Photo: Ruth Ginika Ossai
For our spring issue, out now, we’re looking at glamour and what the term means for a new generation of artists and writers. Below, we’ve selected some of our favourite musings on the subject. Our cover star, the multimedia artist Victoria Sin reflects on using the glamour of drag to break down fixed notions of identity and language; Sour Heart author Jenny Zhang recalls trying to mimic the glamour of her childhood pop icons, as our columnist Chris Kraus reflects on the dangerous glamour of LA photographer Reynaldo Rivera.
Our cover star Victoria Sin on exploring new avenues in their work and adapting the queer glamour of drag
Photo: Nhu Xuan Hua
“Recently, I’ve been moving away from trying to be this perfect embodiment of Western femininity. I’ve done that. What do I want to do now? I’ve been exploring the way drag exists in Cantonese opera, reimagining the visual language and aesthetics of what a queer sci-fi Cantonese opera would look and feel like.”
New York performance artist Narcissister, who stages subversive stripteases, on her childhood glamour icon, Marilyn Monroe
Narcissister, Marilyn, 2016. Digital Video Still. Courtesy the artist
“One of the first posters I acquired to decorate the walls of my bedroom as a young teenager was of Marilyn Monroe, even though I knew virtually nothing about her or her work. I just found her to be so glamorous,” she remembers. “She was beautiful in ways I certainly was not, but aspired to be. I recall being struck by what my mother told me at the time about the truth of her beauty – how fabricated it was – and also how troubled she had been. None of this was conveyed in the beautiful image of her in the poster! It’s no surprise she came up in my work both as someone to revere and to complicate.”
LA artist Clifford Prince King gives his personal take on glamour in relation to his tender images of blackness, queerness and beauty
Clifford Prince King, Boys in Pearls, 2019
“I think glamour is a kind of idea that we have in our heads that makes something that we do everyday which doesn’t seem glamorous, but from the outside looking in it is something that we do to make ourselves feel better. And when we see it outside of ourselves, it is the little things that we do everyday to make ourselves feel like we are beautifying ourselves in the best way we know how, whether that’s applying a layer of shea butter onto our skin, or you know, the gloss on our lips, the pearl on our earring. I guess it’s the way that we try to make ourselves feel good.”
New York-based poet and Sour Heart author Jenny Zhang recounts trying to channel the constructed glamour of her girlhood icons, the Spice Girls
Video stills: Diane Guais. Courtesy the artist
“Everything I knew about pop culture was relegated to this one afternoon of programming that aired one day in 1996. The first music video I saw was of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. I loved the archetypes – the innocent one, the glamorous one, the sexy one, the sporty one, the wild one– all the ideal categories of womanhood in one super-girl group. It wasn’t exactly empowering, but it was energising. I wanted to wear glittery hot pants and babydoll dresses and platform boots and stilettos and, most of all, I wanted to be someone who got invited to the kinds of places where I could show up dressed like that and be stared at in the good kind of way.”
Our columnist Chris Kraus discusses glamour and sleaze in the work of LA photographer Reynaldo Rivera:
Reynaldo Rivera, Ms Alex, 1993 Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles
“All of Rivera’s silvery black-and- white prints evoke an impossible glamour made even more potent by its aspiration. Glamour and danger…the makeshift stage of a dive bar becomes a conduit for an illusion of perfect beauty. In Yoshi Mugy’s (1995), a middle-aged Japanese man wearing a blonde wig and tiered floor- length taffeta dress poses in front of an unseen audience on the dirty black-and-white checkerboard floor of the Mugy’s stage. The club is clearly a tiny hole in the wall, with small cluster wood tables and chairs around the makeshift stage. Oblivious to the cheap cascade of white Christmas lights and the tattered New Year’s banner hung over the stage long after New Year’s, Yoshi channels some kind of Southern Gothic American beauty, the Civil War South as depicted in David O. Selznick’s Gone With The Wind (1939). All of these different eras collide, and Yoshi tilts her head back to bathe the left side of her face in the light. (The other side of her face, hidden in darkness, has a terrible scar that she got when a trick sliced her cheek with a knife.)
Glamour, Reynaldo tells me, has to do with the perception of danger. There couldn’t be glamour without restrictions. And what is allure without danger? It’s something you want to have but you can’t…”
SLEEK 65 is available in stores or via our online store now!
Alongside the launch of our spring issue exploring glamour as a ‘verb’, SLEEK is dropping our “No one cares if you dress up now” tees. Available to purchase here.