Music holds the power to transform; it can elevate a procession of pricey garments into an unforgettable moment that lingers long after the final model leaves the runway and the designer takes their bow. But behind this power, there’s a delicacy. Runway shows are acts of theatre, requiring months of prep and then, suddenly, over before you have a chance to blink. To make music that synthesises seamlessly with these events, moodboards must be consulted, fabric samples may be felt, and one cardinal rule should always be adhered to: the music must never, ever overpower the clothing. In celebration of a year’s worth of musical moments at fashion shows, we talked with legends and newcomers to the field alike to discover their secret recipe for crafting the perfect runway soundtrack.
It wasn’t a newsroom or even a debate stage that signaled the state of political reporting; it was a podcasting studio whose decor looked ripped from a Netflix dating series. Under bland sterile lighting were two mustard yellow, faux-retro chairs, sporadic vases stuffed full of questionably real “flowers,” and, of course, a stack of merch hoodies folded just right to display the show’s name: Call Her Daddy. On this episode of Alex Cooper’s blockbuster hit show (it was Spotify’s second-most-listened-to podcast in the world in 2023, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience), the guest was Vice President Kamala Harris.
Pharrell Williams is like water. No, not because he has a suspiciously hydrated, eternally youthful glow. Rather because of his preternatural ability to pour himself into whatever opportunity comes his way. Simply stating that Williams is a man of many hats (including 2014’s cartoonishly oversized Vivienne Westwood buffalo hat) is an understatement. From the moment the Grammy-winning artist emerged on the music scene in 1992, writing a verse for Wreckx-n-Effect’s hit single “Rump Shaker,” his trajectory has been celestial.
He’s worked as one half of a production power duo (The Neptunes), fronted a band (N.E.R.D.), and founded a record label (Star Trak Entertainment) with former creative partner Chad Hugo. He has partnered with Japanese fashion legend Nigo on two streetwear brands (Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream), launched a skincare brand (Humanrace), and, most recently, made waves in the fashion industry as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director. His falsetto, smooth as a soft leather LV bag, has flooded the radio waves for decades. He’s lent his magic touch to enough 2000s-era earworms to send millennials of a certain age into a frenzy; thank him later for “I’m a Slave 4 U,” “Hot in Herre,” and Snoop Dogg’s career-altering “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
It’s dizzying to comprehend just how much the 51-year-old maverick has achieved, but for Williams, his journey comes down to four simple words: “Curiosity is the key.”
This story is part of a special digital issue of Highsnobiety Magazine, and features a Q+A with writer Michael Harriot.
Vienna’s rising stature in the contemporary art world is not lost on Francesca Gavin, the London-born writer and curator who was named artistic director of the viennacontemporary art fair last October. The fair is set to celebrate its landmark 10th edition this weekend at the Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center. Gavin is no stranger to viennacontemporary, having last year curated its ZONE1 and VCT ACTIVATION programs, which feature Austria-based artists under 40 and a special art-tech collaboration, respectively. Both programs received critical acclaim, and positioned Gavin as a visionary force in Vienna’s art community.
Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond.
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
This story appears as part of 2004 Was So Gay, Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture.
Sometimes, a piece of media is released that is so specifically tailored to your interests that it feels fabricated. It’s as if it has been created in some anonymous room by media executives, their business suits covered by sterile lab coats as they pour liquified records of your viewing history into test tubes to build an Überprogramm. That piece of media, for me, is The Boyfriend, a new reality show on Netflix. I discovered the show through genuine word-of-mouth via a Chinese friend's IG story. He had posted a photo of a cast member, the beautiful model and barista Ryota (my personal favorite), slurping noodles in what could’ve passed for a scene from the legendary, defunct Japanese reality show Terrace House. A few DMs later, I was introduced to The Boyfriend and immediately devoured the first batch of three episodes.
Deep within the cavernous Arsenale di Venezia, amidst hundreds of works on view at the 60th edition of the Biennale, two paintings by Peruvian artist Violeta Quispe offer an invitation into a queer, gender-breaking multiverse. The works — El Matrimonio de la Chola (2022) and Apu Suyos (2024) — are a patchwork of nearly 100 characters pulled from Andean traditions of Quechua culture, recontextualized and filtered through a prism of sexual and gender equity. The inspiration for these colorful pieces comes from an adolescence spent navigating Lima’s deep conservatism. “This led me to ask myself, where do I place myself in the nature of a society where ‘those minorities’ are found and marked by the society of a country that, unfortunately, still has patriarchal, racist, classist, homophobic and sexist thinking?” Quispe told ARTnews in a recent interview. “My origin is part of my blood, my touch, my art, my customs and my identity.”
GmbH’s Berlin headquarters is easy to miss. There’s no gilded signage, no grandiose atelier entrance. As I walk past the smell of fresh falafel wafting from a nearby Lebanese restaurant and enter a nondescript building’s inner courtyard, it’s only the sight of a mannequin propped against a window that confirms I’ve arrived at the acclaimed fashion label’s studio. Even the brand’s name obscures; a GmbH (the merciful abbreviation of “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung”) is simply the German equivalent of an LLC. When co-founders Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Işık launched the label in 2016, they chose the moniker as a way of distancing themselves from their work, à la Martin Margiela. But behind the clever façade is a brand that’s deeply personal — and, in turn, political.
This story appears as part of the 2024 Next Awards, which honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today.
Gabbriette is on the hunt. “Right now I’m reading — actually my favorite author... Where is it?” she asks, more to herself than to me, on the other end of this early morning video call. The rockstar baddie-turned-cooking queen is pacing around her boudoir. The book she’s after, which never materializes, is Courtney Love: The Real Story by William Joseph Martin. Eventually, Gabbriette gives up the hunt and perches on her bed to tell me about her two other faves from the author’s very gothic and very gay ’90s-era oeuvre: Drawing Blood (a gory, sex-stuffed murder mystery) and The Lazarus Heart, a fanfic sequel to the cult film The Crow that centers on a “controversial S&M photographer.”
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Spring 2024 print magazine.
On Friday, April 9, 2019, as Berlin reported 1,019 new cases of coronavirus, the city’s highest daily number since October, a stream of celebrities were photographed outside of Berghain. But it wasn’t a party they were attending. The legendary club in the heart of the city had been chosen by Bottega Veneta creative director Daniel Lee as the locale for their new runway show, titled Salon 02. It was the second iteration of a new concept that had begun in London in October, an attempt to inject some mystery into fashion via secret, super-exclusive shows that show off collections that aren’t unveiled publicly until months later.
In theory, it was a perfect pairing: a nightclub renowned for its secrecy, exclusivity, and hedonism, hosting a fashion show for one of the world’s biggest brands three months after Lee made headlines for deleting the label’s social media accounts. The only proof that anything had happened — at least at first — were the paparazzi photos of the guests invited to the event, walking outside of the venue. While the actual show took place in the Halle am Berghain, a massive hall that can be rented out to brands, the secrecy of the entire production cloaked this detail in the clout of staging a show at one of the world’s most famous nightclubs.
“It’s hard and edgy, but also beautiful and bright.” The four adjectives used by Martine Ali to describe silver could easily be used to describe her, too. As one of New York’s biggest jewelry designers, the alloy has fused with her identity. “Gold feels far too precious, and oftentimes it’s done very delicately,” she says. “Silver just has this universal ability to appeal to different people in different ways.”
It’s this versatility that Ali has tapped into since launching her namesake brand in 2010. Though her designs fit into the familiar categories of bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and rings, Martine Ali pieces are meant to be modular — creative building blocks ready to be recontextualized by the wearer.
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Winter 2023 print magazine.
Down a cold, cement staircase and through a cavernous tunnel somewhere in Berlin, Ai Weiwei sits quietly at a long table in a brick hall. It’s early, and as the city outside begins to wake up, Ai is busy scrolling through his phone and sipping tea. A few feet away, sunlight streams into an open courtyard set two floors below ground. There’s a serenity and completeness to the scene because, in a way, this former brewery turned underground art studio is a perfect metaphor for the artist’s journey. Here, in what he calls his “underground temple,” Ai has found peace and come full circle.
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Spring 2022 print magazine.
When Omar Rudberg first met his Young Royals co-star, Edvin Ryding, it wasn’t a meet-cute. It was a meet-stressed, mixed with a bit of meet-sweaty. For Rudberg, landing a second audition for the Swedish Netflix series had put him on the verge of a big break; a first step towards launching an acting career after years spent entrenched in the music scene as part of an award-winning boy band. As he burst into the chemistry read for the series five minutes late, there was no time to introduce himself to the person who would become his co-star. “I was so scared,” he recalls of the audition that would change his life. “I sat next to him and we just started. We met for the first time in character, basically, and it was just there. It was natural. It was perfect.”
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Summer 2023 print magazine.
A recent boom and bust cycle provides a lesson in why LGBTQIA+ media should be owned by LGBTQIA+ people.
As the effects of the pandemic rip through the publishing industry, it’s fitting that the biggest story in queer media in 2020 was that the newest outlet that prominent LGBTQIA+ writers were flocking to wasn't a publication, but a social media channel by the world’s largest subscription streaming service. The “trendiness” of the community is clearly still enticing, but sustainability isn’t built off trends. If queer media is going to survive, the only way forward is to take note of what went right, sift through what went wrong, and learn from our mistakes so we can ensure a sustainable future for the queer media we deserve.
Featured on Nieman Lab.
BACK TO THE TOP
Music holds the power to transform; it can elevate a procession of pricey garments into an unforgettable moment that lingers long after the final model leaves the runway and the designer takes their bow. But behind this power, there’s a delicacy. Runway shows are acts of theatre, requiring months of prep and then, suddenly, over before you have a chance to blink. To make music that synthesises seamlessly with these events, moodboards must be consulted, fabric samples may be felt, and one cardinal rule should always be adhered to: the music must never, ever overpower the clothing. In celebration of a year’s worth of musical moments at fashion shows, we talked with legends and newcomers to the field alike to discover their secret recipe for crafting the perfect runway soundtrack.
It wasn’t a newsroom or even a debate stage that signaled the state of political reporting; it was a podcasting studio whose decor looked ripped from a Netflix dating series. Under bland sterile lighting were two mustard yellow, faux-retro chairs, sporadic vases stuffed full of questionably real “flowers,” and, of course, a stack of merch hoodies folded just right to display the show’s name: Call Her Daddy. On this episode of Alex Cooper’s blockbuster hit show (it was Spotify’s second-most-listened-to podcast in the world in 2023, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience), the guest was Vice President Kamala Harris.
The fact that a presidential nominee was sitting down for a podcast wasn’t newsworthy; Donald Trump already made freewheeling, longform podcast interviews as a core tenet of his media strategy (including a nearly three-hour-long chat with Rogan on October 25), targeting male-dominated media outlets in hopes of locking in young, male voters. What Call Her Daddy solidified was that in this election, both major political parties had begun to put content creators on equal footing with legacy journalism; Cooper, who shot to fame via her relationship and sex advice soundbites, made just as many waves, if not more, talking to Harris as Bill Whitaker, the award-winning journalist at 60 Minutes.
The writing has been on the (digital) wall for years.
Pharrell Williams is like water. No, not because he has a suspiciously hydrated, eternally youthful glow. Rather because of his preternatural ability to pour himself into whatever opportunity comes his way. Simply stating that Williams is a man of many hats (including 2014’s cartoonishly oversized Vivienne Westwood buffalo hat) is an understatement. From the moment the Grammy-winning artist emerged on the music scene in 1992, writing a verse for Wreckx-n-Effect’s hit single “Rump Shaker,” his trajectory has been celestial.
He’s worked as one half of a production power duo (The Neptunes), fronted a band (N.E.R.D.), and founded a record label (Star Trak Entertainment) with former creative partner Chad Hugo. He has partnered with Japanese fashion legend Nigo on two streetwear brands (Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream), launched a skincare brand (Humanrace), and, most recently, made waves in the fashion industry as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director. His falsetto, smooth as a soft leather LV bag, has flooded the radio waves for decades. He’s lent his magic touch to enough 2000s-era earworms to send millennials of a certain age into a frenzy; thank him later for “I’m a Slave 4 U,” “Hot in Herre,” and Snoop Dogg’s career-altering “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
It’s dizzying to comprehend just how much the 51-year-old maverick has achieved, but for Williams, his journey comes down to four simple words: “Curiosity is the key.” As he explains to Highsnobiety, bright studio lights glinting off his gold grillz, when we sat down with him earlier this month: “As long as you're curious, then you have something [to do]. You have options [and] inspiration and direction, but it's all based on how curious you want to be. How curious you allow yourself to be.”
This story is part of a special digital issue of Highsnobiety Magazine, and features a Q+A with writer Michael Harriot.
Vienna’s rising stature in the contemporary art world is not lost on Francesca Gavin, the London-born writer and curator who was named artistic director of the viennacontemporary art fair last October. The fair is set to celebrate its landmark 10th edition this weekend at the Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center. Gavin is no stranger to viennacontemporary, having last year curated its ZONE1 and VCT ACTIVATION programs, which feature Austria-based artists under 40 and a special art-tech collaboration, respectively. Both programs received critical acclaim, and positioned Gavin as a visionary force in Vienna’s art community. If she has any nerves about taking over from former artistic director Boris Ondreička, an artist and curator who has shown work at the Venice Biennale and over half a dozen other biennials, Gavin isn’t letting on.
Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond.
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
Sometimes, a piece of media is released that is so specifically tailored to your interests that it feels fabricated. It’s as if it has been created in some anonymous room by media executives, their business suits covered by sterile lab coats as they pour liquified records of your viewing history into test tubes to build an Überprogramm. That piece of media, for me, is The Boyfriend, a new reality show on Netflix. I discovered the show through genuine word-of-mouth via a Chinese friend's IG story. He had posted a photo of a cast member, the beautiful model and barista Ryota (my personal favorite), slurping noodles in what could’ve passed for a scene from the legendary, defunct Japanese reality show Terrace House. A few DMs later, I was introduced to The Boyfriend and immediately devoured the first batch of three episodes.
Deep within the cavernous Arsenale di Venezia, amidst hundreds of works on view at the 60th edition of the Biennale, two paintings by Peruvian artist Violeta Quispe offer an invitation into a queer, gender-breaking multiverse. The works — El Matrimonio de la Chola (2022) and Apu Suyos (2024) — are a patchwork of nearly 100 characters pulled from Andean traditions of Quechua culture, recontextualized and filtered through a prism of sexual and gender equity. The inspiration for these colorful pieces comes from an adolescence spent navigating Lima’s deep conservatism. “This led me to ask myself, where do I place myself in the nature of a society where ‘those minorities’ are found and marked by the society of a country that, unfortunately, still has patriarchal, racist, classist, homophobic and sexist thinking?” Quispe told ARTnews in a recent interview. “My origin is part of my blood, my touch, my art, my customs and my identity.”
GmbH’s Berlin headquarters is easy to miss. There’s no gilded signage, no grandiose atelier entrance. As I walk past the smell of fresh falafel wafting from a nearby Lebanese restaurant and enter a nondescript building’s inner courtyard, it’s only the sight of a mannequin propped against a window that confirms I’ve arrived at the acclaimed fashion label’s studio. Even the brand’s name obscures; a GmbH (the merciful abbreviation of “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung”) is simply the German equivalent of an LLC. When co-founders Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Işık launched the label in 2016, they chose the moniker as a way of distancing themselves from their work, à la Martin Margiela. But behind the clever façade is a brand that’s deeply personal — and, in turn, political.
This story appears as part of the 2024 Next Awards, which honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today.
For my debut at ARTnews, I poured over dozens of exhibition programs to find the five must-see shows of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024. The list includes Sprüth Magers, Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Heidi, ChertLüdde, and Contemporary Fine Arts — plus two "unofficial" shows at Cabin and Sandy Brown.
Gabbriette is on the hunt. “Right now I’m reading — actually my favorite author... Where is it?” she asks, more to herself than to me, on the other end of this early morning video call. The rockstar baddie-turned-cooking queen is pacing around her boudoir. The book she’s after, which never materializes, is Courtney Love: The Real Story by William Joseph Martin. Eventually, Gabbriette gives up the hunt and perches on her bed to tell me about her two other faves from the author’s very gothic and very gay ’90s-era oeuvre: Drawing Blood (a gory, sex-stuffed murder mystery) and The Lazarus Heart, a fanfic sequel to the cult film The Crow that centers on a “controversial S&M photographer.”
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Spring 2024 print magazine.
“It’s hard and edgy, but also beautiful and bright.” The four adjectives used by Martine Ali to describe silver could easily be used to describe her, too. As one of New York’s biggest jewelry designers, the alloy has fused with her identity. “Gold feels far too precious, and oftentimes it’s done very delicately,” she says. “Silver just has this universal ability to appeal to different people in different ways.”
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Winter 2023 print magazine.
On Friday, April 9, 2019, as Berlin reported 1,019 new cases of coronavirus, the city’s highest daily number since October, a stream of celebrities were photographed outside of Berghain. But it wasn’t a party they were attending. The legendary club in the heart of the city had been chosen by Bottega Veneta creative director Daniel Lee as the locale for their new runway show, titled Salon 02. It was the second iteration of a new concept that had begun in London in October, an attempt to inject some mystery into fashion via secret, super-exclusive shows that show off collections that aren’t unveiled publicly until months later.
In theory, it was a perfect pairing: a nightclub renowned for its secrecy, exclusivity, and hedonism, hosting a fashion show for one of the world’s biggest brands three months after Lee made headlines for deleting the label’s social media accounts. The only proof that anything had happened — at least at first — were the paparazzi photos of the guests invited to the event, walking outside of the venue. While the actual show took place in the Halle am Berghain, a massive hall that can be rented out to brands, the secrecy of the entire production cloaked this detail in the clout of staging a show at one of the world’s most famous nightclubs.
Down a cold, cement staircase and through a cavernous tunnel somewhere in Berlin, Ai Weiwei sits quietly at a long table in a brick hall. It’s early, and as the city outside begins to wake up, Ai is busy scrolling through his phone and sipping tea. A few feet away, sunlight streams into an open courtyard set two floors below ground. There’s a serenity and completeness to the scene because, in a way, this former brewery turned underground art studio is a perfect metaphor for the artist’s journey. Here, in what he calls his “underground temple,” Ai has found peace and come full circle.
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Spring 2022 print magazine.
When Omar Rudberg first met his Young Royals co-star, Edvin Ryding, it wasn’t a meet-cute. It was a meet-stressed, mixed with a bit of meet-sweaty. For Rudberg, landing a second audition for the Swedish Netflix series had put him on the verge of a big break; a first step towards launching an acting career after years spent entrenched in the music scene as part of an award-winning boy band. As he burst into the chemistry read for the series five minutes late, there was no time to introduce himself to the person who would become his co-star. “I was so scared,” he recalls of the audition that would change his life. “I sat next to him and we just started. We met for the first time in character, basically, and it was just there. It was natural. It was perfect.”
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Summer 2023 print magazine.
A recent boom and bust cycle provides a lesson in why LGBTQIA+ media should be owned by LGBTQIA+ people.
As the effects of the pandemic rip through the publishing industry, it’s fitting that the biggest story in queer media in 2020 was that the newest outlet that prominent LGBTQIA+ writers were flocking to wasn't a publication, but a social media channel by the world’s largest subscription streaming service. The “trendiness” of the community is clearly still enticing, but sustainability isn’t built off trends. If queer media is going to survive, the only way forward is to take note of what went right, sift through what went wrong, and learn from our mistakes so we can ensure a sustainable future for the queer media we deserve.
Featured on Nieman Lab.
BACK TO THE TOP