived as a stupid question. It occurs to me that
the frequency with which Holland turns off their camera might be to hide
group-chat induced giggles, not simply because of their professed wobbly
internet connection.
“The decision to step into civil disobedience or direct action is a
massive decision to make,” says Holland, holding it together to answer with
characteristic thoughtfulness. “Our education system – and I don’t mean
just school, but media, everything we absorb – instructs us that people who
go to prison are bad people. For a lot of cases, because our judiciary system
is so broken, that’s just not true. Putting your body and your freedom on the
line for the sake of this fight takes not just massive bravery, but massive
amounts of unlearning.”
Plummer, whom Holland describes as their best friend, doesn’t think
anyone in JSO is “different” from the rest of us. “We’re ordinary people,”
they say, emphatically. “If you’d told me a few months ago that I’d spend my
university freshers’ term in prison, I’d have laughed in your face. I’m not a
criminal. I’m also not some kind of activist superhero. I’m a normal student
who has woken up to how serious the situation is.” They take a dramatic
pause before building to an inspiring fever pitch: “If you’re not fully standing
up against these systems, then you are complicit. I’m saying ‘not in my
name’ – and everybody has that power within them.”
Public disruption is a centuries-old tactic, but JSO are working in a
distinctly new, heavily politicised climate. The last few months – of train
strikes, nurses’ strikes, postal strikes – have “helped break the myth that
disruption is targeting the public”, Brown says. It’s the government they
aim to provoke. “So often climate action is pitted against workers, but the
only people who have benefitted from the current system is the 0.0001%.
We’re on the side of the workers.”
What’s more, “I’m living proof that civil resistance works,” Plummer
adds, in their trademark rallying cry. “Maybe that’s why I know that there’s
hope in it, because I’m queer, non-binary, but born female. So the only
reason I’m able to vote, I’m able to go to university, I’m hopefully someday
able to marry the woman I love, is because of people that have taken part in
civil resistance before me. History has shown us that this does work.”
JSO will stop their public disruption when the government makes
“meaningful changes”, explains De Koning, who is keen to clarify the
movement’s secondary demands: that the government insulates homes;
subsidises public transport and taxes the big oil and gas polluters.
He reminds me that renewables are nine times cheaper than gas, and I see
the faces on my Zoom screen dissolve into giggles. “They’re telling me in
our group chat that I’m using the same lines as usual,” De Koning says.
“I know I’ve already said it, but that stat really blows people’s minds.”
“It’s fine,” offers Plummer, just about recovered from their laughter.
“I talk about this so much I’ve started sleep-talking about it. I woke my
friend up, one night, saying lines! ‘We’re an island, why aren’t we using tidal
power?’ – that’s another Alex line. Have you said that one yet?”
“You can tell we’re all dangerous criminals with no sense of humour,”
De Koning snarks.
MIKAELA LOACH “I feel an immense amount of
pressure to be the hope machine,” says Mikaela Loach. “That can feel
exhausting, because I don’t see hope as a thing that someone can give to
someone else. Hope is something we create when we take action.”
Loach first got into activism as a teenager, when she went to Calais
to volunteer in the refugee camp then known as the ‘Jungle’. Soon she
learned about climate justice. The concept considers the environmental
crisis not as an equaliser but as 'the great multiplier', and would inform
Loach’s activist future. Loach got involved with Extinction Rebellion, and
in 2019 locked herself to a stage as part of a four-day roadblock protest-
ing Westminster’s connection to fossil fuels. She has since taken the UK
government to court over its subsidies of the oil and gas industry.
The climate crisis “makes existing inequalities greater because it
multiplies the effects”, Loach explains. “It is going to displace more people
around the world and make pre-existing violent border policies worse.
But at the same time, climate justice says that if we tackle this crisis
DAZED
through the lens of justice, we have the opportunity to transform the world.
The climate crisis arose from the same systems that are causing harm
towards people: white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism. To truly tackle
the climate crisis, we need to get to these roots.”
Loach has written a book, It’s Not That Radical, on the subject. But the
writer, who quotes eagerly from Audre Lorde and Rebecca Solnit, knows
that jargon-fuelled tirades won’t help the masses: the climate movement
needs ground-up campaigning. “White environmentalism,” she says,
commends “an academic type of knowledge. I think there’s so much
genius in the community, especially in the Black community, which has
been organising around an existential threat of white supremacy for
generations.”
In July, Loach will return to her medical degree at the University of
Edinburgh, which she paused to focus on her activist work. She still plans to
practise as a doctor: “Climate change is the biggest threat to global health,”
she says.
With her youth and acumen, Loach is increasingly looked upon as a
beacon of hope – that hope machine. Recently she spoke at an event for
insurers. She knew lots of audience members were investors in fossil fuels.
“I don’t want any of you to tell me that I’ve inspired you unless you have
changed your behaviour,” she told them. “Because what is the point of
inspiration, if it doesn’t inspire you to take action?”
AUTUMN PELTIER As a child of a First Nations commu-
nity, Autumn Peltier grew up knowing two important Indigenous teachings:
that she comes from sacred water – in which she floated inside the womb
– and that she has a responsibility to protect the natural world. “My people
have high respect for the land and the water,” Peltier, now 18, explains.
“We treat it as if it’s a human being.”
Peltier grew up in Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Ontario’s Manitoulin
Island, which lies on the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth.
She was just eight years old when she learned about ‘boil water adviso-
ries’ – directives issued to communities not to drink tap water – when she
attended a water ceremony an hour away from her home. That evening she
went online and learned that an old uranium mine had contaminated the
water supply. It has now been 25 years since these families have been able
to use tap water.
“As someone who understands the waters, understands the lands,
understands the animals”, the realisation “did take a really big toll on me”,
says Peltier. Now enrolled in an Indigenous studies programme at college,
she is measured when describing the emotional toll of this injustice, but
a frustration lurks beneath her cool demeanour. “Canada is considered
a very rich country. Yet some First Nations communities don’t have
drinkable water.”
In 2019, Peltier was named chief water commissioner by the
Anishinabek Nation, and she has spoken at the United Nations and the
World Economic Forum. She holds her Indigenous identity close, wearing
traditional First Nations dress for public appearances and remembering
her great-aunt, fellow water advocate Josephine Mandamin, as a mentor.
“Indigenous people are looked down on,” she says. “It’s important for me
to encourage other Indigenous people to see someone wearing those
things, for them to feel comfortable in their traditions, with who they are
in their own skin.”
Peltier’s biggest goal is to aid collaboration between Indigenous
peoples and government, so that those affected are truly included in deci-
sion-making. In 2016, aged 12, she confronted the Canadian prime minister
Justin Trudeau about a pipeline expansion that would put water supplies
at further risk. “I am very unhappy with the choices you’ve made,” she said,
before bursting into tears.
Peltier is still calling on the Canadian government to provide clean
water for all. If she could sit down with Trudeau today, what would she say?
“I would have the same message,” she says, defiant, “because in seven
years, nothing has changed.”
“I ran in front of a moving oil tanker,
sat down for 14 hours
and waited to get arrested”
– Alex De Koning
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wears cashmere sweater LORO
PIANA Cocooning collection.
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knitted sweater JACOB COHËN

161
 GENESIS BUTLER “When I was three years old, my
favourite food was chicken nuggets,” is how a chirpy, ten-year-old Genesis
Butler began her 2017 Ted Talk. In her address, she described the steps she
took towards vegetarianism, and then, aged just six, to veganism. “These
facts really worried me,” she said, before detailing the impact of animal
consumption on climate change, “I hope they worry you too.” The audience
laughed, but this little girl knew exactly what she was talking about.
Now 16, and speaking from her home in Long Beach, California, Butler’s
mission to educate people about veganism has not ceased. Her message
is no longer so far removed from the mainstream: on her bedroom wall
hangs a poster of Billie Eilish, the influential Gen-Z popstar who is also a
spokesperson for climate action. Butler met Eilish at an awards ceremony
recently, and was so overwhelmed she found herself crying. “I love how
she uses her platform,” she says. “More celebrities should do that.”
Butler is now a climate leader herself, inspiring teenagers to change
their lifestyles for the good of the planet. Via her non-profit Youth Climate
Save, which Butler runs via Instagram and TikTok, she shares vegan
recipes (including tofu scramble) and infographics about the agriculture
industries (producing a glass of dairy milk results in almost three times as
many greenhouse gas emissions of any non-dairy alternative). There are
chapters of the organisation in 22 countries around the world.
“TikTok and Instagram are powerful tools to make a change,” says
Butler, crediting the technology with allowing her generation to communi-
cate about actions such as strikes with speed. But she makes sure to get
out into the community too. At a recent beach clean-up event, she gave
out vegan ‘tuna’ sandwiches to amused passers-by. A lot of people still
assume vegan food “tastes like rabbit food”. She rolls her eyes. “So when
they try it they figure out, well, it’s good.” Butler has a history of tempting
people towards veganism because of how tasty her food is: at school, her
friends enjoyed trying her lunches so much that her mum started packing
two portions of every meal, so there was plenty to go around.
Butler has seen the effects of the climate crisis directly. As we speak,
there are areas just 30 minutes from her home that are flooded, while
every heatwave brings the threat of wildfires. “It’s a race against time,”
she says. “A lot of youth were waiting for world leaders to do something,
but it felt like nobody was doing anything. So we thought, ‘OK, we can be
the ones to make the change.’”

VANESSA NAKATE “We are facing the same storm,

but we are in different boats,” says Kampala-born activist Vanessa Nakate,
who has a vivid metaphor for understanding the injustice of the climate
crisis. “It’s important for us to highlight how some boats are weaker than
others, while some are already sinking.”
One of the “horrible realities” of the crisis is the fact that those who are
least responsible for it are the ones who are suffering the worst impact.
The continent of Africa accounts for just 3.8% of the world’s greenhouse
gas emissions, but is experiencing some of the most destructive effects.
When we speak, Nakate is in Berlin working with Unicef to raise
awareness about the climate crisis as a “children’s rights issue”. The worst
drought on record is currently affecting the Horn of Africa, with more than
30 million people on the brink of starvation and many children falling sick
from acute malnutrition. She had recently been to Turkana, Kenya, to visit
some of the affected communities. “We heard that one child I [saw] during
the trip passed away just hours after we met him,” she says, somberly.
It’s a heartbreaking anecdote. “But I always remind myself that it’s
much harder for the people who are experiencing the story that I’m telling,”
says Nakate. Though softly spoken, she expresses herself with determi-
nation, the same persistence she showed in her early years of activism.
Reading about the climate emergency aged 21, she learned how the effects
were already being felt in her home country of Uganda, in the form of land-
slides and intense dry spells. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes,
she too began to protest. “Initially, it was to create awareness about what
was happening. I thought I’d do this for a couple of months. But the crisis
never came to an end. So I found myself continuing.”
As well as her work with Unicef, Nakate runs projects to help Ugandan
schools transition to solar energy, and is the founder of Youth For Future
Africa and the Rise Up Movement, both of which amplify the voices of
Africans in climate discussions. What distinguishes her generation of
young activists, she says, is their insistence on relating everything back to
the science, and holding leaders accountable to the facts. It’s the thought
of the future that inspires her to keep working. “Every action we take today
will impact the fate of so many children – children that are alive today and
children that are yet to be born.”

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is assistant culture editor at the New Statesman

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stylist’s own

This page: Anna wears cashmere jacket

LORO PIANA, cashmere sweater
LORO PIANA Cocooning collection,
custom-made headpiece stylist’s own,
pearl earring MONIES

163
DAZED
 Opposite page: Phoebe wears silk
and cotton sweaters LORO PIANA
Cocooning collection, trousers their
own, veil stylist’s own

This page: Alex wears wool vest

MARGARET HOWELL, silk and viscose
shirt DANIEL W. FLETCHER, polyester
tie COSTUME STUDIO

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DAZED
 Hair SHIORI TAKAHASHI at STREETERS, make-up ANNE SOPHIE COSTA at STREETERS, talent PHOEBE PLUMMER, ANNA HOLLAND, ALEX DE KONING, set design IBBY NJOYA at
NEW SCHOOL, photographic assistants ALEXA HORGAN, JONATHAN JOHNSON, ANDREW MOORES, TAMIBÉ BOURDANNÉ, styling assistants ANDRA-AMELIA BUHAI, NINA GAHRÉN
WILLIAMSON, GRACE MILLER, ELOISE JENNER, hair assistant MICHAEL PITSILLIDES, make-up assistant BABI CAMPOS, set design assistants AXEL DRURY, SAM EDYN, TOBY
BROUGHTON, digital operator LAURA HECKFORD, production CEBE STUDIO 167
photography RENELL MEDRANO styling MARIKA-ELLA AMES

QUEEN Z
Zaya Wade is a shining example
of the power of living one’s own
truth. Since coming out as trans
at the age of 12, she’s taken on the mantle
of activist, fashion-world icon – and now,
for the first time, cover star. Here, she talks
beauty, self-care, former first ladies – and
the importance of a foundation rooted in love

All clothes and accessories

worn throughout MIU MIU SS23
DAZED
text TREY
Zaya Wade, a girl whose very public transition at the tender age of 12
became an emblem of living in one’s truth, is the future. The second child
of former NBA Player Dwayne Wade and stepdaughter of actress and
author Gabrielle Union has already become an activist, fashion darling
and, now, cover girl.
Wade and Union have been fierce supporters of Zaya and have shown
the world the magic that can happen when you cover your children in
unconditional love and support. When they needed more information, they
reached out to the cast of Pose. When Union took her stepdaughter to her
first Pride event in 2021, Zaya wound up riding on a Bring It On-themed float
with friends and family in tow. Through it all, they have been unwave-ring
champions of her becoming. To see two Black cultural figures support their
trans daughter is undeniably powerful.
In a moment when the American right is working overtime to push
life-threatening bills targeting trans youth, stories like Zaya’s become
imperative. To see her flourish and have autonomy over her life is a joy to
witness. When we allow children the space to be themselves, it doesn’t
mean that their lives are automatically a breeze or that they instantly get
the answers to the Sats. What it does mean is that when they come home,
no matter what strife is in the world, they come home to a foundation
rooted in love. And that is a mighty ground to stand on.
Watching the Wades send Zaya off to winter formal was a win, because
she is getting to bask in the teenage experience she deserves. And let me
ask you a question, how many other 15-year-old girls are giving fash-un
like she did that night? Pulling up to the function in a floor-length white-
sequinned Rodarte gown? Sounds iconic to me!
One of the most exciting parts of her journey is watching Zaya fall in love
with clothes. When she made her solo front-row debut at the Miu Miu spring
2023 show, it was clear that a star was emerging in front of our eyes. Her
hair in a bob with the perfect flip, she was clad in a cropped, frayed denim
jacket, plaid brown miniskirt and white penny loafers – all in head-to-toe
Miu Miu, including their signature matelassé bag. The budding fashionista
stole the show and, quite frankly, ate the girls up.
What strikes me most in talking to Zaya is her wisdom and her ginor-
mous heart. She is committed to using her platform to better this world
for her community. Her voice is commanding, and her style is sickening.
Baby, this is Zaya Wade.
Hi Zaya! Thank you so much for doing this. First of all, you looked
so magnificent and angelic at your winter formal in January. How is
high school going?
Really good! I was really scared in middle school to go
to high school, but I’m loving it. I’m loving my classes and
my school. It is such an amazing opportunity to have this
work-life balance.
It’s so special: you get to be in algebra one day and then do shoots on
the weekend. You are a fashion icon and activist, but you are still just 15.
What are the activities that bring you the most joy?
Reading. Probably just talking to my friends, having
fun and sleep!
Mood! Watching you experiment with fashion and consistently
shut down the ’gram has been such a joy to see. That Coperni moment
on Instagram the other day was *chef’s kiss*. Can you talk to me
about your relationship with fashion and how it has strengthened
your identity?
My relationship with fashion has really evolved over
the years. It started out as, “Oh, my parents are super
fashionable, and I want to dress up and be as fashion-
able as them.” But, as time has passed and I’ve become
more integrated into the fashion world, it’s become
a really important part of expressing myself and my
identity. Whether I’m wearing a dress for winter formal
or wearing a suit for a shoot, it’s just a way to level up my
iconic-ness, I feel.
Who are some of your fashion inspirations?
Aside from my parents, I’m going to choose a
model, Anok Yai.
Love her!
Black Queen! She’s amazing; she is definitely top three
for me.
One thousand per cent. Can you tell us what are some of your favourite
fashion brands right now?
As I’ve been growing into my understanding of the
fashion world, I’ve definitely grown to love Miu Miu
– I’m obsessed. I’d say Puma is a classic; I have loved
it since before I was a part of [the fashion] world.
And I love Tiffany & Co. I love a good Tiffany bracelet;
it can always [help you] stunt on everyone.
And that shoot you did for Tiffany – let’s talk about a stunt…
Right!
That’s what I call a moment! I want to talk to you about beauty for a
minute. Your stepmum, Gabrielle Union, is a beauty icon for Black girls
everywhere, but she is also an activist. What has she taught you about
beauty and self-love?
The lesson has changed over time, but more recently
it’s that beauty is in yourself. It’s about being you and
expressing yourself the way you want to. She tries to
teach me that beauty standards are arbitrary and
that they don’t mean anything. They don’t matter any
more; what people thought was the standard is not.
And just that being myself is the best technique
out there.
I think that’s such a great mindset to have so young because as
soon as you can say, “Those beauty standards are not my business,
they are a you problem, not a me problem,” your life becomes so
much more enriched.
Yes!
When do you feel most empowered?
When my family surrounds me. They are such a giant
support system and have always been there for
me. No matter what happens, I feel strongest when
I’m with them.
Watching your family support you and show unconditional love has been
beautiful to see. I love how they’ve said they don’t have all the answers
but they’re committed to learning. Could you talk about learning and
growing as a family?
So many big changes have happened over the last
couple of years with me, but also just in general. I think
it’s not my job, but it’s my honour to continue and further
my family’s education and appreciation for the entire
LBGTQ+ community as we grow together. As our
understanding of acceptance has broadened over the
past couple of years, we have made the strides to keep
ourselves educated and combat the ignorance.
Period, and doing it stunningly. What has it been like growing up
in the public eye for you?
There are some highs and some lows. I mean, a lot of
attention equals a lot more hate, a lot of transphobia,
and [there is] a lot of pressure on me, but I’m also able
to reach more people. The positives of having such an
inclusive platform completely outweigh all of the nega-
tivity online, which my support system has enabled me
to filter out. It has allowed me to let in the positivity and
distribute it to all of the trans people in the world who
need a voice and give them a platform to get inspired
to live with themselves without being afraid.
You talked a bit about the internet. How do you enforce boundaries on
social media, and what does self-care look like to you?
I tend not to interact with social media in an excessive
way. Boundaries are super healthy. On Instagram,
I have a filtered comment section so only the people
I trust and love and know love me can comment and
share positivity, because unnecessary negativity
causes stress. Stress gives you acne and wrinkles,
and no one likes that! No one has time for that.
Emotionally, [it’s about] knowing that if you are going
to put yourself in a situation where you get hate, you
should take yourself out of it, or at least have emotional
support from friends and family.
169
Protecting your space is crucial. You interviewed former first lady
Michelle Obama, what was that like?
I mean, it was Michelle Obama! It was crazy even to get
the opportunity, it was such a privilege and an honour
to even be considered for the interview. Then to be
there and see Michelle Obama, and talk to her, was so
inspiring. I was so nervous the whole time but it was
such an amazing experience.
It was so good. You inspire people of all ages to live their truth. I know
you are young and still figuring it out, but what advice would you give
anyone looking to live a more authentic life?
I would say to protect your peace. Discovering that part
of yourself and then having the courage to share it is
stressful in itself. It’s a lot of stress, pressure and tension.
[You should] recognise that you have gone through a
life-changing experience and that you deserve peace.
You deserve a moment – multiple moments – to step
back and take some time to sit with yourself, and in any
manner of way just escape negativity as much as you
can. I know people have many different circumstances,
and I am privileged to have so many people [who] are
really in my favour. There are people who don’t [have
that], and that’s why I try to give a message of hope to let
people know there are others out there who can really
just help them protect their peace.
That’s so beautiful. Even in how you speak, you take your experience
and try to make the world a better place for others; you are a role model.
What does that title mean to you?
It means to me that I’m a microphone. I am my own per-
son and I have my own experiences, but for me, as a role
model, I try to use my personal experience to broadcast
the positives and also the negatives in life, because a
lot of LGBTQ+ youth go unrecognised in every way.
I think I am here to share those experiences: to voice
them, but also to enhance them. So the world can know,
“We are here, we are queer, we are here to stay, and we
aren’t going anywhere.”
I thought it could be amazing for you to answer some questions from
young members of the trans and gender non-conforming community.
I have a few questions for you from young trans people, most of whom
are from communities around two amazing organisations in the UK,
Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence.
Let’s do it.
The first is from Willow Killeen, 22 (she/her): “Have you ever felt the
sensation of magic, and how did it feel?”
YES! My first experience of magic was laying down
my first wig, rocking out a good pump and saying, “I’m
here.” I was able to see myself in a way I had always
wanted to see myself. It felt amazing: so new, unfiltered
and raw. It was really impactful and emotional as well.
Not me crying, OK? Here’s one from Cait, 18 (they/he): “What or who do
you turn to for sanctuary when things get overwhelming?”
Who: I would say my friends and family. Having a big
support system is so helpful. They will calm you down
and [give you] a [greater] point of view, because it’s
all about perception. Being able to perceive life in a
different way can help better the situation. Or at least go
at it head-on with a different point of view. As for what:
books, whether fiction or non-fiction literature, have
been everything to me for the longest time. It’s a space
you can retreat to; you can really be yourself and find
characters who reflect you and your experiences.
Reading can help take your mind off you are going through, too, whichis
fab. This one is from Jamie, 20 (he/him): “What’s the one thing you wish
all younger trans kids knew?”
You’re not alone! There are so many people out there.
I wish I knew that as a kid because I felt so isolated,
thinking there was no one else like me. And the percent-
age of trans adults versus trans children is such a wide
difference. [When you’re] a child at school you’re like,
DAZED
“I’m trans, and I don’t see many trans people, so I feel
isolated, I feel different from anyone.” But that is not the
only community. There are thousands of communities
waiting [for you], and the trans community is forever
growing. Even if you can’t have direct contact with them,
just seeing their experience is so accessible because of
social media. Other people can inspire you.
Here’s a question from Luan, 19 (he/him): What item would you choose to
show an element of trans joy? How would you explain its significance?
I would choose an origami folding crane, because it
not only represents how multifaceted our community
is, but it also holds many many years of culture within
it. Even if its hard to understand, in the end, it’s a
beautiful thing.
Finally, this one is sent in from Gendered Intelligence. “How can I support
my friend who has come out as trans?”
Oh, easy! This knowledge is from my best friend, who
supported me in so many ways. The easiest [way] is just
to be there. It is so easy to be there, as a shoulder to cry
on or even as a sounding board. There are other ways,
too, like researching. A lot of people don’t know what it
means to be trans, and even if they do, they don’t know
what it means to that specific person. Learn about
your friend: they are different, and they are so much
more. Also, there are a lot of new fears they could have.
Just be there to support them through anything: nega-
tivity, transphobic hate, but also the fear of coming out
to people they love, [which] can be so stressful. To have
someone who is like, “I got you” is priceless.
Phenomenal. They will be so happy to hear those answers. I have a
little lightning round of questions to finish off. If you could have one
designer do your prom dress, who would it be? I’m all about the power
of manifestation.
One designer? I feel like I have two.
You can do an outfit change!
I have two proms, so for one I would say Miss Prada,
but also Valentino. If I had a Valentino personally
designed dress, I would die!
And you look amazing in Valentino, so let’s put it into the universe.
Yes, manifesting.
What do you want to achieve in 2023?
I want to do more for my community. I went through a
journey of self-discovery, and even though I am a voice,
there is so much more I can do. I’m a teenager, so there
are limitations, but I want to push past that to set the
foundation for those in need. This year I plan to do more
and be there for people like me.
You turn 16 in May. If you have a Sweet 16, who would you
want to perform?
Oh, easy, SZA. Princess Solána, she’s an icon. I have
been obsessed with her since forever, since pre-CTRL,
so I’m an OG. That would be a breathtaking experience.
What is one mantra you live by?
I’m me, and not a single person on this planet can
change me.
And that’s that! My last question for you is this. This issue is about
the future: what excites you most about the future, and what
are your dreams?
All the possibilities. There is so much in the future that
can be done, so much that can be changed. It’s inspiring
to know that we are a new generation. Gen Z is so spe-
cial. As I am getting older and I’m realising more about
this world, I think this generation that’s up and coming is
everything. Being able to educate the next generation
so they can educate the next generation. We can make
strides to normalise acceptance through education.
Vintage necklace and ring worn
throughout RELLIK LONDON

171
DAZED
 “Fashion has become an
important part of my identity.
Whether I’m wearing a dress
for winter formal or a suit for
a shoot, it’s just a way to level
up my iconic-ness”

173
 “I’m me, and not a single
person on this planet can
change me”

Vintage bag RELLIK LONDON, vintage

DAZED belt stylist’s own
175
 CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda
aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
earita

Vintage necklace and glove RELLIK

LONDON
DAZED
 “Beauty standards don’t
matter any more. Being
yourself is the best
technique out there”

Hair MILES JEFFRIES at THE WALL GROUP using ORIBE, make-up DANA DELANEY at THE WALL GROUP
using M.A.C, set design PATIENCE HARDING at NEW SCHOOL, photographic assistant
FALLOU SECK, styling assistant GEMMA VALDES-JOFFROY, hair assistant JABARI MALCOLM LOGAN,
set design assistants AALIYAH DOMINGUEZ, BIANKA BASIC, production ICE STUDIOS, executive
talent consultant GREG KELENSTEIN 177
photography JACKIE NICKERSON styling FELIX PARADZA

DAZED
Nu Romantics

Opposite page: mohair

jacket PRADA, cotton and
sequin-embroidered top worn
underneath JIL SANDER BY
LUCIE AND LUKE MEIER,
cotton, hardening lacquer and
graphite headpiece KATRINA
GOSTANIAN, silver-foiled wood
earrings and kyanite, ebony and
leather necklace MONIES

This page: viscose and nylon

jacket PUCCI, metallic wool dress
JW ANDERSON, latex leggings
ELISSA POPPY, sinamay wired
hat LISA TAN MILLINERY,
plastic beaded necklace and
gold and silver charms necklace
TRUST JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE,
polyester gloves PAULA ROWAN 179
 This page: cotton gilet JIL SANDER
BY LUCIE AND LUKE MEIER, latex
corset and knickers SOFT SKIN
LATEX, latex suspenders, stockings
and gloves ELISSA POPPY,
hand-embroidered upcycled wig
CHRISTOPHER ANTONIO HARVEY,
metal earrings SAINT LAURENT BY
ANTHONY VACCARELLO, gold and
silver charms necklace and cotton
and plastic buttons necklace TRUST
JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE

Opposite page: coated linen dress

GABRIELA HEARST, latex top worn
CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda
aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
earita
DAZED
underneath SOFT SKIN LATEX,
silk and feathers hat ATELIER
BENJAMIN PAUL, silver-plated
polyester earrings and gold foiled
wood chain necklace MONIES,
brass embedded choker KATRINA
GOSTANIAN, leather arm cuff
with chrome buckle THE LONDON
LEATHERMAN, latex gloves
ELISSA POPPY
181
This page: foil dress SIMONE ROCHA, latex top
worn underneath SOFT SKIN LATEX, hand-
painted cotton and acrylic jeans and leather
hand painted leather shoes MATTY BOVAN ×
DOLCE & GABBANA, sinamay wired hat LISA
TAN MILLINERY, silk and nylon netted veil
ATELIER BENJAMIN PAUL, silver foiled wood
earrings MONIES, plastic charms necklace
TRUST JUST BLAME ARCHIVE, latex gloves
ELISSA POPPY

Opposite page: saddler leather bra FLEET ILYA,

PVC dress DOLCE & GABBANA, latex top
worn underneath and latex dipped lace
neck-piece ELISSA POPPY, tulle skirt worn
underneath VALENTINO, acacia and silver
foil earrings MONIES, brass embedded arm
cuffs KATRINA GOSTANIAN, silver cuffs
DAZED ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
183
 This page: all clothes GUESS USA, latex
leggings and gloves ELISSA POPPY, faux-fur
cap THE LONDON LEATHERMAN, deadstock
LVMH fabric and leather studded headpiece
underneath CHRISTOPHER ANTONIO
HARVEY, gold foiled wood earrings and
bangle worn on left hand MONIES, gold and
silver charm necklace TRUST JUDY BLAME
ARCHIVE, vintage D’Orlan gold, crystals and
faux-pearl bangles worn on right hand SUSAN
CAPLAN, leather boots ROKER

Opposite page: nylon tulle dress MOLLY

GODDARD, latex corset and top worn
underneath SOFT SKIN LATEX, latex leggings
and gloves ELISSA POPPY, leg warmers worn
throughout stylist’s own, feather hat ANDREAS
KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD,
silver-plated polyester earrings, oversized
gold-foiled wood necklace and bangle worn on
left arm MONIES, gold-plated brass and stone
necklace UNDERCOVER, leather, chrome and
gold studded arm cuff and leather and chrome
buckle arm cuff THE LONDON LEATHERMAN,
metal cuff worn on right hand SAINT LAURENT
BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO, upcycled adidas
trainers TRUST JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE
DAZED
185
 This page: leather jacket and crepe de chine
printed skirt PUCCI, silk ruffle top worn
underneath GIVENCHY, latex bloomers worn
as skirt SOFT SKIN LATEX, latex leggings and
gloves ELISSA POPPY, leather and feather
headpiece LISA TAN MILLINERY, silk and
nylon netted veils ATELIER BENJAMIN PAUL,
acacia and gold foil earrings MONIES, brass
choker UMA WANG, gold and silver charm
necklace TRUST JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE,
cotton and leather lace-up heels GIVENCHY

Opposite page: tulle dress UNDERCOVER,

latex tops and choker SOFT SKIN LATEX, latex
leggings ELISSA POPPY, 3D printed aluminium
cap ROBERT WUN, recycled silver and gold
vermeil earrings DEBORAH BLYTH, upcycled
necklace TRUST JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE,
brass embedded arm cuffs KATRINA
GOSTANIAN, cotton and leather lace-up
DAZED mules GIVENCHY
Hair AMIDAT GIWA at BRYANT ARTISTS using
ORIBE, make-up BEA SWEET at CLM, model
EDNA KARIBWAMI at IMG, set design JABEZ
BARTLETT at STREETERS, photographic
assistant PIERRE LEQUEUX, styling assistants
SAM THAPA, ALEX TANG, BAMBI DYBOSKI-
KING, JENSON KAY, hair assistant AVRELLE
DELISSER, make-up assistant SHANI
MUSHINGTON, digital operator VICTOR
GUTIERREZ, production WKND, casting
MISCHA NOTCUTT at 11CASTING

187
photography CORENTIN LEROUX styling ANDRA-AMELIA BUHAI

All clothes and

accessories worn
throughout PACO
RABANNE SS23

DAZED
text NICOLAS-TYRELL SCOTT

IN FULL
FLO In a musical landscape that
remixes the past at breakneck
speed, FLO’s embrace of the R&B sounds of
their childhoods feels weirdly like the future –
and asks timely questions about Black female
voices in pop

189
DAZED
We may never know what Frank Gehry, renowned designer of Seattle’s
Museum of Pop Culture, thinks about FLO. But meeting the group at Loft
Studios in west London I’m reminded of something he said, about the role of
an architect being to speak of their time and place with a yearning for time-
lessness. The UK pop trio comprised of Jorja Douglas, Renée Downer and
Stella Quaresma make music that exploits a similar tension between the
achingly of-its-moment and the timeless. They’re a group that’s undeniably
now, but steeped in reverence for what came before.
“We’re constantly moving and changing,” says Rob Harrison, the
group’s manager, picking his way through the clutter of their Dazed shoot.
“It’s very nuanced the way things are put into the world, whether it’s the
music or social media posts the girls are responding to where we’re at now
as a team. I feel like that’s the way to do it. As soon as you’re months ahead,
it stunts the potential of the now.”
Among timely colloquialisms such as ‘period’ – heard when Downer
comments on one of her looks for today’s shoot – is a group fluent in the
idioms of past eras, which they have been quick to reference boldly across
their public appearances to date. Lyrics like “Come take your shit ’cause
you can go stay at hers”, from their resonant debut single “Cardboard Box”,
throw back to uber-assertive 00s ballads like Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” and
Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”, while their ever-evolving harmonies – check out
their recent performance of “Immature” for Vevo’s DSCVR platform –
take an immediate steer from En Vogue, The Supremes et al.
In a musical climate that some have characterised as relying too much
on nostalgia or, FLO embrace the influence of their forebears. And yet, all
signs point to them being the genre’s future – in December of last year,
they won the Brits Rising Star award, an accolade they followed a few
weeks later by scooping the BBC’s Sound of 2023 prize. As Downer sets
her phone on the table, her silk press still immaculate an hour after it was
retouched, she rationalises the group’s commitment to spotlighting past
iterations of R&B. “[Our references] are genuine,” she says with an audible
passion and care in her tone; it reflects the organised and poised character
she says she adds to the group. “My mum was born in 1983, and she had
me when she was 19; that was the music she was listening to as a person, a
teenager, a young mother, and that’s what’s in me.” Ironically, Rihanna can
be heard inches away from us through the speakers, “Same Ol’ Mistakes”
lingering in the background before fading out. “I was listening to my home-
girls Rihanna and Ciara growing up. You can’t fake that.”
Being placed together by a Universal callout looking for singers to try
out for a new girl group, their beginnings echo that of a Making the Band or
Chasing Destiny imprint in that iterations of what would later be monikered
FLO were trialled and tested through early 2019. Downer was placed with
Quaresma, a schoolmate and coveted Instagram ‘close friend’ at Sylvia
Young Theatre School in London, at one of the first group tryouts, alongside
an unnamed third member who
originally rounded out the trio.
After another chemistry check,
“UK R&B is well Downer’s instincts told her they
and truly alive, should add Douglas, whom she
knew from the social media
it’s just not as world of London singers, to their
arrangement.
appreciated as After the shoot, west London-
it could be by based Quaresma tells me she never
envisaged herself performing
mainstream as part of a group – but all that
changed once the three of them got
platforms that to work. “Once we were a group,
put people on it all started to make sense,” she
says of the sparks that flew when
to music” the lineup was assembled. “It’s that
feeling of not being alone – like,
JORJA DOUGLAS even if you’re scared, you’re scared
with other people. But my mother,
who never initially saw me in a
group either, was so happy I was placed into such a crazy, unpredictable
industry with girls who all feel the same.”
The breakout success of FLO’s 2022 single “Cardboard Box”, which
peaked on the UK official singles chart at 76 and found international
success in both New Zealand’s Hot Singles chart (#19) and Japan’s Hot
Overseas ranking (#17) , was instinctively always anticipated by the group.
However, internal wranglings with the label cast some doubt whether the
single would ever be released. “It wasn’t that they were trying to control
us,” says Douglas. “It’s just that they are used to doing things in a particular
way; they are used to having autonomy. I think FLO were very confident in
what we wanted to do, so we just had to present that to them and talk them
through it.” Downer is more pithy in her assessment of what went down.
“We can’t put rubbish songs out. It just wouldn’t be a thing because we
know we’re much better than that,” she argues, clarifying that none
of the early tracks suggested by the label for their first single saw light
of day on their 2022 The Lead EP.
Presenting a united front hasn’t just been a winning formula for FLO
in battling the music business – it’s been integral to their creative spark
from day one. As their creative director and sonic architect, MNEK is hailed
by the group as the fourth member of FLO. “MNEK is all of our idols in one,
he’s so talented, and there’s so much to learn from him. He’s really laid
the groundwork for us to be comfortable,” says Downer, who notes the
producer’s role in encouraging the trio to be more audacious with their
lyrics, and in adapting to the formal studio setting. On The Lead, that
confidence can be heard in songs that draw power from lived experience:
the palpably Timbaland-influenced “Feature Me”, for example, guides a
generation of Gen-Z listeners into the minds of each group member,
ushering in a pronounced vulnerability.
References to Black Britishness and Black womanhood abound when
speaking to the girls. Whether it’s the classic ‘plantain’ or ‘plantin’ diasporic
debate I have with Downer, the references to retouching Quaresma’s wig
and how she toys with her curls on set, or Douglas’s relentless stanning of
the one-woman “vocal bible” Brandy, the trio refuse to shy away from their
identities in this regard. It’s a welcome antidote to the shocking levels of
racism many Black British women have been exposed to in the industry: in
the acclaimed 2021 documentary Race, Pop & Power, Sugababes’ Keisha
Buchanan talks about wanting to be “seen for myself” amid tabloid stories
portraying her as the stereotypical ‘angry Black woman’. FLO feel like a
timely rejoinder to such tales of rampant misogynoir, championing Black
womanhood as a fundamental part of their creativity. “Our music is for
the Black ladies,” Downer shares. Harrison, for his part, is mindful of his
position as a white man in how he navigates the nuances of managing the
group. He knows that, historically, Britain isn’t always first to champion
Black women and says so in our exchange.
“Often when you communicate with people, things can be based on
presumption and assumptions – there’s simply not time to get into why
at every moment,” he begins. “But there’s an extra pressure for me to
make sure I understand their experience and what they want to do next.”
Listening to their interactions with Harrison over the course of the day,
a sense of the trust and synergy between them is apparent. While he
does reveal an additional party has recently been added into the equa-
tion – renowned manager Sam Eldridge – the foundations are seemingly
in place for synchronicity.
While the girls contort in and out of Paco Rabanne looks on set, their
social team announces FLO’s debut North American tour online, and the
excitement in the room is tangible. Everyone from press to hair stylists
congratulates the girls repeatedly throughout the day, and the subject
spills naturally into our conversation. In a few days’ time, they will enter four
weeks of rehearsals: new, as-yet unreleased music to learn line-by-line,
Kash Powell-curated choreography, vocal training. It’s the sort of brutal
pop-star training regimen Frank Gatson would prescribe for Destiny’s
Child. “We’re on treadmills making sure we can still sing; it’s a crazy month
ahead,” says Downer. “But once we get over that, we can finally be excited
about the year.” Douglas says she sometimes struggles with her nerves,
and is leaning on the confidence choreographer Powell has taught her as a
first-time dancer to dive into the experience with flair. And for Quaresma,
it’s about using her innate calm – inherited from her mother – to help
the group conquer what’s to come. “My mother has always navigated
experiences with grace; I try to hold myself to that standard,” she says.
“[It’s about] knowing how to manoeuvre in difficult situations.”
While on tour in the States, the girls will additionally look to finish their
debut album, which Downer says is about “45%” complete. All believe
that a more holistic body of work is the way forward for the group. After
the shoot, Douglas and I are among the last to leave. As we sit on the sofa
awaiting our Ubers, she gushes over the prospect of reuniting with R&B
superproducer Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jerkins. “We worked with him in London
and he’s just amazing,” she says. “He taught us to sing our background
vocals 16 times – he used to do that with Brandy and Michael Jackson.”
Douglas adds that Ariana Grande collaborator Victoria Monét and D’Mile
are also on her wishlist of producers to work with.
Despite the group’s wholehearted embrace of the genre, Douglas is
wary of headlines positioning FLO at the vanguard of a new generation of
R&B. “I do feel like we’re also trying to establish ourselves in that pop and
mainstream space as well,” says the singer, citing Bellah and Jvck James
as more conventionally R&B than her group. “UK R&B is well and truly alive
[beyond FLO], it’s just not as appreciated as it could be by mainstream
platforms that put people on to music. But it’s definitely there.”
191
DAZED
193
 Hair MELL’ROSE and ALIYAH
WILLOUGHBY, make-up SABA KHAN
and LISAMARIE MCDONAGH, set design
LYDIA CHAN at NEW SCHOOL, movement
direction YAGAMOTO at NEW SCHOOL,
photographic assistants BENJAMIN
BUTCHER, WYNSTON SHANNON, styling
assistants ANNIE SEVERS, ELOISE
JENNER, production PRODUCING LOVE,
post-production INK

DAZED
195
photography GABRIEL MOSES styling FELIX PARADZA and MARK MUTYAMBIZI

RULES THE
WORLD Clint is the
Oz-like figure
pulling the strings at Corteiz, the cult British
streetwear brand that became a sensation with
its online whispering networks and guerilla-
style fashion drops. Ahead of a new collaboration
with Nike, he gives his first-ever interview
– which may also be his last – on the label’s
spectacular rise and why, whatever people
say he is, that’s what he’s not
 “God has
given me an
opportunity, and
I’d be ungrateful if
I didn’t take it with
my bare hands
and run as far as
I could with it”

Previous spread: all clothes CORTEIZ

RULESTHEWORLD, leather boots
stylist’s own

This page: cotton blazer and trousers

DOLCE & GABBANA, cotton tank top
CORTEIZ RULESTHEWORLD

DAZED
text KACION MAYERS
Beyond a certain point of success, assumptions can take hold of the truth,
a phenomenon that Clint is accustomed to. Discourse follows the divisive
figure – sometimes characterised as abrasive, arrogant or conceited
– often leading to projections which arise from a general uncertainty
surrounding as to who he really is. There are a plethora of critiques and hot
takes aimed at debasing his seemingly whirlwind rise. It’s a familiar trope:
the local success story humbled once it reaches further than previously
imagined. Little is left for any real conversation to take place when hearsay
fuels speculation and accelerates clicks. On the one hand, some of this is
attributable to the fact that, until today, he has never accepted any request
for an interview about either himself or his streetwear behemoth, Corteiz.
Still, he is by no means mute, as his off-the-cuff tweets, Instagram stories
and DM sagas attest to, a partial view into his world. He is indifferent to
the shifting sands of opinion as the truth holds weight – ever-present and
rooted in the facts of his real life.
It’s fair to see why people may assume he is a haughty figure because,
in some respects, he almost leans into it with his characteristic mischievous-
ness. But there is more than meets the eye here. There’s an unexpectedly
endearing quality to Clint in close contact. So much so that, when asked
(as I repeatedly am) about the man behind one of London’s most notorious
streetwear brands after our conversation, I find myself defending him like
an old misunderstood friend. He’s not half as moody as he may often appear
in pictures. In fact, he spends a fair amount of time laughing his way through
our conversation. Mid-sentence, he’ll frequently bracket in sympathetic
disclaimers, announcing with a quizzical tone that he has no idea how I will
make sense of his indulgent storytelling. His answers are long-form and
wind-down roads that lead to several other avenues of visible contemplation,
punctuated by thoughtful silences.
Clint’s story began at Central Middlesex Hospital, where he was born
not half a mile from the first office he rented and operated out of – about
250sq ft of space. He still rents the office to this day, in part for storage
but also for sentimental reasons, and it’s here we’ve been invited to speak
with the designer today. Located between a Budget Food Wholesaler and
a Chinese supermarket just off the north circular road, its nondescript
exterior doesn’t give any hints of the rapidly ascending star still housed,
occasionally, within. It’s only a stone’s throw from the estate he grew up on
and also happens to be side-by-side with the Travelodge his family had
to live in after being evicted. “I was 20, in my third year of uni, and I came
home from my grandma’s burial in Nigeria to an eviction notice saying we
had a week [to leave],” says Clint. “I still have a picture of it on my phone.
That moment changed how I saw things. You come back from somewhere
after grieving and you’re slapped with reality.” After the eviction, he took
refuge on his sisters’ sofa in a flatshare in Stamford Hill. “They didn’t use the
living room for a good six to eight weeks because I was in there,” he says,
“and that was when I started Corteiz.”
Arguably, his success has permeated the consciousness of a generation
of young creatives who skipped art and fashion school in favour of blank
tees and a burning desire to make something of themselves. His path to
success leads the way towards a new means of triumph, achieved on one’s
own terms. Despite circumstances, their dreams are merely plans not
yet actioned. Now on the cusp of his first Nike collaboration, turning over
eye-popping revenues for a still-independent brand and five years’ worth of
story to tell, Clint opens up in conversation.
Who were you before all of this, Clint?
I was a normal teenager like everyone else. I went to
Wireless festival and Paris by coach because I was
broke. I went to Miami, three man up in a one-bedroom
apartment because I was trying to experience shit.
I’ve always been obsessed with going places. My mum
took us to a lot of places; I went to America a couple of
times and Nigeria a lot, but after the recession in 2008
I didn’t go anywhere or experience anything. A lot of shit
changed after that. I think that shaped the way I viewed
the world as well. I used to hate going on Facebook on
Christmas day when I was younger because everyone
would get all this shit, and I wouldn’t because money
was tight. It created an anger in me that made me want
to get shit for myself. I started selling sweets I’d bought
in Poundland at school; I could make £200 in a couple
of months selling Mentos in the playground! I remember
buying a PS Vita after that, but I didn’t have any money
to buy a memory card or a game for a couple of weeks,
so I was still selling sweets until I grew out of it. In sixth
form I got my first job, at Topshop in Marble Arch. I only
worked four hours a week because I hated working.
I also worked in Topshop in Selfridges for a day, and it was a no from me.
I used to go after school and on weekends and I’d be
like, “Why am I even here?” I remember people talking
to me like shit, and [some of my colleagues] would
die for Topshop. I was like, “Yo, this is not even yours.
Philip Green doesn’t give a fuck about you.” I used to
make £120 a month and somehow make it last because
I lived at home and didn’t pay rent. I also used to have
a few followers on Insta, and when I started Corteiz
I had 6k followers. I had to post pictures of me chillin’
with my friends. That was always on my mind; I needed
to post some new swag photos. I wasn’t really into the
hypebeast stuff; I just posted my own personal style
and what I had at the time. I was never too fashion-
forward. While my friends were wearing Trapstar,
Palace and Stone Island, I never bought into it. I never
had any of that stuff; I just made do with the Topman
vintage section and this, that and the other. My own
style and personality is what people were drawn to.
I was into Huaraches before people liked them. I was
always into sneakers and shoes. In school, besides
buying games, I’d go to Footlocker in Ealing. Certain
kids would go Footpatrol, size? or Supreme, but I wasn’t
well versed, so I discovered those things late. I feel like
my perspective was always different from the jump
because I didn’t grow up on Facebook groups.
Your early posts on Instagram reflect this. You also have that
infamous picture with Tyler, the Creator.
I only knew about Tyler, the Creator from this guy in
school saying I looked like him. I was like, “Who the hell
is that?” I remember being 15 and going to the pop-up at
Hideout in Soho when it was still a store; I didn’t really
know what Hideout was until a couple of years later,
even though people always talk about it. Not being
well-versed in Soho hipster things is almost like a
blessing because I didn’t live by the same rules as a
lot of these people live by, especially in terms of how
to start a brand. Some people back in 2018 started a
brand and thought we had to make it look like Supreme.
I didn’t really know or care how Supreme looked;
I was just doing what I was doing. But I was always a
researcher of this stuff, and when I started doing my
thing, I looked into BAPE, Supreme, James Jebbia and
Stüssy. I didn’t learn it from Instagram or those mood-
board pages; I did my own independent research.
It seems like there were key moments in the build-up to the brand.
I remember going to the Red Bull Culture Clash in 2014,
which is one starting point. I was affiliated with this
group called APEX back then; I was kind of the outlier
because they were on their fashion ting and I genuinely
didn’t give a toss. Culture Clash was definitive because
it was my first time being around all of that. I remember
seeing A$AP Mob, BBK, Rebel Sound and Popcaan’s
lot. I snuck backstage when Rebel Sound won; I was on
the stage too. I’d always be in stupid situations like that
because I’d run through the gate and try and blend in.
What was your role in APEX?
Everyone in APEX had a role;I remember Joe [James]
calling me the “social guy” in an interview and people
thought I didn’t have a role or do anything – but at
the same time, I was 17 or 18; why the fuck am I doing
anything anyways? Did I look at that negatively? No,
because I was a social person, and I still feel like I am.
I’m social in a way where I try and speak to everybody
but at the same time, you don’t see me with anybody.
You only see me with [my manager] Kayode or Walid
[Labiri] and the people that work in my office or ware-
house. You only see me in Paris with certain people I
have known for years. Even earlier, before now, I would
keep myself to myself.
199
Why do you think that is?
People are baggy; you never know what they want.
Sometimes conversations are not where I want them
to be. I only need my people around me. If I’m out there
in the club with everyone, where’s my integrity socially?
Yeah, I follow 800 people, but you only see me with
eight people. I only do that ’cause it’s Instagram. I keep
myself to myself. That was important and still is now.
After this interview, I don’t need to talk to anyone.
I’ve said what I [needed to] say. Maybe some questions
aren’t answered, but it is what it is. You isolate yourself
with your people so you can home in and do something
great. People don’t need to know everything about
you. I’ve tried to balance that thought process where
I give you some of me, but you’ll never get all of me.
I want Corteiz to be 30 times bigger than it is now.
When people see me, they need to feel Corteiz on the
street as if I’m pulling strings from the background.
Where there any other key moments leading up to Corteiz?
In late 2017, Virgil did about 30 workshops for the Ten
shoes in [NikeLab] 1948 in Shoreditch, and I applied for
every single one, not because I was necessarily a Virgil
fan, but because it was a free activity. I genuinely had
nothing better to do. I got three workshops, and the day
we got there, they said we had a chance to purchase the
Ten shoes before everyone else, and so I got the three
pairs. At that time, I wasn’t a hypebeast, but I walked
out of 1948, and one guy was like “Yo, I’d give you money
for the creps.” He must have given me like two grand.
I played myself because if I had waited, I would have got
more. Looking back, I made maybe £2,700 off those
shoes, which was recreational money for a couple of
months and money I would spend on making samples.
I could buy them back, but I don’t think I’m spending
£10,000 on shoes – kudos to [Virgil], but that’s crazy.
I hope my shoes can go for a mad figure.
You’ve been known to cancel orders of established resellers you
come across ordering from you, which many people respect.
It’s funny when kids ask why I’m always moaning about
reselling. It’s a different landscape now with sites like
StockX dictating value, whereas [before], the streets
would dictate the value; it was almost decentralised.
It’s intriguing because they can down-value what your
product is worth, and there’s no say from the public or
the producer in that situation. Depop early on was just
annoying for me because I was still small and operating
out of my crib, so it would piss me off when someone
tried to make [money] off me. Anyway, I resold in my
past life; it is what it is.
So, what came next?
I said I would never work for anyone – no one can stop
me. I think it was good that early on, I had an infra-
structure within myself. People ask me, “How do you
do this?” I was the type of person that did everything
myself because, back then, I didn’t know I could employ
someone. Early on I would shoot all the lookbooks
because it didn’t make sense for me to pay someone
when the people I had access to couldn’t take a photo
much better than I could. I took all the product photos,
uploaded all the products, all of that. I kept building and
in September [2018], I did one drop and made £10k.
My mum had found a house in Harrow and I was in a
small-ass room, but I remember going to Waitrose and
it felt like my whole body was vibrating. Those people
had no idea I’d just made ten racks! Like, who does that?
Back then, that was so alien; I was like, “Yo, I’ve just
made a third of what my dad would make when he was
a teacher in a night.” He was still badding me up, but yo…
I can pay the bills for this whole house!
You were living the dream.
That first year, I made £30k from March to December,
and that’s just me from the crib I was in, and being
DAZED
evicted in March. In the second year, I would stagger
the colourway drops so that people would have the
chance to buy different colourways if they didn’t have
the money all at once. I would spend five hours a day in
the post office. One time I did a drop of baby-blue
joggers, and there were about 400 or 500 orders,
but I packed it, and I used to sign people’s orders with
travel cards. People who bought Corteiz early on will
know I used travel cards.
That’s a fun fact, kind of like how Trapstar used to use pizza boxes
instead of standard packaging back in the day.
It started because a kid ordered a hat, but the embroi-
dery had a film the manufacturer had forgotten to peel
off. I remember trying to explain to the kid how to peel it
off, and I didn’t have paper, so I went into my draw
and found a travel card. When I used to take the train,
I used the children’s all-day travelcard that made the
price drop from £12 to £2 to go anywhere in London.
I remember writing on the travel card, “Dab the hat with
a little piece of a wet sponge to peel it off,” but then I had
a eureka moment. [It reminded me of how] when you
buy something from Mr Porter you get personalised
packaging. So that was my personalised way of doing
things, and the fact that it was on the London travel
card I used to bump trains with was authentic. For every
single order at that moment in time, I’d write their name
and “RTW” like a signature every time I packed an order.
I’d spend 18 hours packing orders.
You’re very good at the internet. You’ve always been able to interact
directly with your customer and be relatable. People love your inspira-
tional quotes and your thoughts and opinions which you seem to love
giving… you’re quite critical.
I tweeted once that, at my core, I’m a hater. But that’s
just growing up in London. To create something like this
that genuinely goes against the grain, someone could
argue that I have some kind of annoyance or hatred
[with] the internet and being exposed to everything
and seeing how things were done…
I’m not sure it’s hate. Hate cripples you.
Hate does cripple you… but London does make you hate
things. On social media, why do people say the UK is
bad vibes? Obviously, that’s a generalisation, but it’s
generally miserable; there’s barely anything positive.
When I lived in Dagenham, I looked out my window and
there was a warehouse! Can you imagine waking up
to that view every day? That’s not good, but when you
come from a place like London, you go through certain
things. Diamonds come from the dirt.
What I appreciate about you and people like Jojo [Sonubi] of Recess is
that you’re all supportive of those around you, even if you’re in the same
field of work. There isn’t a crabs-in-the-bucket mentality; there are no
bad vibes at all from the outside looking in.
Funny, I was one of the lost founding members of
Recess. But I realised that party promotion wasn’t
my thing. Then [Jojo] stopped it for a year and
brought it back and now it’s one of the biggest
Black parties in England.
I’ve seen Jojo at DLT and I’ve seen you do collabs with the likes of Soho
Yacht Club or banning people from bringing other Black-owned brands
to Da Great Bolo Exchange.
There’s no crabs-in-the-bucket mentality. You need
good competition sometimes because it makes
everything better at the end of the day. If in early hip
hop there wasn’t someone Jay-Z thought was better,
it wouldn’t have forced him to want to be better.
It wouldn’t push that cultural thing forward. When
I see brands coming up, no matter how small, if I see
something good and I feel threatened in some kind of
way, I need to better my thing. That’s healthy. I want a
kid to look at this brand in a couple of years and think,
‘I wanna be better than this.’ That’s where my head
 “I came home from
my grandma’s
burial in Nigeria to
an eviction notice
saying we had a
week [to leave]…
That moment
changed how
I saw things”

Cotton trousers BURBERRY, cotton

boxers CORTEIZ RULESTHEWORLD,
necklace and all jewellery worn
throughout his own

201
 has been for a long time. It’s only five years. I’m trying
to compete with brands that are 30 or 40 years old.
That is imperative.
Do you think you have certain traits from growing up in west London?
It’s weird ’cause to think about brands like Trapstar,
they come from up the road; it’s west London. Benjart
is up the road. Brands from the UK that operate from a
street level are within a five-mile radius. That’s weird.
What’s that about? Central Cee grew up here. You’ve
got Palace south of the river and a couple of others,
but there’s something different about west. If you
live in the west, you’re exposed to both levels of the
socioeconomic structure – the poor and the wealthy.
Maybe that’s the thing that makes someone from
here think a bit differently. Aspiration across the road
from me is within reach – our environment shapes and
impacts us.
Back to Corteiz, people think about this cool kid with a brand, but it’s
a growing business. There’s immense pressure, no doubt.
This is my first office, and across the street is the
Travelodge where my family lived when they were
evicted. That’s a reality to face. When it comes to
pressure, there are two ways I think about it. God
gives you the opportunity to do something and you
can either complain about it or do [something]. Or you
can succumb to the pressure, fuck up, tweet about it
looking for sympathy and get some validation and likes.
I’ve never been like that. Worse things have happened
to people that define them. In my life, the worst thing
was my grandma passing away, and then me coming
home and getting evicted. I was never a complainer or a
moaner. That came from my dad always telling me as a
young Black boy, “I have to work four times harder than
everyone else if I want half of what they’ve got.” At the
end of the day, God has given me an opportunity, and
I’d be ungrateful if I didn’t take it with my bare hands
and run as far as I could with it. I’m just thinking about
going forward. Pressure is succumbing, stopping and
freezing. If you’re constantly moving, you’re not thinking
about pressure. I want to keep going.
Do you consider yourself to be in the fashion industry?
No, because everyone operates via seasons and they
think fashion week is important, which it is to a lot of
people. The first time I went to a fashion show was when
Virgil passed – the show in Paris. I don’t need to go to
another one. People throw fashion shows, but the world
is changing. No offence, but magazines were much
more successful and popular years ago when people
bought stuff in print. The world is in a different place
now. I don’t know how to use a sewing machine. I have
never made a tech pack. In my head, I still don’t know
what I’m doing. Someone on TikTok posted a video
talking about the importance of making a tech pack,
and he used a Corteiz picture in the background, and
I was laughing ’cause I didn’t make a tech pack for that
hoodie. There are certain disciplines I haven’t abided by.
I don’t feel like I’m selling clothes sometimes. As corny
as it might sound, I’m selling a feeling.
It’s a community and a culture.
You can buy a hoodie anywhere. People buy it ’cause
they feel something. At the end of the day, that’s the
most important thing. I want people to feel an emotion.
That’s art.
They say you’re a marketing genius. Whether that’s Da Great Bolo
Exchange, 99p cargos, the travel card swap shop or whatever is
coming next. But is that what it really is? Sure, it’s marketing to some
guy in a suit but…
I hate that word, ‘marketing’. It’s just natural. I never
thought it would go viral. I’m not going to act like I know
what the exact outcome will be. Everything to a degree
is spontaneous. Everything is last-minute.
DAZED
What does the Alcatraz logo mean?
I always looked at society as a prison: you’re born, go to
school, graduate, have two kids, get married; whatever
order, you are given a schedule or told what to do. When
I was younger, people were telling me where to go in my
life. It’s like you’re in prison with people telling you what
to do and how to think. I look at Alcatraz as a symbol
of society, and to succeed, you have to escape that
mindset. It’s a metaphor for escapism. That’s what it
represents to me.
You’re known to be super anti-establishment, so why did you
choose to collaborate with Nike?
One kid said to me, “You said you’d never do collabs!”
And I said, “No, I said I ain’t gonna do stupid collabs that
don’t make sense.” The point of the matter is, I’m doing
something with Nike on my terms, and a lot of other peo-
ple can’t say that. It’s what makes sense. It’s not going in
JD, size? or Footpatrol. May thunder strike them if Kick
Game gets some pairs. Nike is a big company but cultur-
ally it’s bigger, and it speaks to a certain demographic
of people. It speaks to a lot of demographics. So, me not
doing a collab with them is a disservice to culture. Also,
they might have spoken to my audience before, but now
they are speaking to them with a megaphone; it’s direct.
It’s louder now. There’s also value in the story because,
in 2018, they sent me a cease-and-desist, and I threw
it in the bin. Then they sent me another one a year later,
and I threw that one in the bin too. No one can wave
something in my face and distract me from what I want
to do. I made a conscious decision I needed to make
this the biggest thing ever, undeniable. I had to force
their hand, but I didn’t know what hand I was forcing.
Back then I couldn’t foresee this; I didn’t know
it was possible.
How did the Nike deal come about?
I was meant to do t-shirts in 2020 for Air Max Day
after they saw a giveaway I did in Soho. I went to one
meeting and designed a shirt, but they weren’t keen on
putting Alcatraz on it, so I put CRTZ RTW with a Nike
tick on the back of it. Obviously, in that meeting as well,
I was confused because I didn’t think they knew I had a
cease-and-desist so I couldn’t use certain things. Then
Covid struck and it was cancelled, and I was like, “Fuck,
I just missed my one opportunity to solidify the brand.”
During Covid, I kept working. If I remained street-level,
I could make enough money to buy a house; that’s all
I cared about because at the time I was renting. In my
head, I could buy a crib. I got creative and made logos
with Corteiz script writing. I did the stars, which took
away the vowels and made it a symbol. It wasn’t a set-
back. I made it work. If that situation hadn’t happened,
it wouldn’t have come about. Sometimes, in those
situations, you have to make something out of it.
People might also ask why you’ve decided to have this conversation
with me now. What made you want to give this interview?
I feel like people talk shit and I just wanted to shut them
up! Nah, you know what? Let them. I’ll do another one
in a few years when I feel like it. I’m not ever going on a
podcast. Is my collab with Nike anti-establishment?
Yes, I will release the shoes with a password page on
the same website I started in 2018 on my terms. Who
else is doing that? When the shoot comes out, that shoe
will be released on my website only. To an extent, that
is anti-establishment. Me being me is anti-establish-
ment. People who don’t know me might think I’m rude,
and yes, I can be a bit abrasive, but if you know me, you
will resonate with me and can actually talk to me. It’s
only people who aren’t truthful to themselves that are
pissed off with me. That’s fine; go live in your lie. When
people ask me if I look at the blogs and what they say,
[about me being] a questionable character, they’ve
never had a conversation with me. If you only see what
I’ve said online, you don’t know me. My parents came
 “After this
interview, I don’t
need to talk to
anyone. I’ve said
what I needed to
say. Maybe some
questions aren’t
answered, but it is
what it is”

Polyester track top MARTINE ROSE,

cotton shirt MONCLER, cotton trousers
and leather padded sunglasses 1017
ALYX 9SM, cotton tie DOLCE &
GABBANA, silk and satin scarf wrapped
around hand SAINT LAURENT BY
ANTHONY VACCARELLO

203
 Embossed leather jacket CORTEIZ
RULESTHEWORLD, silk mesh and
cotton t-shirt BURBERRY, organic cotton
denim trousers BALENCIAGA, leather
and metal belt ELLIOT RHODES, leather
boots LOEWE

DAZED
 from Nigeria; my dad in 1983 and my mum in 1986. They
cleaned toilets, worked in factories, then got into the
NHS, and my dad worked as a teacher. They came here
to survive. I live thinking differently from a lot of people.
When I work, I think about my parents. I flip the coin and
think of my cousins in the village in Nigeria, a completely
different reality that I don’t wanna live in. I could have
been living a whole different reality if my dad hadn’t had
the courage to come here. I’m just trying to work hard in
order to have the best life possible for myself, my family
and friends. That’s the community of Corteiz. My sister
is the secretary. My friends from school run my ware-
house. We learned all this stuff here, building something
up. From doing £30k the first year, then £100k from my
crib, then making whatever after that. But I won’t go and
talk about it online or look for kudos. I’m saying it here
obviously because it’s in print, and no one buys print
any more. If a kid has gone out of his way to research,
I want to give him this. I don’t want this posted online.
I want them to spend the money to get this magazine
and read this. That’s important. People talk to me any-
how online, but people should, that’s real. I’m still human
at the end of the day. If you tell me to suck my mum, I’ll
tell you to suck your mum – it’s fair. And it’s real. I don’t
want people to treat me differently. I’ve seen people
fry their brains over £2k and treat other people badly
when they made money, and I’m just not on that. And
that’s one thing about the UK; we’re all so small-minded.
Charlie Sloth will probably be the first billionaire out of
the UK rap scene because he has Au Vodka and that’s
crazy! Kudos to Charlie Sloth, but it’s crazy. That’s how
small we think. So when someone says to me, you have
done well, I’m like, “I’m just getting started.” This can’t
be my ceiling. I don’t have a ceiling and that scares me
sometimes. Where could we take this?
Can you explain where you got the number one plaque with Central
Cee from? I think a lot of people were confused by that.
The t-shirts we made helped Central Cee, a talented art-
ist and trailblazer, get to number one. Shoutout to him
for trusting me and letting me work with him. He asked
me questions and would put his ego aside to listen if he
respected [my ideas] creatively. When he was shooting
the “Loading” video, he asked what he should do in the
first scene. I remember telling him he should come out
the shop like how A$AP Rocky did in the “Peso” video.
Then I saw him implement it. Him listening to me means
a lot. Other artists don’t listen, and that’s why they don’t
have 31 million monthly listeners ’cause they think they
know everything. As someone who does something
creative, you need to have the ability to listen. I used to
want to do more collaborations with more UK artists but
now my mindset is different. It needs to make sense and
in the UK it made sense with Cench at the time. Corteiz
was already a seven-figure business at that point.
People have said things about this online but I’m not
going to succumb to my ego.
other side of the world. You’ve seen this on the internet
and you never thought you were gonna see me. Now I’ve
given you my product and you’ve got that experience.
He can tell his friends, “Clint gave me a t-shirt.” I don’t
know how big Corteiz is gonna be, but that memory is in
his brain.
In terms of music, who do you listen to?
My music taste is quite eclectic. Not mad eclectic but I
don’t like listening to one thing. I don’t put on a specific
artist, I might listen to one song and put it on repeat.
I used to play Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” eight
hours a day on repeat, packing orders the whole day.
This morning I was listening to Dave’s “In the Fire”
on repeat in my car. I will listen to Adele’s “Chasing
Pavements” on repeat. That’s how I listen to music.
Obsessive.
I’m obsessed about what I do, I’m obsessed about cul-
ture. We need a more definitive term, ‘culture’ has been
overused. I’m generally obsessed with human nature,
why people do things, I’m not obsessed with clothes.
I’m obsessed with feeling something. I love nostalgia.
That’s why it lives through what I do if you look at the
lookbooks. I’m heavily inspired by Simon Wheatley’s
photography. It’s hard to conceptualise how his pho-
tography has inspired mine. His is always raw. There’s a
reason Corteiz lookbooks are shot in an alley or a block.
I might be in your local chicken shop, you never know.
That’s the beauty of it. I always wanna be that person
you might see somewhere. I’m not fucking famous or
nothing like that. If you’re aware, you’ll see me. Last
year, when Forbes hit me, a lot of entrepreneurs wanna
be on it, they were like submit your photo, give us a brief
thing, [but] I said I’m not doing this. [They] kept messag-
ing me for eight weeks; I didn’t reply.
One last sneaky question: your pinned tweet on Twitter is that infa-
mous Wiley tweet to Labrinth, and you used Roll Deep to soundtrack
your Nike announcement – have you ever met Wiley in person?
Nah. And you know what else? I’ve never been to
Alcatraz, and I’m not gonna go there.

You were in Japan recently, how was that?

Everything is clean and organised. I went there on a
buying trip; I bought 100 pieces to help create new
ideas. Travelling expands your mind and the way you
see things. You go abroad, stay in a hotel overlooking
the city and that feeling changes your way of thinking.
It’s aspirational. [It also] enables you to meet people
who will change your life. I took a coach to Paris six or
seven years ago with nowhere to stay. I met [this guy]
called Martin [Mougeot], he let me stay in his crib and
he didn’t even know me. Now every time I’m in Paris,
the first person I call is Martin; I know where he lives by
heart. He taught me things about France I wouldn’t have “This can’t be my ceiling.
known. In Australia, there’s a guy called Raff who runs
this brand called Judah Tribe, I went there and 1,000 I don’t havea ceiling and that
people turned up to try and get the product. There was
this 12-year-old kid waiting to get a t-shirt from me. I was
scares me sometimes.
like, “I’ve come 22 hours on a plane from London to the Where can we take this?”
205
 Faux-fur coat SAINT LAURENT BY
ANTHONY VACCARELLO, denim blazer
and trousers OFF-WHITE, cotton tank top
AMI, brass, metal and glass crystal cross
necklace and gold-plated brass, rhinestone
and glass crystal necklace DOLCE &
GABBANA, all other jewellery as before

DAZED
 Cotton trousers BURBERRY,
leather and rubber boots GUCCI

Hair NAT BURY, set design SAMUEL OVERS at NEW SCHOOL, movement direction YAGAMOTO at NEW SCHOOL, lighting direction DARREN KARL-SMITH, styling assistant
SAM THAPA, set design assistant MITCHELL FENN, production THEARCADE 207
photography MIKAEL JANSSON styling IBRAHIM KAMARA

Secret
Sunshine

From left: Aminata and Mariama wear

embroidered cotton dresses MISSONI. Aminata
wears vintage Givenchy enamel earrings
4ELEMENT, tights worn throughout stylist’s
own, satin pumps N21 BY ALESSANDRO
DELL’ACQUA. Mariama wears vintage Miu Miu
plexiglass earrings 4ELEMENT
 This page: Sophia wears satin dress DEL
CORE, lace and satin-embellished bra
GUESS, tights worn throughout stylist’s
own, brass and glass stones earrings
GIAMBATTISTA VALLI, leather and
grosgrain slingbacks CHANEL

Opposite page: Sophia wears fringed twill

dress BOTTEGA VENETA, clay and gloss-
varnish hand-sculpted earrings JUSTINE
GARNER, leather pumps GIVENCHY
DAZED
211
 This page: Coumba wears cotton and
silk dress DIOR, vintage YSL gold-plated
crystal earrings 4ELEMENT

Opposite page: Mariama wears polyester

dress CHOPOVA LOWENA, clay and gloss-
varnish hand-sculpted earrings JUSTINE
DAZEDGARNER, brooch stylist’s own
213
 This page, third from left: Mariama
wears crepe jersey dress LOEWE.
Sophia, Aminata and Coumba wear satin
gowns 16ARLINGTON

Opposite page, from left: Coumba wears

viscose dress and strass, metal and resin
necklace CHANEL, silver-plated and
Swarovski crystal earrings BY ALONA,
leather pumps GIVENCHY. Mariama
wears jersey dress VERSACE, tights
worn throughout stylist’s own, vintage
YSL crystal and gold-plated earrings
Givenchy necklace 4ELEMENT, leather
DAZED slingbacks BY FAR
215
 From left: Coumba wears poly faille and
mesh dress ALEXANDER MCQUEEN,
vintage YSL gold-toned crystal earrings
4ELEMENT, leather strap boots DIOR.
Mariama wears beaded tulle dress
EMPORIO ARMANI, vintage YSL crystal
earrings 4ELEMENT, leather slingbacks
BY FAR. Aminata wears leather dress
LOUIS VUITTON, vintage YSL gold-toned
earrings 4ELEMENT. Sophia wears
printed creponne dress GUCCI
 From left: Mariama wears silk dress
FERRAGAMO, vintage Givenchy enamel
earrings 4ELEMENT. Coumba wears all
clothes and jewellery CHANEL, patent
leather, linen and crystal heels JIMMY
CHOO. Sophia wears printed creponne
dress LANVIN, vintage Valentino gold-
plated enamel earrings 4ELEMENT
 From left: Sophia wears viscose knitted
gown VICTORIA BECKHAM, metal
and strass earrings CHANEL. Mariama
wears polyamide and elastane spiral
dress COPERNI, vintage YSL gold-toned
earrings 4ELEMENT, jersey pumps
PHILOSOPHY DI LORENZO SERAFINI.
Coumba wears silk and linen knitted
dress CHLOÉ, vintage D’Orlan gold-plated
and Swarovski crystal earrings SUSAN
CAPLAN, jersey pumps PHILOSOPHY
DI LORENZO SERAFINI. Aminata wears
viscose jersey dress STANDING GROUND
 From left: Coumba wears embroidered
silk reconstituted gown CONNER IVES,
vintage Valentino rhinestones and
Swarovski crystal earrings 4ELEMENT.
Aminata wears all clothes SCHIAPARELLI,
vintage YSL gold-toned crystal earrings
4ELEMENT. Mariama wears knitted cotton
dress BLUMARINE, vintage Givenchy
enamel earrings 4ELEMENT. Sophia
wears silk dress N21 BY ALESSANDRO
DELL’ACQUA, vintage YSL gold-toned
enamel earrings 4ELEMENT
From left: Aminata wears cotton dress
MISSONI, plexiglass Miu Miu earrings
4ELEMENT, leather laced sandals
VERSACE. Sophia wears satin dress
PRADA, clay and gloss-varnish hand-
sculpted earrings JUSTINE GARNER,
vintage black enamel necklace SUSAN
CAPLAN, metal and bamboo bracelets
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY
VACCARELLO. Coumba wears all
clothes and jewellery CHANEL
 From left: Sophia wears satin dress
ANIYE RECORDS, vintage YSL gold-toned
crystal earrings 4ELEMENT, gold and
Swarovski crystals necklace BY ALONA,
leather pumps GIVENCHY. Mariama wears
satin and lace dress JW ANDERSON,
vintage YSL crystal earrings 4ELEMENT,
leather slingbacks BY FAR
 Hair VIRGINIE MOREIRA at MA+ using COLOR WOW, make-up AMMY DRAMMEH at BRYANT ARTISTS using CHANEL SS23 and No1 DE CHANEL, models AMINATA BA,
SOPHIA DAWIYE, MARIAMA BALDE and COUMBA DIEYE at WOMEN, lighting direction NOAH BEYENE, photographic assistants EGON DETTHOFF, SINCLAIR JASPARD,
PAUL JEDWAB, styling assistants FELIX PARADZA, MARK MUTYAMBIZI, EMILY GLEESON, ROSIE BORGERHOFF MULDER, NINA GAHRÉN WILLIAMSON, ELOISE JENNER,
hair assistant SHAHIYAN MASON, make-up assistants QUELLE BESTER, LINDA WORE, digital operator MAGNUS BERGQVIST, production TANGERINE PRODUCTIONS
photography PAOLO ROVERSI styling IBRAHIM KAMARA

DAZED All clothes and accessories worn throughout BOTTEGA VENETA SUMMER 2023

HOT SHOTS!
text CLEM MACLEOD
In his first issue as editor-in-chief, as the pandemic forced us all to
lock our doors and focus on what felt most important, Ibrahim Kamara
wrote, “Youth culture is happening all around the world, and all of its
elements – fashion, music, style – are in conversation with each other.
This issue is a foundation for a journey that has to continue.”
As we looked deep within ourselves and to our closest communities,
a new fluidity crept into photography. Suddenly, photographers felt
more like journalists, writers or painters than solely image-makers,
using their own stories to tell expansive fashion narratives that actually
said something about the world and where it might be going. It meant
that accounts of little-seen corners of the planet, and fresh faces and
perspectives, filled our feeds.
Since then, as Ibrahim predicted, the paths set in motion by Covid
have continued to set new agendas. With the help of social media and
the hyperconnectivity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram, artists
have become less confined to, and defined by, one specific medium.
Young, diverse, innovative, tech-smart and fuelled by the strength of their
community, a new school of cross-disciplinary photographers has come
to define a shifting medium.
Creatives like Hugo Comte are looking at ways to work collaboratively
with their online bubble, and harness the power in numbers. As he explains
below, Comte has invented a cryptocurrency to allow his followers to
interact with his work and blur photography with his explorations in the
metaverse. “The whole industry is being redefined by the people and not
by the makers and deciders,” he tells me. “People feel stronger together,
because they feel that they have an influence on what fashion produces,
and that they are no longer blind slaves of what the industry tells them.”
Crossing disciplines in similarly bold ways, Lea Colombo uses sculpture
and installation alongside her photographic practice to explore the
contours and complexities of the human body.
From Thibaut Grevet celebrating the power and scope of the
natural world to Campbell Addy revolutionising diversity in casting and
Rafael Pavarotti encouraging mindfulness and connectivity on set, we
present the visionaries defining the unique pocket of history that we call
now. Long live the power of fashion photography, and the remarkable
individuals practising its craft.
It’s not hyperbole to say that
CAMPBELL Campbell Addy has moved the
needle for fashion photography
ADDY since graduating from Central
Saint Martins in 2016. Born and raised in south London, Addy founded
the casting agency and journal Nii Agency while studying at CSM, and
has worked to platform distinctive and diverse new faces ever since.
“At times, a person with a strong character dictates the ideas and stories
that I put forward into the world,” he tells me. “A cast member can often
change a story and an idea, due to their zeal, gumption or sometimes their
sensitivity.” Over the years, Addy has witnessed a sea-change in attitudes
towards inclusivity. “There have been recent projects and gatherings that
have made me step back and think, ‘Wow, we’re really in a new age where
everyone is so humble, and nice, and there’s in part a lack of ego,” he says.
“People from all walks of life are coming together to piece together the
puzzle of fashion, which makes it an entirely more exciting narrative.”
Humble, inspired and driven by a desire to see diversity celebrated and
championed, Addy is one of the essential image-makers of our time.
Spurred by a fascination with
THIBAUT movement, freneticism and the
body, Thibaut Grevet is a French
GREVET photographer and filmmaker
bringing a fast-and-furious brush to fashion photography. Growing up in
the countryside outside of Lyon, France, Grevet harboured a deep app-
reciation of nature and athleticism. “I always dreamt about being a pro
Sit back,
free your
mind and
meet the new-world photographers
revolutionising the medium – frame
by exquisite frame
athlete,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by human performance and
I think I’m trying to translate that in my work. [Practising sport] makes
me happy and gives me the adrenaline I need to get creative.” While
Grevet may not made it as a pro-athlete just yet, he is an expert in his
field of photography. As for his take on the creative process, nature is
key: “It’s important because it gives space to my anxious brain to think
freely… It helps me to not think. When you don’t think, the best ideas
come.” Let’s all get out in the green and give our heads some space this
year – it’s clearly working for Grevet.
Having grown up in the Amazon
RAFAEL rainforest, Rafael Pavarotti moved
to London to refine his colour-rich,
PAVAROTTI oil painting-esque compositions.
A champion of mindfulness, Pavarotti invites his cast and crew to stand in
meditation before a shoot, connecting through a common creativity.
“We stop for a moment to integrate, connect, be grateful, feel the energy.
Feel the silence. Be present in the now. I believe there is a very powerful
force in this communion, this sacred space,” he says. “One of my great
partners is Ib Kamara; we love to dream and when we create together
it’s like a whole new world emerges from within.” As if frozen in time, his
portraits of pop-culture icons from Rihanna to Beyoncé have a striking,
statuesque quality, though he is the first to admit that his work “isn’t for
everyone”, despite him placing an emphasis on sharing and co-creation.
As for the effects the pandemic had on his practice, he reflects, “I believe
that the transformations that Covid brought – especially regarding time
and space, desires and purpose – were completely necessary for me to be
where I am now.” For Pavarotti, going ‘inside’ has a powerful effect on the
magic that is created on the outside.
Renell Medrano's colourful and
RENELL vibrant portraits convey the
vulnerability and emotion from
MEDRANO the friends and strangers she
encounters. Despite having names like Tyler, the Creator, Kendall Jenner
and Jay-Z in her portfolio, it was on the streets of New York City that
Medrano developed her creative excellence. Achieving a connection with
her subjects that is second-to-none, Medrano puts human emotion and
the goodness of people at the centre of her work. Shooting these days, she
says, “feels like a community thing more than anything… Being on set with
all the different young photographers – it’s so beautiful to see because it
just feels like a community of like-minded individuals. It’s amazing what we
can do and at such a young age, too; it gives hope to other kids.”
Hugo Comte is the photographic
HUGO subversive blurring the lines
between fashion, crypto and pop
COMTE culture. With a focus on community
building and accessibility, Comte has used the power of the internet to
cultivate a body politic that acts as a catalyst for cultural cross-pollination.
In his ongoing efforts to eviscerate the lines between creative media,
the multi-hyphenate juggles numerous projects at once, from clothing
collections to high-end fashion photography and album cover shoots for
pop icons like Dua Lipa. Using the metaverse and crypto to control how his
work is interacted with, Comte grants his fans the ability to earn $Nikita
coin, rewarding them for engagement rather than money spending. When
asked why he feels that cryptocurrency is important for the future of
fashion photography, Comte says, “Fashion photography has a mostly
commercial purpose; it’s economy and culture-driven, meaning that
our production is always in tight conversation with the way that people
consume it. Crypto and Web3 in general will change the way people
consume, therefore we will need to change the way we communicate
ideas to people.”
229
RAFAEL PAVAROTTI

“We stop for a moment on

set to integrate, connect,
be grateful. I believe there
is a powerful force in
this communion”

Previous spread, first row: Renell

(second from left) and Lea (far
right) wear all jewellery worn
throughout their own.Second row:
Gabriel (far left), Thibaut (third from
left), Campbell and Clara wear
accessories and jewellery worn
throughout their own. Third row:
Nadine and Justin (middle) wear
earrings their own

DAZED
 Malick Bodian is the Senegalese
MALICK model-turned-photographer
making waves with clean-cut
BODIAN compositions and impeccable
attention to detail. Shifting his gaze from in front of the lens to behind it,
Bodian has a sensitivity to his subjects that only a model could possess.
“I don’t see myself as only a model or only a photographer – doing both
completes me,” he says. “I need my modelling experience to understand
models and, because I’m taking pictures, I understand photographers
better. It’s a win-win.” Lensing natural beauties for brands like Bottega
Veneta, Wales Bonner and Jil Sander, his work is influenced by 1970s west
African studio portraiture, in the vein of a modern-day Jean-Paul Goude.
As for the culture of contemporary fashion photography, Bodian asserts
that “there are a lot of new young photographers that have fresh eyes.
There are new ideas and it’s exciting to be part of them.”
As the first woman of colour to
NADINE photograph a Vogue cover in
2020, Nadine Ijewere is smashing
IJEWERE conventional beauty standards
with her powerful portraiture of women. A native Londoner with Jamaican
and Nigerian heritage, Ijewere explores themes of identity and diversity
through her work, making space for underrepresented natural beauties.
“Diversity is finally being celebrated and recognised; it’s important to
me and my work definitely reflects this,” she says. Taking a break from
photography during the pandemic, Ijewere was able to reflect on her
creative process. “I feel closer to my work… I’m grateful to be in a position
where I can slow down.” Trust is paramount to her practice, working
with teams that contribute ideas and build on briefs and references
the photographer has set. “When working with others, knowing the
possibilities is a big part of my process. I’m very aware of the strengths
of the people I work with and love to explore what’s possible.” Her work
stands testament to the ways in which truly collaborative processes can
result in the highest standard of fashion image-making.
Clara Belleville’s work crystallises
CLARA the purity of youth. Her photos
are vulnerable and emotional,
BELLEVILLE capturing a spirit of freedom
in her subjects. “I think emotion is the essence of art,” she says. “It’s
the movement that pushes artists to create and it is what they hope to
convey. Fashion photography is not exempt from that.” Citing Nan Goldin
and Larry Clark as key influences, her raw imagery of young adulthood
powerfully conveys the essence of adolescence. “As I see it, fashion
photography oscillates between two extremes. On the one hand,
it’s depicting life as it is, with the desire of catching a larger range of
realities. On the other hand, it creates abstract worlds, inventing surreal
spaces of creation where anything is possible. And in between, there
are countless representations. My work leans more on the realistic
side, creating small stories you can relate to.” Keeping it strictly real,
Belleville’s power lies in her ability to communicate these vulnerable
representations of the human condition.
With a background in international
JUSTIN economics, Justin French is
something of an anomaly in the
FRENCH fashion industry. Indeed, his
powerful, socially aware photography is the last thing you might expect
from an economist. But for French, the transition from spreadsheets to
photoshoots felt seamless. “Working as an analyst primarily for marketing
required a unique creativity to help brands tailor ads by their respective
audiences and mediums,” he says. “From a client-facing perspective, my
background has been extremely valuable for me in the photo economy.”
Celebrating and bolstering the representation of LGBTQ+ and PoC
voices in his work, the Chicago-born photographer now works to create
Afrofuturistic masterpieces of iconic standards. When quizzed on the
core traits and aims of his deeply contemporary fashion photography,
French cites “a sense of wonderment, poetry, melancholy, dread,
warmth or whatever the headspace the photographer/team were in
while creating. Fashion photography should be transformative and an
engine for discourse. I believe my work encompasses some of these
things. There is love present in my work.”
Growing up in Malibu and rubbing
BRENT shoulders with some of fashion’s
most glamorous icons, it’s in Brent
MCKEEVER McKeever’s DNA to create sexy,
cinematic masterpieces. You can feel the heat and the haughtiness of the
famous beach in his sticky cover art for PinkPantheress’ debut mixtape
and in Rihanna’s 2021 vinyl rereleases of her back catalogue. But while
McKeever’s images often feel fantastical and otherworldly, there’s an
autobiographical seed in all of his work, he insists. “I don’t like to portray
something I haven’t felt or lived – which makes working commercially for
me either fantastic or horrible.” And while he credits Steven Meisel and
Craig McDean for their lasting influence, his most powerful early memory
of photography was seeing family photos taken by his dad. “There
is an authoritative male gaze in them all and I can feel my dad behind
the camera. I want you to feel me behind the picture on your phone.”
Ultimately, surmises McKeever, photography is an act of self-discovery.
“I grew up believing or at least behaving like something I was not, but
those questions of who I am and why I feel this way are what drives me
to pick up (or put down) the camera.”
“From young I was the one to
GABRIEL mess around in class”, says south
London-based photographer
MOSES Gabriel Moses. “I’ve always
enjoyed making people laugh. As long as I’ve done this, I’ve taken pride
in making an audience feel something or presenting them with familiar
details of our world through my eyes.” A champion of authenticity and
individualism, Moses’ work radiates a liveliness and crystalline honesty
that’s apparent in his up-close-and-personal portraits of Pharrell, the
shape-shifting music videos he directs for Little Simz and his truly
one-of-a-kind, sci-fi-tinged images of Pa Salieu for the cover of Dazed.
“[The pandemic] was a blessing in the sense that there was stillness in
my life – it allowed me the luxury of being able to just think,” he says.
“Multiple ideas were birthed in that period of time.” His ultimate goals,
he says, are to make people feel good and force them to keep exploring
their wildest imaginations.
Will Scarborough isn’t
WILL going anywhere, but
he sees the role of the
SCARBOROUGH photographer drastically
evolving in the coming years. “There are endless abstract ways to create
images now. For example, with creative directors shooting their own
campaigns, it is really about redefining the role of the teams involved
moving forward.” Indeed, a surreal and humorous energy bubbles beneath
the surface of Scarborough’s vital fashion imagery, as if he is constantly
playing with new ideas, smudging the barriers between him and his
subjects, and rejecting any hint of editorial ego. His 80s-inflected Working
Girl homage, shot with Ib Kamara last year for Dazed, was fitted with
the perfect tagline for his approach: “Wait, What?” “It’s hard to say what
[defines] contemporary fashion photography as almost anything goes and
we all have different parameters of taste,” he says, before reflecting on the
ways the medium has embraced sociopolitical messaging in recent years.
For Scarborough, his work exists on the tramlines of fantasy and social
commentary. “I think there is responsibility towards the work now in
terms of its wider social context, which is good. People really want to feel
represented by these images more than ever before, whereas previously
it was all about deceit and the unattainable fantasy.”
Lea Colombo is the photographer-
LEA turned-artist exploring the power
of the feminised body. Born in
COLOMBO Cape Town, Colombo has captured
the likes of Billie Eilish and Cardi B, though recent years have seen her
step away from more commercial fashion photography to adopt a more
spiritual, multifaceted approach to art-making, creating vivid paintings,
sculptures, prints and installation pieces. Her multi-hyphenate approach
to creativity, she says, “relates an open and intuitive process, a mindset
that allows creativity to flow with no boundaries.” A powerhouse who likes
to celebrate joy and gentleness, Lea brings a human touch to any subject
she works with. As for her fascination with every contour of the human
body, well, “there is so much to explore,” she remarks. “[Photography]
allows us endless opportunities to do so.”
231
RENELL MEDRANO

“It’s amazing what we

can do and at such a
young age; it gives hope
to other kids”
CAMPBELL ADDY

“There have been recent

projects that have
made me step back
and think, ‘Wow, we’re
really in a new age’”

233
CLARA BELLEVILLE

“Emotion is the essence

of art. It’s the movement
that pushes artists to
create and it is what they
hope to convey”
THIBAUT GREVET

“Nature is important
because it helps me
not to think. When you
don’t think, the best
ideas come”
GABRIEL MOSES

“I take pride in making an

audience feel something
or presenting them with
familiar details of our
world through my eyes”
WILL SCARBOROUGH

“People really want to

feel represented by
images now, whereas
before it was all about the
unattainable fantasy”

237
LEA COLOMBO
“[My work] relates
an open and intuitive
process, a mindset that
allows creativity to flow
with no boundaries”

DAZED
JUSTIN FRENCH
“Fashion photography
should be transformative
and an engine
for discourse”
NADINE IJEWERE

“Diversity is finally being

celebrated; it’s important
to me and my work
definitely reflects this”

DAZED
HUGO COMTE

“Web3 will change the

way people consume,
therefore we will need
to change the way we
communicate ideas
to people”

Hugo wears sunglasses his own

MALICK BODIAN
“I don’t see myself as
only a model or only a
photographer – doing
both completes me”
BRENT MCKEEVER
“I want you to feel
me behind the picture
on your phone”

Hair DELPHINE
BONNET using
ORIBE, make-up
HIROMI UEDA at
ART + COMMERCE using
CHANEL SS23 make-up
collection and No.1 de Chanel
rich revitalising cream, nails
ANAIS CORDEVANT at SAINT
GERMAIN using MANUCURIST,
talent LEA COLOMBO, GABRIEL
MOSES, RENELL MEDRANO,
THIBAUT GREVET, BRENT MCKEEVER,
MALICK BODIAN, NADINE IJEWERE,
HUGO COMTE, WILL SCARBOROUGH, RAFAEL
PAVAROTTI, CAMPBELL ADDY, CLARA BELLEVILLE,
JUSTIN FRENCH, set design IBBY NJOYA at NEW SCHOOL,
photographic assistants CLARA BELLEVILLE, CHIARA
VITTORINI, styling assistants FELIX PARADZA, SIMON NGO
NDJOCK, REMY YOMBO, hair assistant NADEEN MATEKY,
ALEXANDRA ADAMS, TOMOKO SUPE, make-up assistants
MIKI MATSUNAGA, ALEXANDRA LEFORESTIER, set design
assistant CLEMENTINE DEBRAY, digital operator MATTEO
Brent wears kufi and bracelets his own MIANI, production STUDIO DEMI 243
photography ANA THEINE styling MARINE GABAUT

All clothes and accessories worn throughout THEORY PROJECT SS23

DAZED
Drifters

245
DAZED
 Previous spread, right: Gwen and
Guo wear cotton socks FALKE

Opposite page: Gwen wears fishnet

tights FALKE, gloves stylist’s own

247
DAZED
 CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as
audanda aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore
es aut dolupti onsent QUIST, et facerio.
Henihil ipsaniatet facculla

Hair LAURENT PHILIPPON at BRYANT ARTISTS using

OLAPLEX, make-up PATRICK GLATTHAAR at TOTAL
WORLD using TYPOLOGY, nails CHLOË DESMARCHELIER,
models GWEN WEIJERS at WOMEN, JUM KOUCHIN
at SUCCESS, IMAN KAUMANN at SUPREME, GUO
JIKE at ROCK, photographic assistant ROBIN GUITTAT,
Jum wears gold and styling assistant SORAYA LEROY, tailoring MIKOLAJ
silver rings TIMELESS SOKOLOWSKI, hair assistant VINCENT ZIMBERLIN,
PEARLY, leather belts production PRODUCING LOVE, casting NACHUM SHONN,
D’HEYGERE special thanks IRINA AFANASIEVA

249
photography PHILIP-DANIEL
NAME NAME DUCASSE styling NELL
NAMEKALONJI
NAME

Fresh
Cut

Zya wears virgin wool and elastane dress

ALAÏA, spandex pantaleggings and acetate
sunglasses BALENCIAGA, taffeta turban
ELLEN CHRISTINE COUTURE, custom-
made flowers headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES ×
KRISTA CHUI, gold earrings CARTIER Clash
DAZED de Cartier collection
Pasait wears all clothes LOUIS VUITTON,
leather boots BOTTEGA VENETA.
Ling wears polyester dress SPORTMAX,
nylon tights WOLFORD, custom-made
flowers headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES ×
KRISTA CHUI, leather platform boots
MARC JACOBS 251
 From left: Pasait wears all clothes
and leather shoes SAINT LAURENT
BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Ling
wears jersey dress, metal earrings and
cuff SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY
VACCARELLO, custom-made flowers
headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES ×
DAZED KRISTA CHUI
 Ling wears all clothes
PRADA, cotton polyester cap
MAX MARA, leather platform
boots MARC JACOBS

253
 Zya wears polyester tulle dress GUESS USA,
cotton bodysuit worn underneath and nylon
tights WOLFORD, custom-made flowers
headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES × KRISTA CHUI,
cotton polyester cap MAX MARA, leather
platform boots MARC JACOBS

DAZED
 Zya wears cotton shirt DRIES VAN NOTEN,
silk faille dress CAROLINA HERRERA,
perforated denim skirt DION LEE, custom-made
flowers headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES × KRISTA
CHUI, leather gloves MISCREANTS

255
 Zya wears viscose corset jacket YOHJI
YAMAMOTO, Lycra top, leggings, balaclava
and gloves HAIDER ACKERMANN × FILA,
leather platform boots MARC JACOBS

DAZED
 Ling wears wool and polyamide jacket and
skirt MIU MIU, spandex pantaleggings
BALENCIAGA, custom-made flowers
headpiece DYLAN CHAVLES × KRISTA CHUI,
polyester gloves MISCREANTS 257
Zya wears latex jacket ANDREAS
KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE
WESTWOOD, denim trousers
AMBUSH, cotton polyester cap
DAZED MAX MARA
 From left: Zya wears Hair DYLAN CHAVLES at MA+
polyurethane harness using MIZANI PRODUCTS,
and wool and mohair make-up MICHAELA BOSCH
coat NOIR KEI at BRYANT ARTISTS using
NINOMIYA, spandex DIOR BEAUTY, nails LEANNE
pantaleggings and WOODLEY at SHE LIKES CUTIE
acetate sunglasses using SHE NAILS IT HYDRATION,
BALENCIAGA, models ZYA TAYLOR at
cotton polyester FORD, PASAIT MBOOB at
cap MAX MARA. MARILYN, LING BOL at STATE
Pasait wears wool MANAGEMENT, floral design
sculptural jacket KRISTA CHIU, photographic
COMME DES assistants JUPITER JONES,
GARÇONS HOMME ALEX DEMARCO, styling assistant
PLUS, denim trousers HONOR DANGERFIELD, MAX
COURRÈGES, WEINSTEIN, hair assistant OLIVIA
acetate sunglasses MAIREAD, production WEBBER
and leather boots REPRESENTS, casting MISCHA
BOTTEGA VENETA NOTCUTT at 11CASTING 259
photography LESLIE ZHANG styling AUSTIN FENG

Scene Stealers

DAZED
DAZED From left: AN and YIHAO wear all clothes BAD BINCH TONGTONG, spandex boots BALENCIAGA
261
 Xiaoxiao Wang wears all clothes, metal and strass belt and mesh, suede and patent leather boots CHANEL, tights and gloves stylist’s own, silk taffeta headpiece THOM BROWNE

DAZED
DAZED
AN wears denim shorts MARK GONG, gold bracelet and ring worn on left hand and gold rings worn on right hand (index and little fingers) CARTIER Juste un Clou collection,
gold bracelet and ring worn on right hand (ring finger) and left hand (ring finger) CARTIER Clash de Cartier collection

263
 Lyon wears satin dress MARNI, metal, strass and glass necklace CHANEL, pearl earrings GIVENCHY, gold bracelet and ring CARTIER Juste un Clou collection

DAZED
DAZED
Alibae wears all clothes and leather sandals SHUSHU/TONG, tights stylist’s own, tulle gloves M ESSENTIAL NOIR

265
 Kai Kai wears silk taffeta coat THOM BROWNE, brass, gold, resin and faux-crystal hairpin YVMIN

DAZED
DAZED
Coke wears polyester gown and choker CHEN PENG, polyester gloves stylist’s own, gold bracelet and rings CARTIER Clash de Cartier collection

267
 Coke wears all clothes and gloves BUERLANGMA, silver, gold, brass and resin earrings YVMIN × SHUSHU/TONG

DAZED
DAZED
Harry Fang wears cotton culottes MIU MIU, socks stylist’s own

269
 Yihao wears all clothes KIMHEKIM, metal and palladium necklace GUCCI, silver handcrafted bangles PRONOUNCE × UNDETECTED

DAZED
DAZED
Yihao wears all clothes BUERLANGMA

271
 This page: Harry Fang wears leather shorts PRADA, silk and diamond embellished mask BUERLANGMA, steel chain necklace PRONOUNCE × UNDETECTED

Opposite page: Yihao wears all clothes BUERLANGMA

DAZED
DAZED
 Hair ZHOU XUE MING, make-up JOLIN WEI, nails ERPO LIANG, models YIHAO, COKE, LYON, KAI KAI, ALIBAE, AN, XIAOXIAO WANG, HARRY FANG, photographic assistants
SHEN JIABIN, WU YOU, LIAO ZINING, styling assistants TIFFANY XI, LESLIE BIAN, set design assistant YOGA YANG, executive producer ADAM CHEN, producer GU JIAHUI, production
assistants YUAN YANRAN, ZHAO HAOXUAN, post-production LI HUIWAN

273
 ANDREA
photography NAME ARTEMISIO
NAME styling IMRUH ASHA
NAME NAME

MOST HAIRCLIPS ON THE HEAD

(OFFICIAL RECORD)

Alicia wears viscose and raffia dress

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, tights stylist’s own,
DAZED leather platform slides FENDI
 From a hurricane of
Record hairclips to trousers fit
Breakers! for King Kong, for the
New Issue we broke a
handful of Guinness
World Records. You
saw it here first

MOST T-SHIRTS WORN

(ATTEMPTED RECORD)

Ajak wears custom-made t-shirt stylist’s

own, mohair trousers PRADA, leather boots
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN 275
 TALLEST BOOTS

This spread: Sculy wears all clothes MOLLY

GODDARD, tights and headpiece stylist’s own,
DAZED leather shoes PRADA
277
 MOST TIGHTS WORN

CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda

aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
Ajibike wears satin shirt SAINT LAURENT BY
earita
ANTHONY VACCARELLO, tights stylist’s own.
Coated canvas handbag LOUIS VUITTON ×
DAZED YAYOI KUSAMA
 MOST CLIPS ON CLOTHES

Sculy wears hand-made polyester fringe

coat ALAÏA, socks stylist’s own, leather
shoes KENZO 279
 MOST BEANIES WORN ON HEAD

CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda

aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Vincent
Lupieniwears all clothes
SA coribusam ERNEST
essint W.asimi,
hitatur BAKER ut ,
socks
elibus etstylist’s own, layered
di dolluptaes reperioscotton beanies
pera de natiaec
BEGG × CO, COLUMBIA earita , DICKIES, GAB,
KANGOL and URBAN OUTFITTERS, cotton
sock worn as glove KENZO, rubber boots
DAZED GIVENCHY
JACK BROCKBANK
(AJUDICATOR)

Jack wears all clothes and accessories his own

281
 CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda
aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
earita

DAZED
 TALLEST HAT
(ATTEMPTED RECORD)

From left: Jun wears all clothes LOUIS

VUITTON, leather boots PRADA.
Ajak wears all clothes and leather boots
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN 283
 MOST POCKETS ON GARMENT

CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda

aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
David wears upcycled cotton coat MARINE
earita
SERRE, cotton trousers DSQUARED2,
cotton beanie URBAN OUTFITTERS, leather
DAZED boots PRADA
 MOST NECKTIES WORN AROUND NECK
(OFFICIAL RECORD)

David wears all clothes KENZO, layered

cotton and polyester ties COSTUME STUDIO,
DUCHAMP, ETON SHIRTS, FREDERICK
THOMAS, KNIGHTSBRIDGE NECKWEAR,
PAUL SMITH, PICKNWEIGHT and THOMAS
PINK, leather shoes COMME DES GARÇONS
HOMME PLUS 285
 LARGEST TROUSERS
(OFFICIAL RECORD)

Clockwise from left: Vincent wears all

clothes GIVENCHY. Ajibike wears cotton
and feather dress JIL SANDER BY LUCIE
AND LUKE MEIER. Celia wears silk
dress DEL CORE, cotton tulle shirt worn
DAZED underneath DSQUARED2
 Hair LAURENT PHILIPPON at BRYANT
ARTISTS using OLAPLEX, make-up LILI
CHOI at CALLISTE AGENCY, models
AJIBIKE ABDULRAHEEM at SELECT,
CELIA DADIE at TITANIUM, VINCENT
VILLEMIN at ROCKETMEN, AJAK DENG
CHLO at M MANAGEMENT, SCULY MEJIA
at SELECT, JUN HONG at BANANAS,
ALICIA ATHAMNIA at ELITE, DAVID
SORRIZO, set design IBBY NJOYA at
NEW SCHOOL, styling assistants ANDRA-
AMELIA BUHAI, AROUA AMMARI, LUNA
SYLVA, BEN COMUCE, JULIETTE DA
LUZ, ELOISE JENNER, GRACE MILLER,
JENSON KAY-POLLEY, NINA GAHRÉN
WILLIAMSON, tailoring ANH DUONG, hair
assistants VINCENT ZIMBERLIN, SAMMY
BOYODE, make-up assistant MATY NDAW,
set design assistants CLEMENTINE
DEBRAY, lighting technician MAXIMILIAN
MAIR, digital operator GIUSEPPE CATESI,
production HOTEL PRODUCTION, post-
production OFFICINAOTTO, ajudicator
JACK BROCKBANK, casting SARAH
SMALL at GOOD CATCH, special thanks
GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS

287
photography JACKIE
CAMERONNICKERSON
UGBODU styling GLORIA
FELIX PARADZA
IYARE

Between
the Sheets

All clothes and accessories worn

DAZED
DAZED throughout ETRO SS23
289
DAZED
291
CREDITS PLACEHOLDER equae as audanda
aborrovidi SIM vid modi volore es aut dolupti
onsent QUIST, et facerio. Henihil ipsaniatet
facculla CULPARIBUSAM ex eat.
Lupieni SA coribusam essint hitatur asimi, ut
elibus et di dolluptaes reperios pera de natiaec
earita

DAZED
 Hair AMIDAT GIWA at BRYANT ARTISTS,
make-up BEA SWEET at CLM, model FANFAN
at ELITE LONDON, set design JABEZ
BARTLETT at STREETERS, photographic
assistant PIERRE LEQUEUX, styling assistants
SAM THAPA, ALEX TANG, BAMBI DYBOSKI-
KING, JENSON KAY, make-up assistant SHANI
MUSHINGTON, digital operator VICTOR
GUTIERREZ, production WKND, casting
MISCHA NOTCUTT at 11CASTING

Hair AMIDAT GIWA at BRYANT ARTISTS,

make-up BEA SWEET AT CLM, model FANFAN
at ELITE LONDON, set design JABEZ
BARTLETT AT STREETERS, photographic
assistant PIERRE LEQUEUX, styling assistants
SAM THAPA, ALEX TANG, BAMBI
DYBOSKIKING, JENSON KAY-POLLEY,
make-up assistant SHANI MUSHINGTON,
digital operator VICTOR GUTIERREZ,
production WKND, casting MISCHA NOTCUTT
at 11CASTING

293
STOCKISTS SPRING 23

1017 ALYX 9SM CHRISTOPHER FLEET ILYA MARNI SIMONE ROCHA

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4ELEMENT columbiasportswear.co.uk FURLA MATTY BOVAN SPORTMAX
4element.co.uk COMME DES GARÇONS furla.com mattybovan.com sportmax.com
ACNE STUDIOS HOMME PLUS GABRIELA HEARST MAX MARA STANDING GROUND
acnestudios.com london.doverstreetmarket.com gabrielahearst.com maxmara.com @standing_ground_
ADIDAS CONNER IVES GAP MISCREANTS STEFAN COOKE
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AKONI COPERNI GIAMBATTISTA VALLI MISSONI STERLING KING
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ALAÏA COSTUME STUDIO GIVENCHY MIU MIU SUSAN CAPLAN
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ALEXANDER MCQUEEN COURRÈGES GMBH MOLLY GODDARD THE LONDON LEATHER MAN
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ALYSSA MARIE GROENEVELD CORTEIZ RULESTHEWORLD GUCCI MONCLER THEORY
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AMBUSH CRAIG GREEN GUESS MONIES THOM BROWNE
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VIVIENNE WESTWOOD deborahblyth.com jacobcohen.com NATIONAL THEATRE timelesspearly.com
viviennewestwood.com DEL CORE JIL SANDER BY LUCIE AND COSTUME HIRE TOMMY HILFIGER
ANIYE RECORDS delcore.com LUKE MEIER nationaltheatre.org.uk uk.tommy.com
aniyeby.com DICKIES jilsander.com OFF-WHITE TRUST JUDY BLAME ARCHIVE
ANN DEMEULEMEESTER dickieslife.com JIMMY CHOO off---white.com trustjudyblame.com
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BAD BINCH TONGTONG dionlee.com JUSTINE GARNER pacorabanne.com undercoverism.com
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BALENCIAGA dior.com JW ANDERSON palaceskateboards.com @undetected_____
balenciaga.com DOLCE & GABBANA jwanderson.com PAUL SMITH UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON
BEGG X CO. dolcegabbana.com KANGOL paulsmith.com gb.benetton.com
beggxco.com DRIES VAN NOTEN kangol.com PAULA ROWAN URBAN OUTFITTERS
BLEUE BURNHAM driesvannoten.com KATRINA GULA GASTONIAN paularowan.co.uk urbanoutfitters.com
bleueburnham.com DSQUARED2 @Shykxt PHILOSOPHY DI LORENZO VALENTINO
BLUMARINE dsquared2.com KENZO SERAFINI valentino.com
blumarine.com DUCHAMP kenzo.com philosophyofficial.com VERSACE
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bottegaveneta.com ELISSA POPPY kimhekim.com picknweight.de VICTORIA BECKHAM
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@buerlangma ELLEN CHRISTINE COUTURE knightsbridgeneckwear.com prada.com WILLY CHAVARRIA
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fila.co.uk shushutongstudio.com

DAZED
photography ANTON GOTTLOB

DAZED
text ANNA CAFOLLA

They’re arriving in their thousands every day, but by

2030, the kids of Generation Alpha will be the ones
calling the shots. At school in London, children born
into a world in flux share their hopes and fears for the
future – Matt Hancock, be very afraid…

297
 DOUNYA LAETH
Are the kids alright? Meet the children of Generation Alpha – well,
the ones who’ve shown up so far – a demographic group born between
2010 and 2025. Millions more are yet to even be realised, but they’re
building towards a population of 2.2 billion by 2024. The oldest, thus far,
are on the very cusp of becoming teenagers. The first wave will reach
adulthood by 2030.
They’re Covid babies, students who did school on Zoom and met family
members on FaceTime, with an early media diet that slaloms through the
endless scroll. It’s the first generation to be born totally in the 21st century,
experiencing the digital world in the most all-encompassing manner.
They grew up – and are growing – as institutions and cultural practices
across the world fell away. They’re children caught in the crossfire,
amid new and restructuring social movements, and are experiencing the
impact of climate change first-hand.
A consensus on Gen Alpha’s embryonic sensibilities has already start-
ed to form – arbitrary lines drawn by analysts and marketers desperate
to construct the next next generation’s tastes and habits of consumption.
Their narrative is yet to be made flesh, but they’ll likely be the most com-
modified generation yet. As trend cycles move at increasingly breakneck
speed and the world is pulled taut across the binaries of political and social
extremes, is it even possible to delineate people in any meaningful way?
Whether we’ll even stick with the Alpha name is yet to be seen – spare
a thought for the discarded monikers of slackers, latchkey kids, MTV
generation and the iGeneration. The next axis-shifting global event could
see them dubbed something entirely different, though let’s not get ahead of
ourselves just yet.
I head to St Mary Magdalene’s, a Church of England primary school in
north-west London, on a bright winter’s morning for a small survey of kids
that fall into Generation Alpha. It’s a Friday, and they’ve spent the week
making slime in science, preparing for their forthcoming talent show and
“What’s next,
world war three?
World war 400?”
HUSSAIN
DAZED
ENIS YOUNA
finishing reading and writing comprehensions. Their ages range from nine
to 11. They’re all London-born and bred, though some have family in west
Africa, Yemen, Albania and Ireland.
There are a few cultural unifiers among them – football, mainly.
Paris Saint-Germain is the group’s favourite, and one girl’s admission that
she supports both Manchester United and Manchester City – rival teams
– is met with scoffs and light teasing. TikTok is another – Cally, 10, has an
account monitored by her mother, where she posts fancams of England
footballer Jack Grealish. At the talent show, Cally plans to sing Rihanna,
while Nour and Mohammad, both 11, will take on Imagine Dragons. As with
most generations, they use cultural touchstones as signifiers. Their mostly
older millennial and Gen X parents watch soaps (and they’re not opposed to
sitting with them for a Coronation Street omnibus, or the gameshow Tipping
Point). Those with teenage siblings find them boring or distant because
they’re concentrating on GCSEs and A-levels. They’re heavily influenced
by what their family members enjoy – Hussain, 9, plays PlayStation with
his sixth-former brother (but only when he’s not with his girlfriend, which
is a lot). Cally reads her mum’s “belly books” (pregnancy pamphlets).
Nour listens to the Arabic songs his father loves and Isabelle-Rose, nine,
likes Afrobeats. Laeth is enamoured with Formula One.
The older kids in the group are only 20 days from finding out which
secondary school they’ll be going to in September. “It’s a big step up from
primary,” Leon, 11, affirms solemnly. “We’ll look like nursery kids compared
to the year 12s.”
“My parents are all over it,” Isabelle-Rose emphasises. “I’m not even in
Year 6 and they’re asking everyone at church what the good schools are.”
Everyone is able to list their top three schools of choice seamlessly.
“I’d give my life savings to stay at this age for the rest of my life,” says
Cally. “I still want to go to Peppa Pig World this summer, even though my
family think I’m too old. I don’t want to grow up.”
“I’d give my life
savings to stay
at this age for the
rest of my life.
I don’t want to
grow up”
CALLY
 PARIS YASMINA
“I don’t mind,” says Nour. “I’ll become old so I can get my driving licence.
The bad thing about it is you have to pay taxes.”
“I feel old already. I was in Year 3 four years ago and I was worrying
about Key Stage 2!” says Leon, incredulous.
“I don’t know when I would ever want to move out of my mum’s house,”
says Cally. “She says when I do that I can pick my own clothes, though.
And I can make my own money.”
Their big, small and fleeting dreams are met with equal fervour, and
there’s a playful entrepreneurial spirit among the children. Cally does foot
spas for her family and charges £2. She tells me she has a drinks business
selling lemonade, while Leon has a rival company. “She’s mad ’cause my
drink is better, and I have less people in my company taking up shares,”
he says, miming at flicking an elastic band in Cally’s direction. “I use a
combination of sour apple, lemon and lime. It’s all fresh.”
Nour wants to be a pilot and his second choice is a footballer. His “plan
C” is to be a gamer. If Leon can’t play football, he says, “I’ll start my own
business with my savings account. Or I’ll be an architect.” Cally wants to
be a singer, an interior designer or a YouTuber. Isabelle-Rose wants to be a
paramedic and Mohammad wants to be a heart surgeon. Hussein wants to
be a footballer, a shop manager or an archaeologist.
Mark McCrindle, the social researcher credited with coining the term
Generation Alpha, predicts that this group will delay standard life mile-
stones – like marriage and childbirth – if following previous generational
trends. If we also follow the health and social trends of previous demo-
graphics, this generation will live longer and have smaller families, as well
as being the most formally educated, technology-supplied and wealthiest
generation globally ever.
Proximity to technology defines each and every generation. Already,
‘Generation Glass’ is another label attached to Generation Alpha because
of their attachment to tech – the first births in 2010 were the same year as
“There’s millions
of homeless
people here.
I’d create a
fund to house
them all”
LEON
AGNESA NOUR
the launches of Instagram and the iPad. A 2020 report by Childwise found
that 53% of children in the UK own a mobile phone by age of seven. This
group all have Instagram accounts monitored by their parents and their
main way of communicating is WhatsApp. “Where the drama happens,”
says Nour with a sigh. Each year-group has its own group chats and
gendered offshoots. It’s where arguments about Covid and crushes are
approached with similar tenacity. One person – though I won’t grass – tells
me they’ve had their electronics confiscated after being caught shoplifting:
“it was a gift card with no money on it, I just liked the colour.”
Life pre-Covid for Generation Alpha is truncated. There is no universal
experience of the pandemic, and it remains to be seen what the long-term
impact on a generation that spent some of its formative years inside will be.
At the same time, early research findings highlight the impact on the mental
health and wellbeing of primary school-age children, as well as their ability
to form relationships. Still, children have shown resilience in the face of
change and circumstance – a UK study of young Girl Guides aged four to 18
in 2021 found that 55% felt a new understanding of themselves, and 49%
said they had learned to cope with difficulties better.
“It felt a little weird in the playground when we first went back,” remem-
bers Nour. “Friendships changed for good and bad. There were more fights
and misunderstandings.”
I ask the group more about how they envision future adult life. Will they
go to clubs when they’re older? It’s a resounding no. “People get too drunk.”
“The music is gross!” “They swear too much there.” Someone on set at the
group’s photoshoot says an expletive when dropping a piece of equip-
ment, to the group’s quiet horror. For them, getting older means unlimited
PlayStation, driving, owning their own houses, having kids, having bound-
less job opportunities and travelling the world.
It’s a world with issues they’re attuned to. When I question what they
see as the biggest urgencies today, there’s some box-ticking: world hunger,
“I think of life like
taking my piano
exam. It’s very,
very exciting
and it can also
be scary”
ISABELLE-ROSE
299
 war, climate change, racism, speeding, littering. Analysis by the Science
journal estimates that Generation Alpha, particularly children born in
2020, will experience up to seven times as many extreme weather events,
particularly heatwaves. They’re learning about the cost of living crisis and
inflation through their school tuck shop, where they barter with a firm grasp
of finance. “Crisps are like £1.25 now, you know,” Cally says. We talk about
the recent protests for Albanian refugees, Palestine demos, and vigils for
Turkey and Syria they’ve attended with family. A back-and-forth ensues
that goes deeper into their concerns.
“I think about how single mothers don’t get enough money or sup-
port,” says Cally. “I think about what happened to Stephen Lawrence,”
says Nour, referencing the racially motivated murder of a Black British
teenager in 1993. Every year, they have a remembrance day and lesson
dedicated to Lawrence. Mohammad brings up the recent police killing of
Tyre Nichols in the US, and Laeth recalls the racist treatment of England
footballers Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka during the
Euro 2021 Final.
“There are lots of types of racism here, especially in London,” says
Leon. “It can be about the colour of your skin, but also if you are a refugee,
like how Albanian people coming here are treated. The government thinks
immigrants are criminals and it’s sad.”
RIA MOHAMMAD
“What’s next, world war three? World war 400?” asks Hussain. “I worry
about Russia. I worry about China. I worry about the kids in the earth-
quakes in Turkey and in Syria.”
“Peace and harmony in all the world,” he sings.
“Are you singing Peppa Pig?” asks Isabelle-Rose, dubious, before
joining in softly.
“More people need to pay attention not just to the western wars, but to
the Middle East and Asia,” says Laeth, cutting through the song.
“I think we need to go to the House of Parliament and say all this,” adds
Mohammad.
Freedom is important to them. Creativity is too. And their strong ideas
for what they would do if they were in power. “I think we could do a better
job than what they’re doing now,” says Isabelle-Rose.
As we’ve seen with their forebears, Generation Z, there’s increasing
pressure and expectation for young people to change this amorphous
world, to do better than ever before. When they imagine what they’d do
as prime minister for the day, they keep busy. “I’d jail Matt Hancock, ban
TikTok and put bankers and people who hurt children in prison for life,”
says Cally. Surprisingly, the suggestion of the death penalty for various
crimes is received with rapture – for littering, racism, and speeding.
The group cycles through existential questions and increasingly elabor-
ate scenarios for each.
“There’s millions of homeless people here. I’d create a fund to house
them all,” says Leon.
ALI ALIYA
“I would lower the electricity bills firstly,” says Mohammad, “and the
water bills.” His party line is received with the most applause and some
flamboyant bows.
As we’ve warmed up, they become more confident in throwing
questions back at me – on what issues I care about, who should be in
charge and fix things, whether sexism can go both ways, would I ever
shoplift, and, if the dinosaurs went extinct, whether I think the same
thing will happen to us.
“I wonder when it will be the end of the world,” says Nour.
“Maybe we’ll de-evolve?” offers Leon.
Despite the increasingly bleak bouts of prophesying, we talk about
their excitement for the future – where cars are swapped for spaceships
and everyone can be a footballer-architect or engineer-YouTuber. “I’ll get to
go to Formula One and finally shake Max Verstappen’s hand,” says Laeth.
“I think of life like taking my piano exam,” says Isabelle-Rose. “You have
to prepare – sight reading, scales, all the big songs. It’s very, very exciting
and it can also be very, very scary. And you see big changes in yourself
when you look back, so thinking about how it’s going to get even better is
fun. Last year, my sight reading was awful gibberish. Now I’ve practised
and practised, and I just want to do more.”
“Maybe our parents care about the world, but a lot of people just care
about themselves right now and how they’re living as it goes right now,” says
Leon. “We are young and I think we have time, but if the world is digressing
this fast, it’s going to be chaos.”
LILIA If we’re to follow the Greek alphabet naming system, we’ll be on to
Generation Beta in 2025, and Gamma and Delta in the next time bounda-
ries. As Ursula K Le Guin once wrote in her speculative fiction: “The children
of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful
that it is so.”

DAZED
301
 Pupils HUSSAIN MEREDITH, RIA FITZGERALD, LILIA HOTAIT, YASMINA FAKHRELDINE, LEON MACI,
ALI EL-KHALIL, LAETH RADMAN, NOUR LYASSIMI KAMAL, DOUNYA KARZAZI, AGNESA BICMETI, PARIS
KARZAN, ISABELLE-ROSE ASIEDU, MOHAMMAD EL-ABDALLAH, YOUNA GHONCHEH ARAGHI, ALIYA SAADAT,
ENIS BERISHA, CALLY CURRAN, photographic assistants FEDERICO COVARELLI, ANTONIO PERRONESANT,
special thanks TONNIE SIMPSON and CAROL GOLD at ST MARY MAGDALENE’S PRIMARY SCHOOL