Maison Margiela dress; Gucci top, bra, briefs, and skirt; StockinGirl thigh-highs.
Miu Miu necklace; Cornelia James glove; All-In top.
The Row tops and slip skirt; Heather Huey headscarf; StockinGirl thigh-highs (worn as belt); Falke thigh-high.
Dolce & Gabbana halter vest, top, bralette, and bodysuit; Jennifer Behr veil headband; Wolford thigh-highs.
All-In top and skirt; Miu Miu necklace; Cornelia James gloves.
Miu Miu jacket, shirt, skirt, and necklace (worn as bracelet); Loro Piana top; Celine by Hedi Slimane hat and necklace; stylist’s own slip skirt.
Dolce & Gabbana halter vest and top; Jennifer Behr veil headband.
Prada jacket, gray skirt, and pink slip skirt; Araks bralette; Proenza Schouler red slipdress (worn as skirt); Victoria’s Secret lace-trim slip; stylist’s own purple skirt.
Balenciaga top, skirt, and pantaboots; stylist’s own veil.
Loewe coat; Polo Ralph Lauren swimsuit; Chopard Haute Joaillerie Collection ring.
Ralph Lauren Collection jacket and pants; Polo Ralph Lauren tops; The Row shoes; stylist’s own blue top and socks
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello top, skirt, briefs, earrings, bracelets, belt, and tights.
Hair by Jawara for Oribe at Art Partner; makeup by Sam Visser at Art Partner; manicure by Dawn Sterling for Nailglam at EDMA World. Entrepreneur and model: Bella Hadid.
Produced by Fresh Produce; Executive Producer: Izzy Cohan; Producer: Halle Lagatta; Production Coordinator: Chloë Harper; Photography assistants: Jordan Lee, Colin Smith, William Takahashi; Digital Technician: Atarah Atkinson; Retouching: The Hand of God; Fashion assistants: Katarina Silva, Umi Jiang, Grace Turner; Hair assistant: Roddi Walters; Makeup assistant: Shimu Takanori; Production Assistants: Gio Barba, Madeleine Thomas.
Bob Mackie was never much for nightlife. “I was in my studio, working away, and I couldn’t have been happier,” he says. But perhaps no designer is more responsible than he is for broadcasting glamour, pizzazz, and pure spectacle into Americans’ living rooms. Born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Mackie always knew he wanted to be a designer. Encouraged early on by the legendary costumer Edith Head, Mackie worked for a time under the midcentury pioneer Jean Louis before breaking through on his own with the outfits for Mitzi Gaynor’s Las Vegas revue in 1966. He went on to help shape the stage and screen image of a Mount Rushmore of legendary divas: Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Diahann Carroll, and, perhaps most iconically, Cher.
In time, his clients wanted to wear his designs in everyday life—and so did their fans. Runway collections and some of the most eye-popping red carpet gowns of all time followed, but Hollywood remained his true love. (He has a Tony, nine Emmys, and three Oscar nominations to prove it.) Mackie’s life story will be told in the documentary Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, to be released later this year; in the meantime, the designer takes us behind the scenes of his dream factory and the glittering moments that defined his career.
“I tried out for cheerleading because I knew I wasn’t going to be a football player,” says Mackie (top right). “I thought to myself, Well, it’s the closest thing to show business without being in show business.” Though Mackie remembers those times fondly, he did have one fashion note for his alma mater: “We had the worst school colors. They were maroon and gray. Can you imagine?”
Mackie, seen here with his elder sister, Patricia, grew up with a supportive family, but they didn’t quite understand his Hollywood dream. So he took matters into his own hands by studying the careers of those who came before him. “I always wanted to go to Chouinard Art Institute,” he says. “Many of the designers in Hollywood had gone to that school back in the 1920s.” Originally enrolled at Pasadena City College, Mackie made it to Chouinard after winning a scholarship.
In 1961, Mackie left Chouinard after a year and worked as a sketch artist for Edith Head and Jean Louis. He was often at the NBC costume workroom, having outfits made. He was so excited he ended up decorating the workroom’s door with his drawings for Christmas.
Mackie first encountered Barbra Streisand in 1963, when she guested on The Judy Garland Show while he was working as an assistant costume designer. But their most significant collaboration would come on the set of 1975’s Funny Lady, where this photo was taken. “I stood behind her and I looked,” says Mackie. “She was quite amused by the fact that I was almost doing her facial pose.” She sent him this signed copy afterward.
Harry Langdon/Getty Images
“Diana Ross is one of the most gifted and talented and hardest to live with ladies I know,” says Mackie. They first collaborated on a television special featuring the Temptations and Ross’s group, the Supremes. “It was a big salute to Broadway, and it was so much fun to do,” says Mackie. “And I got an Emmy.” They worked together for decades, creating looks for the screen, the stage, and the red carpet. This nude-illusion bodysuit, worn on the cover of Ross’s 1970 album Everything Is Everything, has frequently been emulated but never quite duplicated in the years since.
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
“Bernadette Peters is my oldest friend in this business, in television especially,” says Mackie. “We had her on The Carol Burnett Show I don’t know how many times.” Here, the pair attend the 1986 Met Gala. In sharp contrast to today, he says, back then society types were still a bit stuffy about entertainers joining the event.
Fairchild Archive/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
Mackie’s first foray into consumer fashion was a collection for the lingerie brand Glydons in 1979. Predating the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show by decades, the extravagant runway show was staged at Studio 54.
“I’m not going to say any more about the Met Gala moment,” says Mackie, referring to the Marilyn Monroe dress that Kim Kardashian infamously rewore in 2022. Mackie was the sketch artist for the Jean Louis dress, which Monroe had worn to serenade President John F. Kennedy at his 45th birthday celebration in 1962. Mackie described Kardashian’s decision to unearth it as a “big mistake.”
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Madonna wasn’t a regular Mackie client, but the one time they crossed paths made pop culture history. Fashion editor Marina Schiano dolled up the Material Girl like Marilyn Monroe in a Mackie runway sample for a 1991 cover of Vanity Fair. On set, Madonna said she wanted something like it to wear to the Academy Awards, and Schiano told her to call up Mackie and ask him to make her something special. “She wore that dress all night—to perform, at the parties. We got a lot of publicity,” recalls Mackie.
“They were giving Joan a big to-do in San Francisco, where they were showing Land of the Pharaohs, in which she played an Egyptian queen of some sort,” says Mackie of this night with Joan Collins, circa 1981. “We were right in the heart of the gay district in San Francisco. That place was packed. And there she was, dressed like that, in a brand-new dress that I did for her.”
Harry Langdon/Getty Images
“I was on pussy patrol because Cher was stark naked except for some chains,” says Mackie of the heavy metal–inspired photo shoot for the singer’s 1979 rock album, Prisoner. “There were all these guys around with hardly anything on. She said, ‘Stay there so nobody will see anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, see anything? You’re naked!’ ”
The singer with Burnett on the show Cher in 1975.
Mackie did the costumes for all 11 seasons of The Carol Burnett Show, where he met Cher. “Sonny and Cher were on the very first season. We were repairing a beaded dress, and she said, ‘Someday I’d like to have a beaded dress.’ And I said, ‘Well, you could.’ She said, ‘No, we can’t afford it right now.’ I said, ‘When you’re ready, I’m ready.’ ” Here she is with Raquel Welch in 1975.
Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images
After donning Mackie at the Oscars in 1984—where she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, for Silkwood—Cher returned in 1986 to present the Best Supporting Actor award in one of the most famous creations by the designer. “I said to her, ‘Do you think maybe it’s too much outfit? You’re pulling focus from the actual winner of this award,’ ” recalls Mackie. “And she said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t know who it’ll be, but he’ll love it.’ ” Don Ameche ended up winning for Cocoon and did, in fact, love it: “He said, ‘I would not have my picture in every paper in the country with Cher if she hadn’t dressed like that.’ ”
PL Gould/Images/Getty Images
Mackie never really intended to show his work on the runway. “I wanted to design for movies, stage, and Broadway—anything other than fashion.” Still, so many private clients called on him that he began producing regular collections in the 1980s. How did the established New York fashion guard respond to Mackie’s arrival? “They were all very nice. Some of them made shirts that said HOLLYWOOD BOB on them.” Mackie celebrates after a show, circa 1986.
Mackie was the guest judge on the very first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, long before the show became an Emmy-winning machine. “I thought I’d never get out of there. Do you know how long it takes for drag queens to put on their makeup?” he asks. The show invited him back in 2023 to honor him with the first ever Giving Us Lifetime Achievement Award.
RuPaul has worn Mackie’s creations numerous times, including a silver version of the signature flame dress to the 1995 VH1 Fashion and Music Awards.
Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage
It’s not a surprise that the man recently responsible for styling some of Hollywood’s biggest superstars has a fondness for Mackie. “This dress was kind of a tribute to My Fair Lady from a Broadway collection that I did. Law Roach found it, and he was hanging on to it for something special.” Roach ended up putting it on then-client Anya Taylor-Joy for the 2020 premiere of her film Emma. “On her, it was amazing,” says Mackie.
Fairchild Archive/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
Iman, a frequent muse and presence on his runways, closed out his 1983 show in a towering bridal ensemble.
“Miley is one of those creatures who was born to be onstage,” says Mackie. “You can’t beat her—it’s amazing.” Cyrus’s team had reached out about pulling from Mackie’s archive for her 2024 Grammys performance of “Flowers,” and she eventually settled on a one-of-a-kind beaded fringe dress from a 2002 collection. The piece fit like a glove, and she performed her choreography in front of the designer. “She’s one of the Disney kids. They’re just so well-trained. They know about rehearsal, and they know about getting everything right—the lighting and the hair. There’s never a detail she’s not worried about.”
At the couture shows in Paris this past January, the most talked-about accessory was neither an It bag nor a statement shoe but an alien robot baby—a husky, sparkling tot constructed of electronic panels, pearl-covered circuit boards, wires, cables, and thousands of Swarovski crystals that Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry sent down the runway in the arms of model Maggie Maurer. It was made from what Roseberry referred to as “prehistoric technology”—flip phones, computer chips, and motherboards dating back to the days before going viral on social media was considered the ultimate measure of success.
Such wild creations are not surprising coming from Schiaparelli. The house’s founder was the mother of surrealist fashion, known for making gloves with claws on the fingertips, trimming boots with long fringes of monkey fur, and collaborating with Salvador Dalí to turn a shoe into a hat. Roseberry, since joining the house in 2019, has continued in that same vein. But this year, as other labels began to roll out their fall ready-to-wear collections, it became clear that he wasn’t the only designer turning eye-popping materials into major runway moments.
For his first collection at the helm of McQueen, Seán McGirr took inspiration from smashed phone screens to create a black, irregularly hemmed, rectilinear dress adorned with metal thread and ribbon work, glass beads, and laser-cut shards of clear Perspex that simulated broken glass. On the opposite end of the coziness spectrum, Jonathan Anderson opened his JW Anderson show with a sunny yellow top and skirt made from giant stuffed mohair tubes that functioned as comically oversize yarn—the design team used their arms as knitting needles, stitching the squishy cylinders directly onto a mannequin. The following month, in his role as creative director of the Spanish house Loewe, Anderson sent out a sparklier and even more labor-intensive creation: a voluminous, winged A-line shift dress with a caviar-beaded image of a Brussels Griffon dog sprawled on a grass lawn. The piece—which, on a model, had the effect of a walking tapestry—took 23 embroiderers 1,600 hours to make and was inspired, Anderson said, by antique high-society paintings featuring pets. A silk Balenciaga dress, meanwhile, was “frozen in time” through a process of wetting, bunching, and applying a crystallizing fixative, which makes it look perpetually windswept even when it’s standing still.
The use of unexpected and sometimes downright odd materials to make grand fashion statements is, of course, not a 2024 phenomenon. “These designers are building on a foundation that’s been laid by their predecessors,” says Daniel James Cole, an adjunct assistant professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and the coauthor of 2015’s The History of Modern Fashion. Cole sees today’s examples as “the natural progression” of designs by sartorial provocateurs like Martin Margiela, known for such innovations as the porcelain waistcoat (1989), which was made from strung-together smashed plates, and the wig coat (2009), a wearable accumulation of faux hair. But even before fashion was an industry, dressmakers were thinking beyond the loom. In 16th- and 17th-century India, for instance, beetle wings were used as proto-sequins, affixed to fabric to produce a shimmering effect. The practice was appropriated by the Brits during the colonial period, reaching peak trendiness in Victorian England, where women flaunted what were known as “elytra dresses”—white muslin gowns that sparkled with thousands of emerald green bug parts.
At other times, designers eschewed fabric out of scarcity rather than a desire for adornment. In Japan, says Matilda McQuaid, the acting curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, “they were always working with interesting materials, which I think goes back to the lack of resources they had as an island nation.” One example is a 19th-century “sweat protector,” an undergarment meant to absorb perspiration and allow for air flow, which was made from recycled paper ledger books. A century later, Anglo-American designer Charles James also had to get creative when available fabrics failed to meet his needs, says the fashion and textile historian, curator, and conservator Sarah Scaturro, who ran the Costume Conservation Laboratory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, in New York, and is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “He started laminating together multiple textiles, including nylon window screening, to get the buoyancy and volume he was desiring for pieces like his four-leaf clover gown.”
Scaturro points out that, over the course of history, innovations in fashion materials have often reflected developments in science and technology. James’s invention is one such example—nylon was first introduced in 1935, just as he was establishing his name. But the 1960s were truly the heyday of this phenomenon. The rapid rise of synthetics brought fads like “paper” dresses—which were usually some blend of cellulose and man-made fibers. First introduced as part of a marketing campaign by the Scott Paper Company, the idea was eventually picked up by various apparel makers and the likes of Andy Warhol, who did a dress printed with Campbell’s Soup cans. (Though it was touted as disposable, the paper dress’s influence on fashion was surprisingly durable: Three decades later, Hussein Chalayan used Tyvek paper sheets to make a jacket trimmed with red and blue airmail envelope stripes. Björk wore it on the cover of her 1995 album, Post.)
The advent of plastics gave rise to “space age” styles made from vinyl and PVC by European designers such as Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Paco Rabanne. In the U.S., Betsey Johnson attracted attention with a line of completely clear plastic dresses sold with adhesive-backed plastic shapes that could be stuck on the body to cover up private parts. To Cole, that experiment in customization brings to mind a current-season Alaïa coat with black-on-black dots that can be removed and repositioned for a different look with each wear. The technique, says Alaïa creative director Pieter Mulier, turns the garment into “a canvas for creativity.” Unlike Mulier’s design, however, Johnson’s frocks were definitely NSFW. “A big part of ’60s fashion was about shock value,” says Cole.
The pressure to raise eyebrows has only increased in the Internet age, when attention seems to be its own reward. For the Costume Institute Benefit at the Met this past May, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing transformed the singer Tyla into a human hourglass by encasing her in a gown made from sand and micro-crystal studs that he’d molded on a cast of her body. And who could forget Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress,” stitched together out of raw steak? Whether these attention-grabbing experiments qualify as fashion, or even clothing, feels beside the point. Time magazine deemed the meat dress the “top fashion statement” of the year in 2010, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame reportedly paid $6,000 to have it preserved.
McQueen by Seán McGirr dress.
Still, fashion experts aren’t ready to write off the most recent round of wild looks as mere meme-chasing stunts. Virginia Postrel, the author of the 2021 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, sees the tech-inspired pieces, in particular, as incisive cultural commentary. “These designers are calling attention to the materials, and that is a response, perhaps, to our dematerialized digital world,” she says. Scaturro sees a pushback against innovations like AI and fashion NFTs (virtual clothing solely for cyberspace) in Anderson’s work, which depends on the hands—and arms—of actual people to produce. “I love that they used their arms to put the knit onto the body,” she says of the JW Anderson yellow set. “The more technology impacts our lives, the more we need to keep in touch with what makes us human, and that’s handwork and craft.”
At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy did just that, most notably with a handmade coat of embroidered leather strips that were knotted for a shaggy, pom-pom–like effect. Marni creative director Francesco Risso was similarly inspired to imbue his collection with a personal touch: A series of stiff, high-necked dresses was hand-painted with layers upon layers of broad, heavily textured brushstrokes to look like abstract artworks. Especially after the pandemic, he says, members of his team found themselves craving a more “visceral approach to creation”—and so, this season, Risso decided to do away with visual reference points or overarching themes and instead spend “hours and hours” painting fabric in the atelier.
JW Anderson top and skirt.
“Fashion understood as a canvas, as a work of art, requires attention and sensoriality,” he says. “That’s what makes our work exciting day after day. We must protect our magic.”
Set design by Hella Keck at Webber Represents.
Produced by M.A.P Ltd.; Senior Producer: Elizabeth Cooper; Junior Producer: Saskia O’Keeffe; Production Manager: Matthieu Perdrizet; Photo Assistant: Bastien Santanoceto; Lab: Garage Film Lab; Fashion assistants: Martina Dotti, Manon Munoz; Set assistants: Nikki Lavollay, Celine Ruault.
The days of the “@[insert username] blocked you” page appear to be over. X owner Elon Musk announced a new change to allowing blocked users to see posts of the accounts that blocked them.
Blocked accounts still won’t be able to interact with those accounts but they’ll be able to see their posts. A source from X told the new blocked access feature is being implemented because users can already see and interact with accounts that have blocked them by switching to a non-blocked account.
Musk has wanted to disable the block feature on X for awhile now. More than a year ago, he first expressed (or technically, Twitter) except for direct messages. He wrote that blocking would become “deleted as a ‘feature’” as well as saying “It makes no sense.”
Last May, announced it would implement the blocked viewer change to the platform without including a solid implementation or rollout date. The post said the change would be implemented to give users with blocked accounts the ability to “identify and report any potential bad content that you previously could not view.”
Editor’s note, September 17, 2024: This piece was originally published on August 20, 2019, when the seventh episode of Break Stuff: The Story of Woodstock ’99 was released. To mark the recent 25th anniversary of the festival, The Ringer is resurfacing Break Stuff on its own dedicated Spotify feed.
In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment. There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.
Below is an excerpt from the seventh episode of Break Stuff. Find the series here, and check back each Tuesday and Thursday through September 19 for new episodes.
By early Sunday morning, on Woodstock ’99’s final day, many attendees were still trying to sleep off the previous night’s partying. But the media people covering the festival were up with the sun. In the harsh light of day, Griffiss Air Force Base looked like a wasteland.
“We got there before anybody had started playing, before anybody had left their tents,” says Dave Holmes, an on-air host for MTV in 1999. “I got a photograph from the stage of the entire lawn, the main viewing area, and it was just a sea of trash and one single person face down asleep. Not on a sleeping bag, just on the grass. It was just him and a thousand hot dog wrappers and red Solo cups and napkins for as far as the eye can see. And that is my enduring image of Woodstock ’99.”
Rob Sheffield, who covered the festival for Rolling Stone, was also up early that morning, surveying the damage.
“Everybody was really pretty used up and burned out by Sunday morning,” he says. “I hadn’t done a drug all weekend and I felt like the wrath of God so I can just imagine how people who were literally hungover were feeling.
“I slept on a pile of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes were a very good surface to sleep on because pizza boxes are white. And, uh, because they’re white, you could tell if they’d been urinated on or not. Which makes them very very useful if you’re looking for something to sleep on. Because every flat surface there had been so thoroughly urinated on.”
The music on Saturday culminated with some of the loudest and most aggressive bands of the entire festival: Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, and Limp Bizkit. Sunday, however, started on a much different foot musically. Wearing sunglasses and his signature black hat, Willie Nelson attempted to bring a little mellowness back to the festival.
“His set begins with ‘Whiskey River,’” Sheffield says. “And that was one of the great musical moments of the weekend, ’cause I just remember everybody really kind of breathing a sigh of relief. Willie is going to take care of us. Willie is the smart sane adult in the room at this point—not the promoters, definitely not the security people.”
But the laid-back feeling Nelson brought to Woodstock ’99 was short-lived. Not long after Willie Nelson left the stage in clouds of marijuana smoke, another smart, sane adult—Elvis Costello—came out.
Now, I love Elvis Costello. I am a rock critic, after all. I think he’s one of the great singer-songwriters of the ’70s and ’80s. But Woodstock ’99 wasn’t exactly his crowd. In the video, you can see people throwing water bottles at Elvis before he’s even reached the chorus of his first song.
“Elvis Costello, he really tried, but he was with an acoustic guitar and was playing for the most part for a non–Elvis Costello–cultist kind of crowd,” Sheffield says. “He began with a deep cut from Spike, ‘Pads, Paws, and Claws,’ and it was just a preposterously bad performance that was self-indulgent in a rock star kind of way. It was just really kind of abrasive and aggravating for people. … The collective angst level of the crowd got a little uglier.”
The bad feeling that Rob picked up on during Elvis Costello’s set was also felt by Jake Hafner, a 23-year-old Syracuse man hired to work for the festival’s Peace Patrol. Jake and his fellow guards were already struggling to contend with a depleted security force. By Sunday, many of Jake’s coworkers had already been fired; others simply quit once they were inside the base in order to join the party. But when Jake showed up for his shift on Sunday afternoon, the tension in the air was even sharper and more intense.
“It would get a little closer to the edge every night,” he says. “By Sunday when we showed up for work we all knew collectively that something was going to happen that night. It was just in the air. You could just feel it.”
That feeling in the air might have just been sheer exhaustion. Many people were operating on very little sleep by then. During the previous night, security guards had given up on policing the campgrounds where many attendees stayed.
“They had stopped sending ambulances or cops into that area because as soon as they would enter in there they would just get pelted with rocks and mud and everything. It was kind of like a no man’s zone,” Hafner says. “So they stopped sending people in there altogether. And I believe that was where a lot of the really bad stuff happened.”
One member of Woodstock’s medical team who did venture into the campgrounds on Sunday morning was Dave Konig, an EMT.
“When you went through the campground, a little bit it reminded you of a refugee camp from the movies,” Konig says. “That there had been some sort of big battle and there’s just trash all over, things burnt all over from the night before, from whatever campfires had gone on. So you just saw that breakdown of both the structure and civility amongst people. Yeah, it was definitely palpable Sunday morning. But yet people still went to the stages.”
While most attendees were still able to maintain some semblance of sanity, Dave does remember encountering a man in the campgrounds who had clearly gone off the deep end. I say “clearly” because the man was completely naked and seemed like he was hopped up on some combination of drugs. He was so out of it that he was destroying every tent in sight.
Finally, one of Dave’s coworkers decided to intervene.
“I remember this guy stepped up to, to, this naked man,” Konig says. “He gave this guy a right hook like Muhammad Ali. He just hooked him so hard. The guy’s head snapped to the right. And then … he was like the Terminator—it just slowly turned back and then he looked at the guy who had just hit him and he was just like, ‘Rawr!’ And … everybody just tackled him at that point. We tackled him. We got him restrained, sedated, and brought him in.”
The rising tension was getting to MTV’s Holmes. Festival attendees had been abusive to the music channel’s hosts and camera crews since Friday. Someone even threw a bottle of urine at TRL host Carson Daly.
By Sunday, the MTV contingent was thoroughly rattled.
“Even before the rioting—that’s a fun way to start a sentence, even before the rioting—it seemed like this was not going to be remembered as a successful festival,” says Holmes. “When we got back to the Air Force base the next day, all anybody was talking about was how scared they were the night before. A lot of the cameramen and the production people were up in this tower that, like, could have been brought down like a scene from Game of Thrones in the middle of the show. People were understandably a little nervous that Sunday.”
That tension boiled over during a press conference in the afternoon. Someone from MTV confronted Woodstock ’99 promoter John Scher over the festival’s failure to control the most violent attendees:
“MTV News was forced to get off of home base, we felt it was too dangerous,” the reporter said. There were people throwing glass bottles everywhere. MTV tower people had to be evacuated.
“Calm down,” Scher responded.
“In all of the concerts I’ve seen, I have never seen anything quite so out of hand as this. It was violent, it was dangerous, it was hostile,” the reporter continued. “My question for you is why did no one from either security or the organization walk out to Fred Durst and say, ‘Man, can you ask these kids to chill?’ I talked to kids later who were petrified out there.”
The confrontation was a rare sour note for Scher at that point in the festival. As far as he and other organizers were concerned, Woodstock ’99 was going along swimmingly. All of the tensions that seemed obvious to those on the ground weren’t apparent to the people running the festival.
“Right after that, I took a walk from the press tent to the stage and this woman journalist, I can’t remember her name, but she walked and said, ‘Can we talk?’” Scher says now. “And at one point we stopped and she said, ‘This is unbelievable. This is the greatest thing. If you put this many people at any other kind of event, it never would have gone that well.’ She said it was just amazing. And then it all blew up over the next couple of hours.”
It turns out that the expectations were way out of whack. What was actually in the works was a candlelight vigil organized by an anti-gun group. By Sunday afternoon, they were handing out candles to attendees.
“And the peace candles became the kindling for the fires that became part of the riot,” says Brian Hiatt, a journalist who covered Woodstock ’99 and later did a yearlong investigation into the festival.
In his reporting, Hiatt discovered that attendees had been setting fires all over the grounds throughout the weekend. And yet nobody ever seemed to get in trouble for it.
“As they put out those fires, the attendees were already threatening to make more fire,” Hiatt says. “They said, ‘We’ll burn anything.’ The threats were, ‘You can’t stop us. If you stop us, it’ll start somewhere else.’”
As late afternoon turned into early evening, the crowd grew increasingly disgruntled and unruly. And then, one of the most popular rock bands of the era showed up on stage: Creed. At Woodstock ’99, they were received like rock royalty.
However, Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti remembers Woodstock ’99 as kind of a terrifying experience.
“Back then in ’99, we’d only been kind of a professional touring band for about two years, so I didn’t have the stage confidence that I have now,” he says. “So it was I just remember it being such a large and intimidating type of setting.”
Soon after Creed left the stage, Woodstock ’99 would descend into riots. But Tremonti can’t recall feeling any premonitions. After Creed it was time for that night’s big headliner—the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band was riding high again that summer after years of inaction. The album Californication,which became the band’s best-selling record, came out the previous month.
Their performance was supposed to mark the festival’s triumphant climax. And the band was primed for the decadent atmosphere. No one more than Flea, who came out wearing his bass guitar … and no clothes.
Getty Images
“It seemed like they were playing very well,” Sheffield says. “It was really a beautiful Chili Peppers set. They were coming off Californication. They had the best songs of their career, and they were playing at the peak of their career. So it’s weirdly incongruous. That’s when the violence and the crowd got really, really ugly.”
After playing for about an hour, the Chili Peppers left the stage. Before they could come back for their planned encore, the chasm between the stage and the audience suddenly collapsed. John Scher himself came out to warn the audience.
“As you can see, if you look behind you, we have a bit of a problem,” he said.
The problem was a bonfire raging on the horizon. Actually, the word “bonfire” doesn’t do justice to this wild inferno. In a video posted on YouTube, it looks like a small cabin that’s been totally engulfed in flames. But in the chaotic context of Woodstock ’99, it didn’t seem out of place at first.
Even with part of the festival now on fire, the show didn’t immediately end. When the Chili Peppers came back out, singer Anthony Kiedis commented sardonically on the situation.
“Holy shit, it’s Apocalypse Now out there. Make way for the fire trucks!” he said
And then they proceeded to play a cover of “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix. I think that this was supposed to be part of the festival’s grand finale—a callback to one of the biggest stars of the original festival, coupled with the candlelight vigil that was now a full-on blaze.
Celine by Hedi Slimane coat, bag, and boots; stylist’s own turtleneck.
Dior top and skirt; stylist’s own tights.
Prada dress, cuff, bag, and shoes.
Prada coat, cuff, bag, and shoes.
Louis Vuitton dress, mittens, and shoes.
Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, blouse, skirt, bag, and shoes.
Celine by Hedi Slimane coat, bag, and boots; stylist’s own turtleneck.
Miu Miu dress, necklace, gloves, and bag.
Prada coat, cuff, and bag.
Marc Jacobs peacoat, skirt, and shoes; stylist’s own tights.
Marc Jacobs top, shorts, and shoes.
Rianne Van Rompaey wears a Prada coat, cuff, bag, and shoes.
Hair by Julien d’Ys at L’Atelier NYC; makeup by Francelle Daly for Love+Craft+Beauty at 2B Management; manicure by Megumi Yamamoto for Chanel at Susan Price NYC. Model: Rianne Van Rompaey at DNA Model Management. Casting by Piergiorgio Del Moro and Samuel Ellis Scheinman at DM Casting.
Extras: Connor Reavely, Max Zeman. Produced by Farago Projects; Executive Producer: Zara Walsh; Producer: Anna Blundell; Production Coordinator: Reilly Hail; Location Manager: Matthew Dipple; Photo Assistants: Cecilia Byrne, Alec Vierra; Lab: Rapid Eye; Retouching: Simon Thistle; Fashion assistant: Conor Manning; Hair assistant: Shinya Nakagawa; Makeup assistant: Madrona Redhawk; Production assistants: Gregory Gabb, Michael Vick, Corryn Diemer, Thomas Polcaster, Alan Bell; Tailor: Hailey Desjardins.
Looking back on her initial resistance to creating clothes for women, former menswear designer Colleen Allen laughs. When she was working at The Row, she says, “they asked me to design women’s, and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that!’ I was very rigid. I felt like everything had been said in women’s and there was more to say in men’s. But, eventually, there was an itch at the back of my brain. I realized that there were ideas I wanted to explore.”
Those ideas—identity, spirituality, community—culminated in February in the 28-year-old designer’s New York Fashion Week debut, an imaginatively conceived, tenderly executed exploration of femininity anchored by that often maligned archetype: the witch. It was while she was researching how witches have been portrayed over the centuries, she says, that “something clicked for me.”
Models (from left) MJ Herrera, Ayak Veronica, Serena Wilson, Sylke Golding, and JoAni Johnson wear Colleen Allen clothing and accessories.
Allen, who is now based in Brooklyn, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Her grandmother, a quilter, taught her to sew, and weekend classes in illustration and clothing construction—one instructor was Shane Gabier, of Creatures of the Wind—gave her the foundation to seriously pursue becoming a fashion designer. She arrived at Parsons School of Design in 2014 but headed to Central Saint Martins, in London, for what was supposed to be a junior year abroad. She liked it so much that she persuaded the administration to let her stay on. Allen credits the combination of the two schools’ approaches—rigorous technical training at Parsons, and a studio-based format that stresses research and collaboration at Saint Martins—with giving her a solid footing in both design and production.
Three years at The Row further honed these skills. Once she started pondering womenswear, she quit, took on a few freelance design gigs, and began the process of turning her mental catalog of images and thoughts into a coherent statement. An online lecture by the art historian Susan Aberth led her to the tarot deck of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, an English beauty who, in 1937, horrified her straitlaced family by running away to France with the painter and sculptor Max Ernst, who was not only married but also 26 years her elder. Brightly colored and shining with silver and gold leaf, Carrington’s cards, first created in 1955, depict feminine energy that is fecund and irrepressible: Her Empress is Medusa-haired and pregnant; her Hanged Man and the Devil have androgynous features. Carrington based her imagery in part on the practice of witchcraft in Mexico, where she spent most of her life, and on the 19th-century secret society Golden Dawn Order, from which Wicca takes inspiration.
Ayak Veronica wears a Colleen Allen dress and cap.
Allen’s interpretation of the witch is less esoteric and more immediately relevant: a woman who is independent and self-empowered. This translates into clothes that reject the bourgeois stereotypes that have bedeviled fashion recently. There are ruffled pantalettes, which sound jokey but aren’t. The collection’s standout piece is a lightly fitted jacket that resembles an intricately seamed Victorian bodice. It fastens with silver hooks and eyes, a nod to a designer whose work Allen admires: Claire McCardell, who loved the subversive appeal of visible hardware. The ruffled shorts are in cotton, while the jacket is made from polar fleece, a fabric that the forward-looking McCardell, who died in 1958, would surely have embraced. The latter piece was inspired by the garb of storybook witches—call it Salem chic—and by a trip to the Scottish Highlands, where Allen was struck by the disparity between the ancient, epic grandeur of the landscape and her 21st-century hiking gear. Wear the jacket and shorts together, and you have a renegade suit that is both practical and distinctive—and, as Allen puts it, gives you “a warm feeling, like there’s a ritualistic presence as you’re walking around doing your everyday thing.”
Less specifically witchy are an orange velvet cape that falls in deep folds from the shoulder and a magenta wrap-and-tie wool jersey top that swaddles the torso. Both, however, are linked to Allen’s interest in religious rites. Orange is associated with spiritual awareness; think of the robes of Buddhist and Hindu monks. Allen conceived of the top after observing young mothers with their babies bundled tightly against them at a Shinto shrine in Japan. “Being held that way, in a spiritual place, was really powerful,” she says. “Plus, I like having a more personal relationship with your clothes than just when you put something on.”
Ayak Veronica and Golding wear Colleen Allen clothing and accessories.
But it’s the character of the witch that animates this collection, and Allen feels that it’s time to celebrate her power. In Jungian psychology, the witch represents the shadow self, the appetites and instincts that we prefer not to acknowledge: rage, sadness, greed, loneliness. It’s a big concept—but, at its best, fashion takes inarticulate ideas and gives them physical expression. “What you put on has transformative power,” Allen says. “I wanted to access that version of myself—the witch—embody it, and then create that space for other women.” For a designer who once thought she had nothing to say about womenswear, it’s the start of a provocative conversation.
Hair by Junya Nakashima for Oribe at Streeters; Makeup by Marco Castro AMAZONICOIL at Born Artists; Models: Ayak Veronica at New York Models, JoAni Johnson at The 11:14 Agency, MJ Herrera at One Management, Serena Wilson at The Society Management, Sylke Golding at Muse Model Management; Casting by DM Casting; Casting Assistants: Brandon Contreras, Evagria Sergeeva; Produced by Photobomb Productions; Senior Creative Producer: Kevin Warner; Project Manager: Nick Lambrakis; Photo Assistants: Mark Jayson Quines, Ashley McLean; Fashion Assistant: Celeste Roh; Hair Assistants: Christine Moore, Vincent Tobias; Makeup Assistants: Shoko Kodama, Arias Roybal; Tailor: Lindsay Wright; Special Thanks to NYC Park Isham Park & Bruce’s Garden.
For survivors of IBSA, this empty announcement is a slap in the face. Many survivors, including myself, have experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get justice for these types of offences. Despite the existing laws, the criminal justice system often fails to take these cases seriously. The process is confusing, support services are lacking, and police often don’t take survivors seriously.
In response to this announcement, many survivors have voiced their frustrations, with some even writing an open letter to the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT). The consensus is clear: this announcement is not an improvement. It does nothing to address the systemic failures in the handling of image-based sexual abuse. It offers no additional protections, no better support services, and no new tools for survivors to pursue justice. This isn’t a meaningful change—it’s lip service.
If the government truly cared about tackling IBSA and making the internet a safer place for women and girls, it would go beyond announcing meaningless administrative changes and address the core issues that allow these abuses to continue.
First, there needs to be significant investment in survivor support. Legal aid, counselling services, and survivor advocacy are all woefully underfunded.
Second, the government should focus on prevention. Educational campaigns about consent, respect, and the consequences of IBSA should be rolled out across schools and online platforms. Media literacy programs are crucial to raising awareness and helping individuals, particularly young people, understand the harmful effects of sharing non-consensual images.
The UK government’s announcement about reclassifying IBSA as a priority offence is awful, as someone who has experienced IBSA and seen the devastating effects it has on women, I’m saddened and angry that it’s being used as lip service. It is a routine administrative procedure being spun as a significant new measure, designed to boost public perception without delivering any real change.
Survivors of image-based sexual abuse deserve far better than this. If the government truly wants to tackle online abuse, it needs to go beyond PR stunts and take meaningful action—by providing more support for survivors, and focusing on preventing these offences in the first place.
Find out more about GLAMOUR’s campaign in partnership with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), Not Your Porn and Professor Clare McGlynn, demanding that the government introduces a dedicated, comprehensive Image-Based Abuse law to protect women and girls.
Revenge Porn Helpline provides advice, guidance and support to victims of intimate image-based abuse over the age of 18 who live in the UK. You can call them on 0345 6000 459.
IT is the first far-right party to win German state elections since the Nazis – and the success of Alternative for Germany is down to younger supporters.
Paramedic Severin Kohler says that it is now trendy among Generation Z TikTokers to back the organisation known as AfD, which is led in the state of Thuringia by a man who has been labelled a “fascist”.
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AfD fans Severin Kohler and Carolin LichtenheldCredit: Paul Edwards
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AfD MP Torben Braga — who, curiously for a German anti-immigration party, was born in Brazil and is of Brazilian and Welsh ancestryCredit: Paul Edwards
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Professor Reinhard Schramm, who lost 20 close family to the Nazi extermination camps, has had death threats and bullets sent to him in the postCredit: Paul Edwards
Severin, 28, a leader of the party’s youth wing Junge Alternative, told me: “It’s a matter of a rebellion against their parents. Being from the right is punk now.”
Almost 40 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old voters backed the AfD in Thuringia, central Germany, last week. In neighbouring Saxony, 31 per cent did the same.
Yet the local branches of the party in the two states have been classified as “right-wing extremist” by the nation’s domestic intelligence agency.
On the Instagram page of Carolin Lichtenheld, who leads Thuringia’s Junge Alternative, the 21-year-old trainee pharmacist is shown brndishing a megaphone at a rally, with the caption: “Ready to fight for the preservation of our homeland and for our future. We are the youth who are ready to resist a woke society.”
The image is hashtagged with the word “reconquista” — a reference to the recapture by Christian kings of Spain and Portugal from the Muslim Moors.
Felix Steiner, from German far-right monitoring group Mobile Consulting, agrees that young voters are attracted to the AfD.
The activist told The Sun: “Almost no other party is so active on social media platforms, especially TikTok. The message is, ‘Young people, come to us. We are the next movement’.”
Youth campaigner Severin wears a T-shirt bearing the name Bjorn Hocke — the AfD’s leader in Thuringia who has twice been convicted this year of using Nazi slogans.
Former history teacher Hocke harnessed the power of TikTok to target the youth vote during the election.
Incredible story of Nazi hunter and holocaust refugee
In one post he leads a cavalcade of motorcyclists riding models made by Simson — a brand associated with national pride by the far right — in the old Communist East Germany.
Yet critics say that behind Hocke’s glossy social media campaigning is a man who is a political “danger”.
In 2019 a court in Thuringia ruled it was not libellous to call Hocke a “fascist” as the opinion had a “verifiable, factual basis”.
Thin-lipped and greying, Hocke once described Berlin’sHolocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” and demanded a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s culture of remembrance.
The father-of-four once spoke of the Germans “longing for a historical figure” who would “heal the wounds of the people”.
Ulrike Grosse-Rothig, leader of Thuringia’s left-wing Die Linke party, told The Sun: “Hocke is a die-hard fascist. He’s a danger for German society, its voters and to democracy.”
Former AfD Thuringia MP Oskar Helmerich has called Hocke “a dangerous man”.
Little wonder Thuringia’s small Jewish community has been fearful.
Professor Reinhard Schramm, who lost 20 close family to the Nazi extermination camps, has had death threats and bullets sent to him in the post from unknown sources.
Speaking at a synagogue in Thuringia’s largest city Erfurt, the 80-year-old Holocaust survivor told me: “The Jewish community is insecure and some are afraid. They are quite allergically against the AfD. This is not a normal party.”
Of Hocke’s demand for a “180- degree turn” in Germany’s culture of remembrance, the grandfather-of-three says: “So does this mean that I am not supposed to speak about my grandmother who was gassed to death in a German gas chamber?”
‘Some are afraid’
Severin insists the AfD is “against political violence”, adding: “We don’t have anything in common with people sending bullets to synagogues.”
The AfD won Thuringia — a largely rural state in central Germany — with just under 33 per cent of the vote.
It’s the latest European convulsion of the far right which has seen rampaging thugs attempt to torch migrant hotels in Britain and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally topping parliamentary elections in France.
In Germany — as elsewhere — the touchstone issue has been immigration.
Days before the Thuringia vote, a Syrian asylum seeker went on a knife rampage, killing three in the west German city of Solingen.
It emerged that the man — linked to Islamic State — had previously had his claim for asylum turned down but he had not been deported because the authorities could not find him.
Germany’s lame duck premier Olaf Scholz promised to speed up deportations and other mainstream parties followed suit with tough talk on immigration, including the conservative Christian Democratic Union.
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Andreas Buhl, a Thuringian MP for Merkel’s CDU, concedes that the former Chancellor’s open border policy was wrongCredit: Paul Edwards
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A CDU poster calling to stop illegal migrationCredit: Paul Edwards
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An anti-multicultural bannerCredit: Paul Edwards
Yesterday, it was reported that Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser has told the EU that controls will be brought in on all the country’s land borders, to deal with the “continuing burden” of migration and “Islamist terrorism”.
Britain, where populists Reform won four million votes at the General Election, will be watching whether moves towards the AfD’s turf will win back voters.
As well as a hardline stance on immigration, the AfD is also against what it says are over-zealous green policies, and it wants to halt weapons supplies to Ukraine.
At the Thuringian parliament in Erfurt, I met key Hocke lieutenant Torben Braga — who, curiously for a German anti-immigration party, was born in Brazil and is of Brazilian and Welsh ancestry.
The 33-year-old Thuringia MP says: “Bjorn Hocke doesn’t have a single fascist vein in his body.”
‘Political firewall’
Of his boss’s infamous “shame” reference to the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Braga says he meant it was “a shameful part of our history”.
Braga believes the security services are monitoring him and suggests “provocateurs” from those agencies were behind the “two or three cases” of people doing the Hitler salute at a recent rally in Erfurt.
Picturesque Erfurt is, at first glance, perhaps an unlikely setting for a far-right upsurge. Half-timbered town houses crowd flower-bedecked medieval squares where tourists enjoy beers on its many restaurant terraces.
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A far-right mob gather at a demonstration in Solingen last monthCredit: EPA
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Far-right AfD supporters wave German flags, including one adorned with an Iron CrossCredit: Getty
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The AfD party’s slick TikTok videosCredit: tiktok/@afd
This summer the England squad had their Euro 2024 training base a short drive away and Three Lions star Jude Bellingham was spotted having coffee in the city of 215,000.
Yet Thuringia has seen too much history in the 20th century.
After the Americans liberated Thuringia, it fell under Soviet control.
From 1949 to 1990 it was part of the Communist state of East Germany.
Post-German reunification, Thuringia and other eastern states struggled economically, with many youngsters heading to western Germany.
Immigration became a key political battleground after conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to a million refugees in 2015 and 2016.
Last year around 334,000 people claimed asylum in Germany — more than France and Spain combined. In the UK the figure was just under 85,000 people.
The AfD — formed in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party — has seen its fortunes rise as it hammered home its anti-immigration stance.
No other party is so active on social media platforms, especially TikTok.The AfD post pictures of demonstrations. The message is: ‘Young people come to us. We are the next movement’
It called for a ban on burqas, minarets, and call to prayer using the slogan, “Islam is not a part of Germany” in 2016.
In Thuringia, Hocke led a radical AfD faction called The Wing, deemed beyond the pale even by many in his own party.
Andreas Buhl, a Thuringian MP for Merkel’s CDU, concedes that the former Chancellor’s open border policy was wrong.
He told me: “In hindsight, it should have been clearer that you can also push people back at the border who have already entered another European country.”
He pledged, as other mainstream parties have, not to work with the AfD, creating a political firewall likely to block it from taking power.
It raises the spectre that those who voted for it may come to believe that democracy is failing them.
But anti-far-right activist Felix Steiner says only around half of AfD supporters are wedded to their hardline doctrines, with the rest supporting them as a protest vote.
He added: “The AfD result could be halved if voters were satisfied with other parties’ policies.”
The fight for the political soul of Germany’s Generation Z goes on.
It’s a battle of ideas that may be won or lost on the feeds of TikTok and Instagram.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple on Monday is set to unveil its iPhone 16 lineup, focusing on how its flagship device’s features have been infused with artificial intelligence, rather than its usual emphasis on hardware upgrades.
The event at the tech giant’s Apple Park headquarters at 10 a.m. PDT (1700 GMT) follows its developer conference in June during which the company unveiled Apple Intelligence, its take on generative AI that can conjure text, images and other content on command.
It had also showed off an improved version of voice assistant Siri, featuring an integration with ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
The refresh comes as iPhones face stiff competition from Huawei in China, where consumers are hankering for more AI features and are willing to pay for them. Huawei itself has scheduled its own product announcement mere hours after Apple’s event.
Apple Intelligence must be approved by Beijing in order to be released in the Chinese market. In July, OpenAI blocked access to ChatGPT in China, a move that could impact the chatbot’s integration into Siri.
“The Chinese market is hungrier for AI features than the U.S. market,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. “It will be very difficult to bring it to China immediately, so they’ll be going off the merits of the hardware.”
IPhones accounted for more than half of Apple’s $383 billion sales last year, and the new devices are an important update for the Cupertino, California-based company that is betting the AI feature will drive consumers to upgrade amid a slowdown in iPhone sales.
In China, Apple aggressively slashed prices earlier this year, prompted by government restrictions and increased domestic competition.
The iPhone 16 lineup will be the first Apple smartphones designed around these AI features, though those will also be available on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, the top-end versions of the previous-generation devices. New versions of the Apple Watch and AirPods are also expected.
“The software side, and how Apple frames it, is the biggest question,” said Bajarin. “Investors will look for if it’s compelling enough to have a larger than normal upgrade cycle.”
Rivals including Alphabet’s Google are also showcasing AI features to try to upend Apple’s dominance in the high-end smartphone market.
Google, developer of the Android operating system which competes with Apple’s iOS, traditionally announced its Pixel smartphones in the autumn. This year, it pushed the event to August ahead of Apple’s announcement.
Google focused on AI features including Gemini Live, which allows users to hold live voice conversations with a digital assistant. Many of the AI features Google announced were also rolled out to the Android-based devices made by manufacturers such as Samsung and Motorola.
“The question is who is going to be the first to combine a truly personal AI assistant with knowledge and information that is accurate and personalized,” said Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst for TECHnalysis Research.
Apple has so far shared a timeline for the release of Apple Intelligence only in the United States, where it is slated to launch on compatible devices in the autumn.
In June, one week after its developer conference, Apple said it would delay the release in Europe due to European Union tech rules.
(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco, Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis)
Rare is the fashion model whose career has legs as long as her own. For every Carmen Dell’Orefice, Naomi Campbell, or Kate Moss, there are thousands who disappear—none, perhaps, more effectively than Iria Leino. Along with Bettina and Dovima, the Finnish American beauty was one of the first models to go by a single name; then, in 1964, she fled fashion forever.
Now Leino is having a comeback, not as a model of brief renown in Europe, but as the artist she was in New York. This month, two years after her death, at 90, from leukemia, Harper’s gallery in New York is introducing that Leino: an obsessive painter of luminous abstractions with only one solo U.S. show to her credit.
That show was in 1966.
A portrait of Iria Leino by Georges Saad, c. 1961.
Courtesy Archives of the Iria Leino Trust.
Probably no one in the art world today remembers the exhibition or its venue, the Panoras Gallery, a long defunct midtown emporium where a graduate student named Donald Judd had debuted as a painter 10 years prior. But Leino’s exhibition did not go unheeded: It brought her press, at least one big sale—to the fashion designer and art collector Larry Aldrich—and, to top it all off, a spot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Leino with her painting Garden of Eden, c. 1980.
Courtesy of Harper’s Gallery
Courtesy of Harper’s Gallery
The number of visual artists invited onto late-night television in those days was about the same as it is now: almost none, unless they were media hounds like Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, or painted themselves in the nude at the age of 80, as did Alice Neel. But instead of capitalizing on that acclaim, Leino went into seclusion. After a freak accident in 1968 caused a head injury that required brain surgery, she converted to Buddhism, to which she had initially been introduced by “Gurudev,” the populist Sri Swami Satchidananda. In her will, she named the two yoga centers he founded, in New York and Virginia, her only beneficiaries.
“She went to Integral Yoga Institute and sat in the back of a room with a hundred people,” says Robert Saasto, an attorney and the executor of her estate. “She felt she had an out-of-body experience with the swami, eyeball to eyeball, and she was hooked.”
Leino remained devoted to painting, however, even though she barely scraped by. Her refusal to submit to a patriarchal system that largely discounted women contributed to her obscurity. In the early 1980s, she even sent the power dealer Leo Castelli packing, and rarely permitted anyone to see her work again. “She was very ‘my way or the highway,’ ” says Varpu Sihvonen, a Finnish journalist who worked in New York and is one of the few people alive to have known the artist well. “Very, very private. If I asked to see her paintings, she would say, ‘Yes, but not now.’ That was her way of saying no.”
Leino in Paris during her modeling days, c. 1963.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Iria Leino Trust
Harper Levine is saying yes. A bookseller and art dealer who operates a hybrid gallery and rare bookstore in East Hampton, as well as two galleries in Manhattan, he is showing canvases from Leino’s “Color Field” and “Buddhist Rain” series, two distinct bodies of work that she made in the late 1960s and early ’70s, respectively. “Those paintings spoke to me,” he says. “Their strangeness makes them compelling, and this was a great opportunity to bring what I believe is a historically important voice into the current dialogue around painting.”
Nonetheless, it’s a risky proposition for a contemporary dealer to introduce a deceased 20th-century modernist with no track record to a skittish election-year market. “I think there’s a real hunger among collectors for artists who were forgotten or never known,” Levine counters. As proof, he cites Vivian Springford, an American contemporary of Leino’s who fell by the wayside; today her abstractions sell at auction for six figures. Another case is the recent runaway success of the late Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong.
Levine did not find his way to Leino on his own. He got wind of her through Peter Hastings Falk, an art historian who is writing a critical biography about her. Falk has rather heroically cataloged the hundreds of unseen paintings that Leino left in her dusty SoHo loft, along with voluminous diaries and letters in Finnish, English, and French that he is still deciphering.
Courtesy of Harper’s Gallery
A fabric design Leino created for Marimekko, 1964–65.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Iria Leino Trust
Falk has made a specialty of resurrecting neglected artists and features them in his online magazine, Discoveries in American Art—one reason Saasto gave him the job. The lawyer describes Leino’s loft as “stacked with art everywhere, and all this cardboard! You could hardly walk. I went there with the head of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. He said three things were needed to make any artist successful: One was a lot of art; we had that. Second, it had to be unique. And third, we’d need a good story—and her story is beyond.”
Born Taiteilija Irja Leino in Helsinki, Leino graduated from the city’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955 with a degree in fashion design. One mentor was Tapio Wirkkala, the acclaimed Finnish designer of glassware, stoneware, and furniture. He supported Leino’s application to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and over two years there, she studied painting while reporting on the latest couture for Finnish magazines and newspapers.
At just five feet six, Leino was not an obvious candidate for modeling, but her broad shoulders, Nordic complexion, and high cheekbones attracted Madame Grès; the designer was soon outflanked by a young Karl Lagerfeld, who persuaded his boss, Pierre Balmain, to hire her. Soon Leino was walking for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent. Magazine editors came calling. So did photographers such as Claire Aho, a Finnish groundbreaker in color photography, and the erotically inclined Jean Clemmer, Dalí’s frequent collaborator. By 1960, Leino had enough money to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and a farmhouse in Taormina, Sicily, her summer retreat.
Leino at work on a large “Color Field” painting in her New York loft, 1968.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Iria Leino Trust
It wasn’t all easy, though. The constant reminders to be vigilant about her weight led Leino, who already had a compulsive nature, to anorexia and bulimia. When Saint Laurent remarked that her hourglass figure was too “sexy,” or voluptuous, she resolved to become “the thinnest girl in Paris.” Her eating disorders sent her deeper into a depression that had begun with the death of the woman who raised her. (Her mother, who had not been married to her father, died when Leino was 6.)
She longed for an escape into art. Deluding herself into believing that a move to New York would cure her, she packed up her wardrobe and her easel and left Paris in 1964. With help from an unnamed patron—possibly Wirkkala—she sublet an Upper East Side apartment and began classes at the Art Students League on a scholarship. Her favorite teacher was the irascible (and still active) Larry Poons, then widely celebrated for his vibrant “dot” paintings. (In 2018, he reemerged as the poignant 80-year-old star of The Price of Everything, a documentary on HBO about the contemporary art market.) “All I remember about Iria,” he says, “is that hers was a very lively class, and that she was attractive but very quiet.”
Though barely conversant in English, Leino learned of artists colonizing raw, high-ceilinged lofts in SoHo and snagged a 4,000-square-foot space on the sixth floor of a cast-iron building that had no elevator. The rent was $650 a month—or $350 with the subsidy she received from a foundation. New York was Fun City then, and Leino was attending “tie-only” parties with the best of the art crowd, never as short of boyfriends as she was of money.
Courtesy of Harper’s Gallery
For years, her only income came from leasing her apartment in Paris—a collaboration with Marimekko for the use of her designs did not pan out—but still she continued to maintain that she didn’t need to exhibit or promote her paintings. “When the time is right,” she told Sihvonen, “people will come to me.” What money she had went into making her art, which at first entailed her staining unprimed canvas, Morris Louis– and Helen Frankenthaler–style, by pouring paint. Later on, she made what Falk describes as a thick gruel of powdered pigment and an acrylic emulsion that she slathered on canvas with a trowel, her hands, or a stucco applicator, sometimes embedding the surface with stones. (She also seems to have anticipated Gerhard Richter’s use of a squeegee.) Throughout, she grew increasingly withdrawn—something that, for Levine, seems supremely ironic. As he points out, “Iria repudiated the New York art world while living at its center.”
In her diaries, she noted every morsel of her vegetarian diet. “She loved Chinese food,” Sihvonen says. “Especially tofu. She didn’t drink coffee—only green tea or water. No alcohol or even fruit juice. But she always wore high heels, even at home. In her last years, she always wore black and purple, and I never saw her without makeup.” Nor did a day go by without the meditations she had learned from Gurudev. “She would repeat and repeat a chant, and then start painting and be in another world,” says Saasto, one of the rare people who have ever watched her work. She did continue to visit galleries and attract men—an affair with the married painter Stanley Boxer went on for years—but she never wed anyone. “I love to love,” she confessed, “but I’m saving my energy for painting.”
Leino in a modeling shot, c. 1963.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Iria Leino Trust
The fashion pendulum briefly swung her way again in 2000, when the streetwise Moroccan French designer Claude Sabbah opened a store in NoLIta selling avant-garde, made-to-order clothes that were catnip for hip-hop stars such as Lauryn Hill and Eve, as well as downtown style cognoscenti. The artist Laurie Simmons still has her silk camouflage suit overlaid with fishnet. “My first-ever piece of couture!” she declares.
“Iria came to the opening of Da House of Sabbah,” the designer says. “I felt blessed! She was very modern, even at her age—68—and was not only a friend but a muse who wore many outfits of mine.” When he asked her to return to the catwalk for a Fashion Week show of young designers, she did not hesitate to don the dramatic black satin and silk spandex ensemble he’d made for her: voluminous harem pants, a boatneck blouse, a signature do-rag cap—and, of course, spike-heeled black boots. “It was quite shocking to be back on the stage after all these years,” she remarked in a journal recovered by Falk. “But my love to be the center of attention on the stage has not disappeared.”
Sihvonen says that Leino hoped Sabbah would revive her modeling career and felt abandoned when he returned to Paris in 2004. “An angel of integrity” is the way he remembers Leino. “A person gifted to life! I hope she gets the recognition she deserves.”
Leino with pastel works from her “Buddhist Rain” series, 1972.
Oh my god!” exclaimed Zoë Kravitz. She was about to change clothes at the W photo shoot when a brightly colored lizard crawled into a corner of the dressing room. The shoot was happening in a modernist 1970s house high in the canyons of Beverly Hills, and somehow the reptile had decided to visit. “Did he come through the window?” joked Kravitz. She was dressed in a short Saint Laurent cream-colored slipdress, and her hair was slicked back into a tight bun. Although Kravitz is only five feet two, she has a commanding presence and seems taller. She is simultaneously funny, curious, and absolutely certain about her beliefs, on every subject from politics to fashion to art. People close to her were not surprised that she wanted to direct a movie. “Everyone said, ‘You are a control freak, and you’re super bossy—directing is perfect for you,’” Kravitz told me, as she leaned into the carpet where the lizard had been.
Kravitz’s debut film, which she cowrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, is called Blink Twice (the original title was Pussy Island, but that name proved too controversial). It centers on Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, a young woman who falls under the spell of a handsome tycoon played by Channing Tatum, who happens to be Kravitz’s real-life fiancé. He brings Frida and her friend to his private island, which at first seems like a dream come true—the meals are spectacular, the setting is stunning, and the zillionaire has chosen Frida above all other women to be his lover. But almost immediately, bizarre, violent, and mysterious events start taking place.
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello slipdress, bracelets, and shoes.
Kravitz was inspired to write Blink Twice by the Me Too movement, which was shocked into life by the horrific behavior of Harvey Weinstein. “In the summer of 2017, I had come to a place of frustration with society and culture power dynamics,” she explained. “I went home one day after talking to a friend, and I wrote down the original title of the film: Pussy Island. Then—when was it? October, I think, when everything happened with Har—actually, I don’t want to say his name. I don’t want to give him any power.”
Initially, Kravitz wrote a short, stream-of-consciousness story, and that, over four years, morphed into the script. Interestingly, the film still has a kind of surrealist, experimental quality—the distinction between reality and fantasy is often unclear. “This was something that needed to come out,” Kravitz recalled. “I wanted this thriller to be bright and beautiful—so beautiful that it was almost oppressive. I was interested in a world that is seductive and vibrant and then turns into something terrifying. The sun, if you’re in it too long, burns you. If you eat too much, you feel sick. The thing that you think you want can be the thing that destroys you.” And yes, there’s a reptile in the film. “I think this lizard showing up today is a sign,” said Kravitz. “I am going to see this as a lucky thing—the universe sent him.”
Jacquemus dress, skirt, headscarf, belt, and shoes; Jessica McCormack drop earrings and ring (both throughout).
Although she’s only 35, there have been many distinct chapters in Kravitz’s life. She’s been through the famous-child phase (her parents are the actor Lisa Bonet and the musician Lenny Kravitz) and the superhero phase (she was both Angel Salvadore, who sprouted beautiful gossamer wings in X-Men: First Class, and a wonderfully sly and sexy Catwoman in The Batman). There was a more-serious-actor time (she starred in the series Big Little Lies and in Kimi, directed by Steven Soderbergh), and there was even a rock star chapter, when she played in her band Elevator Fight. Through it all, Kravitz has always been a fashion icon and a favorite of big-name designers. “I did have one bad moment,” she told me. “I plucked my eyebrows scarily thin. My mom said, ‘If you ever touch your eyebrows again, I will kill you.’ Thank god they grew back.”
As a child, Kravitz was theatrical. “The first movie I fell in love with was Grease,” she said. “I drove everyone crazy with the songs, with leather jackets, talking about Danny Zuko. I would put on shows in my grandmother’s or my mom’s house. I’d perform songs with my cousins. I would cut up little tickets—I’d make the family pay me money! I was like, ‘It’s one dollar to get in.’ They’d say, ‘We live here; this is crazy,’ but they’d give me the dollar.”
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt, pants, and shoes; stylist’s own headscarf.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, one of Kravitz’s close friends, first met her at the Grammys in 2000. “Zoë doesn’t remember this, but it was the first year that I was nominated, and she was sitting in front of us next to her dad and Chevy Chase,” Thompson told me, calling from Berlin, where his band, the Roots, was on tour. “I was sure we were going to lose that night, and the way I coped back then was to repeat ‘We’re not getting anything’ over and over. At that moment, Zoë shot me a strong look, like, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Zoë doesn’t remember this at all. She says, ‘I was a polite kid and would never do that.’ But at the exact same moment she gave me the look, they announced from the stage, ‘The winner is the Roots!’ We won. And I became instant friends with Zoë Kravitz!”
When Thompson went to an early screening of Blink Twice, he was overwhelmed. “The narrative in my head was, she’s the magic child, but over the years I had seen so much more complexity in Zoë. And when I saw the film, it was a Six Flags roller coaster experience for me. I went from the screening straight to her apartment, and I didn’t care if I woke her up. I may have underestimated Zoë’s power: Seeing her film was like meeting her for the first time. I now think she is going to take the ball further than both her parents combined.”
Miu Miu dress, necklace, and gloves; Selima Optique by Jack Spade sunglasses; The Row shoes.
Part of what intrigued Thompson about Blink Twice was what he viewed as female code-switching. In the movie—as in life—women constantly reinvent themselves. “It was really interesting to write about this living, breathing thing,” Kravitz explained. “We kept on having to adjust and change the relationship of the characters to the world we were depicting.”
As an actor, Ackie instantly saw the parallels between the film’s power dynamics and her own life. “Zoë sent the script when I was quite overwhelmed,” said Ackie. “I was playing Whitney Houston and was completely immersed, but when I heard the title Pussy Island, I knew I had to read the script immediately. We had a Zoom meeting and I said, ‘Please, can I do this movie?!’ I was prepared to do backflips—it was that important to me. And, luckily, Zoë and I share the same interest in questions about power, especially between men and women, and how we navigate that.”
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket, swimsuit, and shoes.
Issey Miyake poncho and skirt; Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shoes; stylist’s own headscarf.
The Blink Twice shoot was fast—around 26 days—and the crew and cast lived together on set in a resort location in Mexico. “We were like this weird, culty summer camp group,” said Kravitz. As always, she had a chic look: “I bought 10 pairs of Patagonia shorts in different colors. I wore dresses sometimes, and I was really into loafers with socks. And hats. My ’fits were pretty cool. I didn’t think about it a lot, but when I looked back, I was like, ‘These are pretty cool.’ ”
At the W set, Kravitz was on her fifth look: a black one-piece bathing suit topped with a loose men’s-style blazer. “I know I should wear high heels with this,” Kravitz said to no one in particular. “If it were up to me, I would be wearing comfortable shoes at all times. I think comfortable shoes are necessary in life.” When Kravitz speaks this way—quietly but authoritatively—it’s easy to see how she would make a great director. (Or, perhaps, the ruler of a nation.)
Jacquemus dress and headscarf.
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello slipdress; stylist’s own headscarf.
Throughout the photo shoot, Kravitz was very careful about the image she was projecting. For this chapter of her life, she is not playing an established character like Catwoman or performing with a group. In this moment, she’s trying to get as large an audience as possible to watch, think about, and respond to the ideas in her movie. “Zoë is after nothing less than a galvanizing effect,” Ackie told me. “And I applaud that goal—my family and friends were exhausted after watching Blink Twice, and Zoë loved that. She wants that kind of major reaction.”
As Kravitz meticulously tied and retied a long light blue scarf around her head, I asked her if she had played any particular music during filming. “I was listening to women who I found very powerful,” she said. “A lot of Nina Simone—her intensity!” Kravitz studied her reflection in the mirror. “Who doesn’t like the way Nina Simone sings? She’s an absolute vision.” She patted the scarf on the sides of her head, smoothing down the fabric. “Yeah, I’m really fascinated with people who are so themselves that they don’t have a choice.” Kravitz paused. “People like her, they burn so bright. The way she sees the world, the way she feels things—I think that’s so beautiful.”
Hair by Nikki Nelms at the Only Agency; makeup by Yukari Bush for YSL Beauty; manicure by Betina Goldstein at the Wall Group. Set design by Nicholas Des Jardins at Streeters.
Produced by AP Studio, Inc.; Producer: Anneliese Kristedja; Production Manager: Hayley Stephon; First photography assistant: Zack Forsyth; Photography assistants: Brandon Yee, Essence Moseley, Nick Haaf; Retouching: May Six; Fashion assistants: Tyler VanVranken, Kaley Azambuja, Sage M. McKee; Hair assistant: Ar’tavia Harris; Production assistants: Laicia Bouali, Gigi Rosenfield, Anderson Renno, Tommy Murray, Jeung Bok Holmquist; Set assistant: Josh Puklavetz; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, Inc.
On a humid day, at about 3 p.m., Sabrina Carpenter was standing on the expansive front lawn of a house in Pasadena, California, trying to commune with a family of peacocks. For decades, peacocks have been allowed to breed and fly freely in the area, and they are everywhere—parading across streets and through gardens, their plumage trailing behind them. “Look at the babies!” Carpenter exclaimed, as three peachicks walked confidently behind their mother. Carpenter, who is tiny, with cascading blonde hair and a surprisingly low, sexy voice, was wearing a tan Gucci ensemble. She was in between setups at the W photo shoot, licking a mango-flavored ice pop. “Maybe you should sing to the peacocks!” someone suggested. Carpenter considered this for a second, but the avian family seemed much more interested in the frozen treat in her hand. Apparently, they were the only ones in this cul de sac—or on this planet—who hadn’t been humming “Espresso” or “Please Please Please,” Carpenter’s two massively popular summer songs. Even the pop icon Adele has spoken about singing “Espresso” compulsively.
Before the peacocks could get too close, Carpenter was called back to the house to touch up her makeup for the next photo. Although she is having a huge moment—at one point in June, she simultaneously had the No. 1 and No. 4 pop singles in America—Carpenter, who is 25, has been working since she was a child and is extremely comfortable in front of the camera. “I can’t even remember when I started singing and performing and entertaining, because I was really, really little,” she told me. “I did my first audition when I was around 11 years old. The second or third audition was for the first job that I booked—Law & Order: SVU. I was thrown off by that booking because I always wanted to do comedy. And on that show, I was a victim. I remember running the lines with my dad and asking, ‘Is this what acting is?’ And then I booked Orange Is the New Black. Can I swear? That episode was called ‘Fucksgiving.’” Carpenter laughed. Her next gigs were all wholesome. “I went from raunchy to Disney!”
Loewe dress; Jimmy Choo shoes; her own ring (throughout).
Even while pursuing acting, at 9 years old Carpenter was posting videos of herself singing on YouTube. At first, she did versions of other artists’ songs, but she quickly began writing her own music. While she was costarring in Disney shows like Girl Meets World, music was not her main pursuit. “But when I was 16,” she said, “I put out my first project. Ever since, music has been my whole life.”
On set, while she was having her hair combed into a smooth Brigitte Bardot–esque look, Carpenter was listening to music that she had chosen—most of which was released before she was born. She was singing along to the likes of the Beach Boys, Shania Twain, and the Human League. “I sing ‘Don’t You Want Me’ in the shower!” said Carpenter. “The lyrics are so funny. It has been stuck in my head.” Carpenter wrote her own addictive earworm, “Espresso,” in France. She was opening for Taylor Swift and had 10 days off. “I was in a ghost town that had one little creperie down the road. I had my shot of espresso, and then I might have had some champagne, and before I knew it the song was written.” She paused. “I definitely hear it now in every car I get into, and being on the radio, to me, is still—it’s like fate. You have to be at the right place at the right time.”
Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket and sunglasses.
Versace dress; Van Cleef & Arpels earrings; Roger Vivier shoes.
“Please Please Please,” the second single off her album Short n’ Sweet, was cowritten and produced by Jack Antonoff, the three-time Grammy Award winner for Producer of the Year. “I just adore Sabrina,” said Antonoff. “And she’s going to be around forever because she’s such a great songwriter.” The video for “Please Please Please” features Carpenter’s real-life boyfriend, Barry Keoghan, who is best known for starring in Saltburn, last year’s hit film. In the video, Keoghan is a recently released convict attempting to reform his bad-boy ways while Carpenter pleads with him to respect her. She wins. It’s a sly, deft take on what some people believe to be the dynamic in their relationship.
Carpenter’s video for “Espresso” is similarly clever. In the clip, she’s had the better of a boy and is rejoicing in a series of beach tableaux—sunning with her friends, dancing in the sand and on top of a surfboard. “My favorite bathing suit was the black one-piece on the surfboard,” Carpenter recalled. “I did that video because I thought the clock was ticking on how much longer I had to do my beach music video. To me, ‘Espresso’ sounded like when you turn on a vintage radio at the beach. And I did want to make it a little bit ridiculous, because that’s up my alley.”
Carpenter was summoned to the white picket fence on the side of the house. Although she can project a girl-next-door quality, she smartly leans into her innate sex appeal. When she appeared on the season finale of SNL, she wore a feather cape for one of her songs, only to toss it off and reveal a sparkly showgirl-esque micro mini. “They made me a redhead for a skit,” said Carpenter. “And I realized that I am definitely happier as a blonde!”
N21 by Alessandro Dell’Acqua dress; Van Cleef & Arpels earrings; Celine by Hedi Slimane sandals.
Around four years ago, Carpenter’s blondeness was used against her. She was allegedly the subject of Olivia Rodrigo’s massive hit “Drivers License,” as “that blonde girl” who had supposedly captured the heart of Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, Joshua Bassett (who has since come out as gay, but that’s a different story). Carpenter released a hit song of her own, titled “Because I Liked a Boy,” with lyrics like “I’m a home-wrecker, I’m a slut/I got death threats filling up semi-trucks.” The backlash from “Drivers License” has only inspired Carpenter to create more personal music, but she definitely doesn’t want to turn her romantic life into a public discussion. “I get why people are interested,” she said. “But they can listen to my album and decide for themselves what the songs are about.”
After taking the photograph, Carpenter and her older sister, Sarah, who works with her, returned to a small guesthouse, where Carpenter changed into a Loewe gown. As she checked her phone, I asked if she had ever been starstruck. “Oh god—I had a really dangerous Zac Efron phase, when he was in Hairspray,” she said. “I was 12 years old, and I was on a beach for the Fourth of July. He would never remember this, but I saw him and said, ‘I’m a big fan of your work!’ He gave me a hug. And I remember thinking, Oh my god—he wasn’t wearing a shirt and he gave me a hug! I was like, This is amazing. I’m never washing my body!”
Marc Jacobs dress and shoes.
Dior coat; Van Cleef & Arpels earrings.
Carpenter laughed again and headed outside. She posed near the front door of the house. It was the penultimate look of the day—the final shot would be among the sprinklers on the front lawn. It was hot out, and Carpenter was looking forward to being in the wet grass. “It will ruin my hair, but who cares?” she said. “I like water, but I’m definitely more like a cat. I’m smart, I love a little cat eye, I’m soft sometimes, I love a nap, and I can jump.” Carpenter smiled. “And I’ve got so many lives.”
Loewe dress; Jimmy Choo shoes; her own ring.
Hair by James Pecis for Blu & Green Beauty at Bryant Artists; makeup by Fara Homidi for Fara Homidi Beauty at the Good Company; manicure by Zola Ganzorigt for OPI at the Wall Group. Set design by Spencer Vrooman for SVS.
Produced by Connect The Dots; Producer: Jane Oh; Production Coordinators: Nicole Morra, Alison Yardley; Photography assistants: Milan Aguirre, Bailey Beckstead, Arvin Rusanganwa; Retouching: Studio RM; Fashion assistant: Antonina Getmanova; Hair assistant: Ramon Fuertes; Makeup assistant: Jason Case; Production Assistants: Jack Fish, Danielle Rouleau, Juanes Montoya, Soheyl Hamzavi; Set assistants: Christian Duff, Hannah Murphy; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, Inc.
Kwekwe, Zimbabwe – Dorothy Moyo says a prayer every time she walks, runs or drives around her neighbourhood in central Zimbabwe – afraid that the earth will give away from beneath her feet, dragging her underground.
The 36-year-old’s fear is not uncommon among the hundreds of families living in the Globe and Phoenix community, a mining compound in Kwekwe, more than 200km (125 miles) from the capital Harare.
Last year, on an afternoon in mid-May, Moyo had visited the local school – Globe and Phoenix Primary – to check on her daughter and get an appraisal from the teacher when suddenly the ground began to shake.
She vividly recalled the moment she heard the noise of the falling desks and chairs followed by the screams of children.
“I was just a few feet away from the scene, clearly indicating that I was also in the danger zone. It was scary,” Moyo told Al Jazeera. “Instead of going to rescue those who were crying, I ran to safety,” she admitted.
Fourteen children were injured when the class caved in as illegal small-scale miners burrowed beneath the pillars that had held the school up for more than a century.
Although only one classroom collapsed, findings from the Department of Civil Protection said the whole area was in danger.
In the aftermath, the school was permanently shut down and 900 of the 1,500 affected children were transferred to the neighbouring school, while others use offices at the Globe and Phoenix Mine as classrooms.
After the collapse, there have been other similar incidents caused by illegal mining in Kwekwe.
In communal areas around the city, livestock have been the main victims of the earth giving in. But in another incident near the Globe and Phoenix compound last May, a house collapsed and was swallowed by a mine tunnel, authorities said.
A classroom caved in at the Globe and Phoenix Primary School in 2023 [Calvin Manika/Al Jazeera]
Tonnes of gold
As part of Zimbabwe’s broader macroeconomic roadmap towards achieving an upper-middle-income economy by 2030, the government unveiled plans in October 2019 to revitalise the mining sector and create a $12bn economy by the end of 2023 (the latest available figures from 2022 put the value at around $5.6bn).
This plan would be driven by the mining of gold – which is Zimbabwe’s biggest export – along with platinum, diamonds, chrome, iron ore, coal, lithium and other minerals, the government said.
Kwekwe, in Zimbabwe’s Midlands province, is a key site for minerals and mining.
The city of more than 100,000 people houses the headquarters of Zimbabwe’s largest steelworks, a major power-producing plant, and the country’s largest ferrochrome producer.
It is also known for its rich gold alluvial soils and is home to one of the biggest gold mines in the country, the privately owned Globe and Phoenix Mine, which was founded in 1894 but has been operating on and off since 2002.
Exploration in the surrounding area, as well as the emergence of new mines, shows the existence of tonnes of gold. As a result, in the past three decades, thousands of small-scale miners searching for their fortunes have made their way to the city, digging pits on the surface and tunnelling underground.
After last year’s cave-in at the school, the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA) issued a statement expressing concern about the ways mining was being conducted.
“The collapse of the classroom block at Globe and Phoenix Primary School is once again a reminder that irresponsible mining is retrogressive and should not be tolerated at any level,” the environmental watchdog’s statement said.
Although ZELA said it appreciates that mining is the backbone of economic recovery, and that strategies like the $12bn mining economy are important for development, it noted that a successful strategy must take cognisance of the environment, the communities, and be supported by a strong regulatory and monitoring framework.
“This incident must be a clarion call for authorities to act on the best possible ways to regulate the artisanal and small-scale mining sector to discourage illegal activity and noncompliance,” warned ZELA.
Kwekwe’s mayor, Councillor Albert Musungwa Zinhanga, told Al Jazeera the city has bylaws in place with regards to trespassing on private property, which they are enforcing. However, others need to be updated.
When it comes to environmental safety laws, for example, the city is instituting bylaws to protect the central business district from mining activities, he said. “Some of them we are going to be working on, so that we enforce the things … not covered when those bylaws were formulated.”
A general view of the Globe and Phoenix gold mine in Kwekwe [Jekesai Njikizana/AFP]
A ‘web of tunnels’
Illegal miners – many of whom travel from place to place in search of gold – often burrow on the outskirts of official mine territory, or in the now disused underground tunnels that were mined previously.
According to residents and environmental activists in Kwekwe, illegal miners do not abide by responsible mining practices, often targeting the support pillars within these underground tunnels.
Runyararo Priscilla Mashinge is the current chairperson of the Midlands chapter of the national human rights organisation ZimRights. She is also a small-scale miner herself, working in a group with other artisanal miners in Kwekwe.
She said illegal miners burrowing underground put people at risk, and she feels that the authorities must ban all mining activity near the central business district and residential areas in order to save people’s lives.
“At Globe and Phoenix, we saw a classroom sinking; many other houses have been affected,” Mashinge said. “In Gaika [another mining area] also, it’s the same issue. We are in a total mess especially with no legal action being taken. This is affecting surrounding communities.”
Mashinge said that in the now disused parts of the Globe and Phoenix Mine, the underground pillars have been left untouched for “strategic” reasons, so that the mine would not collapse. But now illegal miners are threatening those foundations.
“The whole city is on top of a web of tunnels,” she said. “But now the artisanal miners when they see gold on the pillars, they burrow through, posing danger to human lives.”
The pillars are blocks of untouched rock that are purposefully left underground to support the overlying strata, as mined material is being extracted. While big mining companies leave the pillars – and the gold they contain – untouched to protect the stability of the whole operation, illegal miners looking for any bit of gold often target the pillars in old mines without regard for the structural consequences.
“The economy has contributed to this,” Mashinge said, “but it is regrettable.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, small-scale miner Patrick Hokoyo said miners like him do not usually dig further underground, but often follow existing tunnels in search of the yellow metal.
“In some cases, things are hard as you will be tracking gold underground, only to see it on the pillars. To us, it’s about gold. It is only when something happens that we are told it was a support pillar,” Hokoyo explained.
Despite the imminent danger, Mayor Zinhanga said artisanal mining will not hinder the future of programming in Kwekwe and its “master plan” to use resources found in the city to improve infrastructure.
“We are actually seeing the reduction of ‘makorokoza’ because most of the people that used to be roaming around the town during the day and in the night have been driven away,” the mayor said, using the local Shona term for the illegal miners. Zinhanga said most miners are now city residents or people with formal claims to a piece of land with gold deposits.
An illegal gold miner going underground in Kwekwe [Calvin Manika/Al Jazeera]
Above the law?
Kwekwe residents have been calling for illegal miners to be actively blocked from using disused underground shafts. Despite the recent cave-ins and warnings from authorities, though, these miners have resisted and continue their operations.
“We do not own the pits, in fact, we do not have permission. We get access [to the mines] from ‘mabosses’,” one miner who wanted to be identified only as Charles told Al Jazeera.
Locally, ‘mabosses’ are politically linked individuals who illegally run some mining pits yet have unchecked power. They do not go underground themselves, but are paid a cut by miners who are desperate for areas in which to search for gold.
“They [mabosses] man the entrances to the mines, and to have access means we pay in return in the form of gold,” Charles said.
Another miner, Ngonidzashe Chisvetu, said that because their operations are illegal, they need protection from people connected with government officials.
“If you look, this Globe and Phoenix is operated by a mining company. Truly, I can’t just come from home and enter then start mining without someone shielding me. [Mabosses] are the people we literally work for … We are shielded by them,” he told Al Jazeera.
Most artisanal miners fall under the Zimbabwe Miners Federation, headed by Henrietta Rushwaya, a niece of Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Early this year, Rushwaya was arrested after allegedly duping Indian investors of $1.5m in a botched mining transaction.
Last year, Rushwaya was convicted after attempting to smuggle 6kg (13 pounds) of gold to Dubai. She was fined $5,000 and handed a wholly suspended three-year jail sentence. She also featured as a central figure in Al Jazeera’s documentary series Gold Mafia, which exposed gold smuggling and money laundering by senior Zimbabwean public office bearers. Rushwaya remains free.
Commenting on the illegal mining in Kwekwe, Farai Maguwu, the director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, said politicians are behind the illegal mining activities taking place in Kwekwe and the town of Kadoma about 70km (45 miles) north.
The head of the Zimbabwean natural resources watchdog added that artisanal miners orchestrating illegal underground digging were also being sent by the same politicians.
“The Kwekwe incident was long coming. It was a matter of time. Residents have been raising alarm on the issue for some time and it’s unfortunate that the same people and other innocent lives are the victims,” Maguwu said.
Al Jazeera contacted the provincial police spokesperson for a response to the Kwekwe allegations, but he was not available to comment.
Speaking at a recent expo organised by the Ministry of Public Works on the way forward regarding artisanal miners, Midlands Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister Owen Ncube highlighted the need to formalise and empower artisanal miners to expand their business operations.
“It is important to note that in addition to the main actors in the mining sector, there are also artisanal miners who require support to increase production, as well as environmentally friendly and sustainable mining,” said Ncube.
Meanwhile, Minister of Mines and Mining Development Winston Chitando said in a presentation last year that small-scale mining makes a significant contribution to the country, but that “every mining activity should follow the law”.
Small-scale miners search for gold in Kwekwe [Thapelo Morebudi/Al Jazeera]
Frightening new findings
In Kwekwe, a network of illegal mining tunnels extending as deep as 1.5km (0.9 miles) beneath the central business district and residential areas is posing a significant risk to residents, according to a 2024 study conducted by the Zimbabwe National Geospatial and Space Agency (ZINGSA).
There are growing concerns that these areas might cave in due to the widespread underground pits.
ZINGSA’s study, which employed advanced geospatial mapping techniques, revealed an extensive network of tunnels. The results were alarming – exposing a sprawling maze of tunnels that are undermining pillars essential for structural support.
“The mapping has shown us the severity of the situation. We are literally sitting on a ticking time bomb,” said a ZINGSA official, who requested anonymity due to the nature of the issue. “These could lead to disastrous collapses of buildings.”
The report further details the numerous hazards these illegal mining tunnels pose to the city’s infrastructure and environment. Sinkholes, resulting from the collapse of underground voids, have emerged as a significant concern. Ground vibrations from blasting activities within the tunnels also contribute to structural damage and further instability.
On having mining activities near the central business district and residential areas, Mayor Zinhanga emphasised the need to re-look at the bylaws and realign them with current priorities. But he also said the city faced challenges from illegal miners who burrow underground at night, a practice common in Kwekwe.
Meanwhile, back at the Globe and Phoenix compound, since the cave-in over a year ago, residents have been living in increased fear.
Moyo – who remains cautious – said although the collapse at the school was shocking, it was not surprising, as the issue of illegal mining has been raised several times – but with no action taken.
“People used to jokingly say, the city has been left with nothing underneath as artisanal miners have harrowed it in search of gold,” Moyo said. “[Now] it is becoming evident.
“We are living in a city where any time, you can fall underneath. This is a death sentence role. Any time, you can fall and die.”
Editor’s note, September 5, 2024: This piece was originally published on July 30, 2019, when the fourth episode of Break Stuff: The Story of Woodstock ’99 first released. To mark the recent 25th anniversary of the festival, The Ringer is resurfacing Break Stuff on its own dedicated Spotify feed.
In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment. There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.
Break Stuff, an eight-part documentary podcast series now available on Spotify, investigates what went wrong at Woodstock ’99 and the legacy of the event as host Steven Hyden interviews promoters, attendees, journalists, and musicians. We’ve already explored whether Limp Bizkit were to blame for the chaos, how the story of the original Woodstock is mostly a myth, and how the host town prepared for the festival. In Episode 4, Hyden looks at how the first night of Woodstock ’99 set the stage for what was to come.
As attendees filed into Griffiss Air Force Base for the first day of the festival, large crowds swelled around the east and west stages. And when I say large, I mean humongous. It’s estimated that 220,000 people attended the festival, plus an additional 10,000 who worked there.
“It was kind of an out-of-body experience when you play a big festival like that, you know, where you can’t see the end of the crowd,” said Noodles, a guitarist for the Offspring.
In 1994, Noodles’s band released Smash,a blockbuster that sold 11 million copies, making it the best-selling record ever to be put out by an independent label. Five years later, the Offspring were still big MTV stars. But even a band as popular as the Offspring was humbled by the size of Woodstock ’99.
“We flew over it on our way in,” he says. “The area that this festival took over was really just a huge, huge area. We’ve been able to fly over other festivals since and it’s one of the biggest for sure. So it looked kind of cool, we were really excited.”
Once the band touched down and arrived backstage, however, the grandeur of Woodstock ‘99 also came crashing down.
“The venue really wasn’t great,” he says. “You know, it wasn’t a very hospitable. So it was kind of bleak in that regard.”
The Offspring were scheduled to play after the rapper DMX and before Korn. On stage, the members of the band stared into a vast sea of humanity that stretched as far as the eye could see. Playing Woodstock ’99 was a pretty heady experience for a band that came up in the underground punk scene.
“It is a little overwhelming,” Noodles says. “We’ve done it so much now that I guess I get more and more used to it, but still there’s an energy there that’s unlike anything else, and I guess that was kind of fun. It was, I think, a little too much, just a little bit too big.”
Most musicians will say the most disorienting aspect of performing at an event as massive as Woodstock ’99 is the disconnection from the audience. Even in an arena, an artist can still see the people in the first few rows. But at Woodstock ’99, the distance between performer and fan was nearly insurmountable.
“You know, the audience was super far away, there were big cameras on tracks that were in between us and the crowd as well,” Noodles says. “So just kind of connecting with the audience was a little bit more difficult.”
But the band didn’t miss everything. There was one moment when Offspring singer Dexter Holland was able to discern some bad behavior in the audience. It occurred near the end of the band’s set, when Holland decided to comment on it.
“But you know what, I was noticing something, I gotta call your attention to it for just a second,” Holland said on stage. “I’ve been noticing that there’s a lot of girls coming over the top here crowdsurfing. And they’re getting really groped, you know what I mean. Now I think, just because a girl wants to go crowdsurfing or whatever, that doesn’t give a guy the right to molest ’em, know what I’m sayin’?”
Then, Holland said that the audience members should take matters into their own hands.
“If you’re a guy and you see a girl go overhead, give her a break,” he said. “If you’re a girl and you see a guy go overhead, I want you to grab his fucking balls!”
But again, in the moment, the bands were in a totally different world from the audience. And that surely affects the perspective of artists like Jonathan Davis, the lead singer of Korn. When he talks about Woodstock ’99, he doesn’t think about sexual assaults.
It was the biggest fucking group of people I ever saw in a festival setting like that in America, and all I know is our show was amazing,” Davis says.
Woodstock ’99 was the first concert that Korn had played in months. The band had been holed up in Los Angeles working on a new album. After so much hard work, playing a big concert in front of hundreds of thousands of people was a much-needed release.
“It was us, Limp Bizkit, Ice Cube, all these people,” he says. “We all chartered a big 737, and we all flew from L.A. to the site, and it was just amazing. We had a huge party on that plane, we were all just listening to music and having fun. We were playing craps and it was just amazing—an amazing experience.”
When you watch Korn’s performance on YouTube, you can see both what went right and what went wrong. On one hand, the band played incredibly—any signs of rust from not touring were obliterated by the nuclear-level energy coming off the crowd. On the other hand, you can see a female crowd surfer fighting off dozens of men attempting to grope her.
The separation between Korn and the audience is obvious. I wonder whether it was also apparent in the moment—I wasn’t there, but I suspect that the audience felt like it was in its own world. That feeling helps to embolden bad behavior. In the end, nobody seems to take responsibility for when things go sideways.
As for Jonathan Davis, it’s obvious that his adrenaline was jacked through the roof. He will never forget what it felt like to perform that night.
“I mean, it’s like no drug on earth,” Davis says. “For me, at least for Korn, when we play, I have a real intense connection with the crowd. I’ve never been a frontman that talks a lot but I think by the way that I perform and how emotions come across, that I touch something that makes people want to do that thing.”
He still remembers how the crowd reacted to the last song of the night.
“When we were doing ‘My Gift to You,’ and I had a lighter and I got everybody to put their lighters up in the air or when they were you know all jumping or just pumping their fist,” Davis says. “Those moments were really huge moments to have that many people doing it.”
Jonathan Davis of Korn during Woodstock ’99WireImage
For Davis, the only negativity associated with Woodstock ’99 happened backstage.
It was a feud with a band playing that night on the west stage, commonly regarded as festival’s B-list showcase.
“Insane Clown Posse wanted to fight us or some stupid bullshit that I don’t understand,” Davis says. “But Cube’s people put them in their place and that was it. That was the only drama.”
To this day, Davis is confused as to why Insane Clown Posse had a beef with Korn.
“I don’t even fucking know why they don’t like us,” he says. “I heard that they talked some other shit about us before too. I think they like to start shit just to get press or start a beef and get things going. I don’t know––I was a huge fan of ICP and that whole Juggalo thing. I think it’s cool.”
Here’s something you should know about me: I love band rivalries. I even wrote a book about it. And yet, in all of my research about Woodstock ’99, I hadn’t come across any information about a fight between Korn and Insane Clown Posse. I didn’t know about it until Jonathan Davis brought it up, unprompted.
Naturally, I now wanted to insert myself into some Korn vs. ICP drama. So I reached out to Violent J, who makes up Insane Clown Posse with fellow rapper Shaggy 2 Dope. And I asked him, “Hey, Violent J, why were you so mad at Korn back in 1999?”
According to Violent J, ICP didn’t have beef with Korn at all. In fact, the opposite was true. ICP worshipped Korn.
“What happened was, we kind of diss them in the lyric,” he says. “You know what I mean.”
In case you don’t know what he means: The diss lyric occurs in the song “Everybody Rize,” which mocks Jonathan Davis for a song he wrote about being bullied as a kid.
“It was uncalled for and it was stupid,” he says. “When we dissed them, it was an old lyric. So when we saw them we apologized for that and they had no idea what we were talking about.”
In my experience, Violent J isn’t really an accurate moniker. He was more like Gregarious J. I don’t think I talked to anyone who was happier to talk about Woodstock ’99. He was like a little kid talking about meeting Santa Claus for the first time.
“They drove us to the other stage,” Violent J says. “We hadn’t looked out, and we didn’t see the crowd or anything. And we came out and boom! It was just packed, and we were so happy. We couldn’t believe it. We were so excited, because it wasn’t like the other festivals we’d done. There was a lot of people there that would want to see us, you know, and that felt so good. It felt so cool to be a part of something.”
Insane Clown Posse formed in Detroit in 1989. From the beginning, they were outcasts—too rap for the rock crowd, and too rock for the rap crowd. Both sides seemed to agree that ICP were ridiculous. But Woodstock ’99 signified a rare moment of acceptance. Violent J finally felt like a true rock star.
“We always call ourselves the most hated band in the world,” he says. “And we’ve always played up the role that we like being the outcasts, you know? But in reality there’s always been an urge to want to be accepted to something. I mean, we want to be considered cool enough to be there.Andthat was like the ultimate reward. That that was something that really came through for us and felt that way.”
The band decided to show their appreciation by giving back to the audience at the concert.
“Yo, I know for Woodstock, tickets were a little expensive,” he said from on stage. “And me and Shaggy, we got paid a lot of money to be here. So we decided to give you all your money back.”
Then the band kicked a basket of red and yellow dodgeballs into the audience—each one with a $100 bill taped to it. And once those balls were gone, ICP kicked balls with $500 attached to them.
“We wanted to try to come up with some extra flavor for Woodstock,” he says now. “They were all jumping up trying to grab them, and that would just make the ball fly in the air again.”
Along with the free money, there was also some boorishness during ICP’s set. At one point, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope invited women to shed their tops onstage. Then they doused the women with Faygo soda.
When you watch the video, it all seems playful. The women appear to be doing this of their own volition, and having a good time. But in the harsh light of 2019, the whole thing seems pretty gross. It’s the sort of mindless decadence you associate with the fall of great empires.
The darkest impulses of Woodstock ’99 were already manifesting on Friday—two full days before tensions finally boiled over in the form of riots and looting.
Sumaya Abu Ajwa had woken up for the Fajr prayer with her two foster daughters, 16-year-old Nuseiba and 14-year-old Retaj, and their mother.
She and the girls’ mother were off to one side when the missiles struck, one of them passing between the two girls, Abu Ajwa told Al Jazeera.
“Suddenly, dust and fire spread everywhere, like it was Judgement Day. I started looking frantically for the girls,” she says tearfully, sitting on a bed because she has difficulty walking.
“I found the younger girl [Retaj] and held her in my arms. Her blood was pouring onto my clothes, but I could sense that she was still breathing,” Abu Ajwa said, adding that she screamed for help, for anyone to come and save Retaj, but the scene was so chaotic nobody was able to help.
Soon after, Retaj succumbed to her wounds.
The search for Retaj’s big sister Nuseiba took longer.
“I went back into the flaming prayer room over and over, looking for her, I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then someone told me that she was under the rubble so I went to look where they said.
“When I reached her,” Abu Ajwa breaks down, “I found her and her body had been torn in two.”
Weeping bitterly, she said she and the girls’ mother had done everything they could, through several displacements, to keep the four of them together.
Retaj, left, and Nuseiba, were killed in Israel’s attack on al-Tabin School, which was sheltering displaced people in Gaza [Sanad/Al Jazeera]
Abu Ajwa had discussed leaving al-Tabin with the girls, but Nuseiba had been reluctant to leave, she said, because she was attending Quran classes there and was proud of her progress in memorising the holy book.
“She told us that if we wanted to leave that was fine, she would stay behind in the school. I told her that I had stayed with them throughout the war and wouldn’t leave them now, we’d either make it together or die together, but now they’ve gone on ahead and left us. They died before us.”
The girls only had one wish, she added – for the war to end because they “have been scared so many times, displaced so many times, they were so exhausted and had gone hungry so many times”.
The girls have a 14-year-old brother, Abu Ajwa said, who had been taken from them when the Israeli army raided al-Shifa Hospital where they were sheltering at the time.
“The Israelis sent him north on his own. We were very sad then but, who knows, this may have saved him, he’s the only hope we have left.
“Who will call me Mama Sumaya now? I crave those words so much,” Abu Ajwa sobs.
Will Arnett used to leave BoJack Horseman recording sessions feeling disoriented. He’d step outside a dark Hollywoo(d) studio blinded by late-morning sunlight. As he walked to his car, he’d start to sweat. The caffeine from the coffee he’d just drunk would buck in his empty stomach. All the while, he’d be struggling to shake his character’s pathologically antisocial behavior. “This guy’s just been really shitty to someone in some fucked-up scenario,” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘What? How am I going to go on with the rest of my day?’”
Hey, that’s life as the voice of a depressed, self-loathing, alcoholic, anthropomorphic horse: Occasionally, you sink into the depths with him. “There were days where I’d come home really bummed out, and I’d be like, ‘What is life, man?’” says Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the show’s creator. “And I’d go to work the next day like, ‘Oh, right. I’m watching this really depressing episode all day.’ It’s seeping into my brain.”
On first look, BoJack Horseman was a satirical story of a washed-up sitcom star desperate to be famous again. But it was more than the tale of one unhappy equine. It was an existential comedy about people, some of whom happen to be animals, figuring out how to live without letting their piled-up baggage weigh them down. “That’s just such a unique point of view: to realize that each day, we get out of bed and we have a certain amount of damage that we are all either trying to protect our friends and colleagues from or protect ourselves from,” says executive producer Steven A. Cohen. From the beginning, it was clear that in the show’s world, like in the real world, damage can’t be reversed. When the ottoman in BoJack’s living room catches fire, it stays burned out in every subsequent episode. “Things like that, which were such small pitches at the time, were showstoppers,” Cohen adds. “Because you’re like, ‘That’s the way life is.’”
There were dozens of smart and funny animated series in the decades before it, but BoJack Horseman was different: It was built for prestige TV. It had a hard-to-pull-for antihero as toxic as Tony Soprano or Don Draper, an anti-feel-good sensibility, a unique visual style, and the ear of critics. But even while exploring serious topics—the Wikipedia page lists 12 hot-button issues it covered, and that’s a low estimate—the adult cartoon didn’t veer into self-seriousness. And it could’ve come about only during the brief time in the early 2010s when media conglomerates, in pursuit of building big streaming platforms, were willing to take chances on quirky ideas. Today, the show about a horse would be considered, well, a unicorn.
Over six seasons, BoJack got really real, really often. Yet as heavy as it was, it had a unique knack for finding room for jokes. “That’s one of the things I’m proud of with the show, is that 77 episodes deep, it was still really silly and goofy and cartoony while also being very dramatic and melancholy and intense the whole way through,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I never felt like we could choose one tone. It was always kind of both things.” BoJack tapped into an eternal truth: When you’re drowning, sometimes the only thing you can do to stay afloat is laugh at your predicament.
Late in the first season of the show, there’s a flashback to a fresh-faced BoJack and his friend and creative partner Herb Kazzaz—whom BoJack later screws over—sharing a moment at the Griffith Observatory. They look out at Los Angeles, and Herb says, “I see a city that you and I will run someday. And when we’re both famous and have everything we’ve ever wanted, we’ll come back here together and high-five.”
The scene, more or less, was ripped from Bob-Waksberg’s life. When he was new to L.A., he’d hike Griffith with friends, look out at the city, and snarkily wonder about the future. “We used to say, tongue planted firmly in cheek, ‘Someday we’re going to own this town,’” he says. “That was the thing we would do. We were like characters on Entourage.” Or The Lion King. “One day,” he adds with faux gravitas, “everything the light touches will be yours, Simba.”
That was a decade and a half ago. Back then, Bob-Waksberg would’ve laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his success was preordained. The dream of BoJack Horseman was alive, but in the way a zombie is alive. “BoJack was the development that wouldn’t die,” he says. “It was like two years I was bouncing around this thing, and there were points where I was like, ‘Why am I still spending time on this?’”
Bob-Waksberg was working on the project with Tornante, the studio founded by former Walt Disney chairman Michael Eisner. His spec script had initially impressed two development executives at the company, Cohen and Noel Bright. “In this town, everything starts with somebody sending us something to read,” Cohen says. “And the very first thing we read of his … it’s from the same writer today. You can see the hallmarks. He’s just a gifted storyteller.”
Cohen and Bright quickly set up a meeting with Bob-Waksberg. “When you sit with Raphael, he’s just as gifted in person, and you can see his brain working and when he’s excited, because his body starts moving and his hands start moving,” Cohen says. That day, Bob-Waksberg, hands in motion, told them a story about the time he went to a beautiful home in Laurel Canyon for a party that, to him, was anything but festive. “He was feeling completely alone and divorced from the magic reality that is Hollywood,” Cohen says, “and realizing like, ‘What does this all mean? And who are these people?’ … It’s 10 years later, and I don’t have those answers. And that’s uniquely Raphael, to just basically provoke you into thinking about something for 10 years.”
Eisner didn’t go to the meeting. “It was not Steven Spielberg,” he says with a smile. Afterward, though, he briefly met Bob-Waksberg and asked what show he was pitching. “Just tell me in one or two sentences the best idea,” Eisner recalls saying. “He said, ‘Well, it’s a comedy about a character who has the head of a horse and the body of a man.’” Eisner, who used to get a kick out of Mister Ed back in the ’60s, loved it. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it,’” Eisner says. “That’s how long it took.”
The show that Bob-Waksberg wanted to make was constantly asking, “What does this all mean?” The full premise wasn’t all that complicated: “BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.” In fact, that’s exactly how he described it in an email to a friend in Brooklyn, cartoonist and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt. They both grew up in Palo Alto, California. “I knew who he was in middle school because he was in school plays and because he was loud and weird,” Hanawalt says. “Which is my favorite kind of person.” Bob-Waksberg wrote Hanawalt because he needed an artist to help bring BoJack to life. Luckily for him, Hanawalt had always loved horses. In early 2010, a few months before he reached out about his show idea, she’d made a comic about a horse person.
“I looked at his pitch, and I was like, ‘This looks really depressing. I don’t know about this. I’m into things that are less depressing,’” Hanawalt says. “And he was like, ‘OK, cool.’ But now I actually like the depressing aspects of it a lot. I take it back.”
With Hanawalt’s blessing, Bob-Waksberg downloaded a bunch of animal drawings from her website and showed them to Cohen and Bright. “I kind of put them in a little envelope, and I brought it with me and said, ‘This is the show I want to make, with these guys,’” he says. The execs loved the concept and asked for an outline. “I was frantically Googling, ‘What does an outline of a TV episode look like?’” Bob-Waksberg says. “I sent in this thing, and Steve was like, ‘This is not an outline, but sure, go write your draft now.’”
Bob-Waksberg eventually came back with something more fleshed out. “Everything that came in was so true to form,” Bright says.
“All of a sudden, we realized that Raphael was different from everybody else,” Eisner says. “Somebody like Raphael comes along once a decade, if that.”
That original script treatment included what became the pilot’s opening scene: Charlie Rose interviewing a drunk, defensive BoJack about his long-ago-canceled sitcom, Horsin’ Around. “For a lot of people, life is just one hard kick in the urethra,” BoJack says. “Sometimes when you get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a show about good, likable people who love each other, where you know, no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out OK. Because in real life … did I already say the thing about the urethra?”
Finding someone to personify a sad horse turned out to be fairly easy: Bob-Waksberg and Arnett had the same manager. “My manager said, ‘Hey, this guy we represent wrote this really cool thing for this animated series,’” Arnett says. “And it’s always a crapshoot. You never know what you’re going to get. I read it and it was like, ‘Wow.’” The actor, who has a uniquely gravelly voice, loved that the series sounded both grounded and ridiculous. “OK, so this guy is kind of a has-been, and he lives in this fucking cliché house in the Hollywood Hills with what’s left of his entourage, which is one moron,” Arnett says. “And then on top of it all, he’s not a guy, he’s a horse.’”
“The first thing I said to Will—I mean, I was nervous, I guess, to meet a star—was just like, ‘It’s great that you’re cast because you sound like a horse,’” Hanawalt says. “And he’s like, ‘Never heard that one before.’”
The one guy left in BoJack’s entourage was Todd Chavez, who ended up being less of a moron and more of a sweet and sneakily wise slacker with a million crazy ideas. Kind of like Jesse Pinkman if he’d never met Walter White. Coincidentally, Breaking Bad was almost over, and Aaron Paul was about to be available. “He got this really goofy, silly comedy script, and he did not know this would also go to a dark place,” Bob-Waksberg says. “And so I think he felt like, ‘Oh, this is a ray of sunshine. What a fun break from being in a pit, the slave of neo-Nazis making meth all day.’” Not long after he learned about BoJack, Paul committed to it. “I love that you can laugh and also really have an emotional experience in a single scene of that show,” he says.
The rest of the main BoJack characters were a mix of humans and animal people. Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) is BoJack’s feline agent who struggles with work-life balance. Like most Labrador retrievers, actor Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins) is an outwardly cheerful people pleaser. And Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie) is BoJack’s Vietnamese American ghostwriter who deals with depression. (When we spoke, Bob-Waksberg complimented Brie’s performance but reiterated a point that he’s made in other interviews: “I think I was not fully cognizant when I cast her, the limitations I was putting on myself by casting a white actress to play a Vietnamese character. I wasn’t up to the responsibility of writing a Vietnamese character fully. And so part of that is it’s not just the casting, it’s the writing. It’s that I wasn’t thinking about all the dimensions of what this would mean. And I think that, combined with the casting of Alison, was a disservice to the character.”)
Yet even with all BoJack had going for it, networks weren’t interested. Bob-Waksberg felt like he was rowing a boat with one arm, just going in a circle. “No one’s going to buy this show,” he remembers thinking. “Maybe I’ve outgrown it.” Arnett and Paul, who’d also come on as executive producers, did their best to sell the project, but it seemed futile. “I was part of the pitching process, just kind of calling people that I had relationships with or had a past with and really pushing this thing to get across the line,” Paul says. “And everyone was passing on it.”
Everyone except one. In the early 2010s, Netflix was no longer just a DVD subscription service. It was gunning to become a real Hollywood studio. To make a big splash—with consumers and creators—it needed to take creative risks, particularly the kind that other networks had long been afraid to take. It had found early success with House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and a reboot of Arrested Development but still hadn’t green-lit an animated show. Cohen and Bright happened to know Blair Fetter, a new creative executive at the company. They asked him whether he’d take a look at an animation test put together by Mike Hollingsworth, who became the show’s supervising director.
“That five-minute test had me hooked,” Fetter says in an email.
“The questions he asked were ‘Is this going to have Will Arnett in it? Is it going to have Aaron Paul?’” Bright remembers. “I was like, ‘Yes. Yes.’ Those are the easy answers.” Then Fetter asked two more questions: “Does the creator have a vision?” and “Could we hear it?”
About a month later, Bob-Waksberg had a meeting with Netflix. During his presentation, which lasted more than an hour, he sketched out the entire first season of the show without a single note in front of him. The pitch was years in the making. “That long development process gave me the room to grow as a writer and figure out what kind of stories I wanted to tell in this world so that when the opportunity came,” Bob-Waksberg says, “I would be ready for it.”
“It felt exactly like the Netflix version of an animated series,” Fetter says. “We were all in.”
The first season of BoJack Horseman had to be made at a full gallop. After selling the show to Netflix, Bob-Waksberg and his team had about seven months to finish 12 episodes. “Which was wild,” he says. “We had some materials because we’d been developing it for so long, but it was still a mad dash to get that first season done.”
The process of learning how to create a digitally animated show on the fly was particularly difficult for Hanawalt, the production designer. “I was using watercolor on paper,” she says. “I didn’t know how to draw on the computer at all.” What she did already know how to do was create distinct characters. That helped give the show its unique look.
“What first drew us in was her attention to attire and wardrobe,” Cohen says. “Drawings of some of the characters that were these anthropomorphic animals but were wearing a tweed jacket with patches and a vest or a tie. And all these different looks that were exciting and different than the traditional animation characters that were wearing one outfit for 30 years.”
Hanawalt liked playing around with patterns, whether it was the designs on BoJack’s sweaters, the little fish on Princess Carolyn’s dress, or the red arrows on Diane’s jacket. “A lot of the details didn’t come from anywhere in particular,” she says. “It was just me wanting to make them look specific rather than generic.”
The anthropomorphic cast eventually could’ve filledNoah’s ark, giving the animators the opportunity to conjure up characters like Sextina Aquafina, a dolphin pop star; Amanda Hannity, the editor of Manatee Fair; and Cuddlywhiskers, a hamster and TV producer. Naturally, the show was full of animal references, animal jokes, and animal puns. Yellow lab Mr. Peanutbutter gets anxious when there’s a stranger in his yard. There’s a spear-nosed bartender/marlin at a ’50s diner named Brando who announces the delivery of three beers: “Stella!,” “Stella!,” and “Corona Light.” And Princess Carolyn has dinner with an albino rhino gyno.
And aside from The Simpsons, no animated series had better—or more numerous—sight gags. Some were broad, like Vincent Adultman, who’s really three kids stacked under a trench coat. Others were of the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it variety, like a party banner that says, “Happy Birthday Diane and use a pretty font.” There were also plenty of running jokes, like when Hollywood became “Hollywoo” in the show after BoJack drunkenly stole the “D” in the famous sign. The way Bob-Waksberg sees it, some of the series’ silliest bits popped because of what Arnett did with them. The showrunner recalls working on the scene where BoJack wakes up hungover and sees the missing “D” in his pool. “The line we wrote for him was ‘D-d-d-damn,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “And I remember being like, ‘OK, we’ll replace this later. This is not a joke,’” he says. “And then Will did it at the table read, and it was so funny and stupid. And so we thought, ‘OK, let’s not touch that.’”
Like Arnett, BoJack was a veteran sitcom actor with impeccable comic timing. But the character was also, frankly, despicable. Arnett realized that early in the show’s run. He points to a story line in the first season when BoJack is so afraid of losing his lackey Todd that he sabotages his rock opera. “BoJack is so fucking hateful about it,” Arnett says. “That for some reason always sticks out at me because Todd’s so sweet and kind and BoJack is just so unrelentingly BoJack in that moment.”
While voicing someone with so many ups and downs, Arnett admits that he couldn’t help but think of his own. “It made me think about my own mental health a little bit, for sure,” he says. “A lot of it felt like it’s a cautionary tale.”
Over the years, Arnett has spoken candidly about his own sobriety. “I’ve often thought about how prescient it was of Raphael to write this,” Arnett says. “And I went through my own struggles, which I talked about with Raphael. I was like, ‘God, it’s so odd to do this thing, to play this guy.’”
Still, Arnett is not BoJack. Despite what some misguided fans might think. Several years ago, the actor had a house built in Beverly Hills. It had a pool. “People were like, ‘I saw photos of Will Arnett’s house, it’s just like BoJack!’” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘Motherfucker, shut up.’ By the way, we need to take the internet apart.”
At midnight on August 22, 2014, Netflix released the entire first season of BoJack Horseman. “We all waited up and watched the first couple of episodes,” Bright says. The next morning, the producers started hearing that some viewers had seen all 12. That shocked them. After all, binge-watching TV was still a relatively new phenomenon. “That was something that we all looked at each other like, ‘This is unbelievable,’” Bright adds. “We just spent four and a half or five years working on this show. It premiered. And the next day, people were like, ‘I love the season.’” Most critics agreed: Writer Alan Sepinwall called the show “something that simultaneously functions as both lunatic farce and melancholy character study.” Four days after the first season dropped, Netflix announced that it was renewing the animated series for a second season.
These days, studios cancel promising shows with ruthless efficiency. But back then, streaming companies gave new series more time to build an audience. Even though BoJack didn’t have as many viewers as Game of Thrones, Netflix got behind it. That faith was a gift to its fans, a group that grew as time went on. “People that stayed with it and watched the show and got the show came to love it,” Bright says. “And it was really fun to see that happen.”
Viewers stuck with a series that stayed funny, but became less fun. BoJack’s depression worsens. He mistreats the people closest to him, repeatedly crosses the line with young women, and pathetically clings to the hope that he’ll once again become an A-lister. He reminded Eisner of an older American comedian he once ran into at a hotel in England. When Eisner asked what the comic was doing there, he replied that it was the only place he still got recognized. “BoJack was a big star,” Eisner says. “All he wants to do is be in the movie Secretariat, which he can’t get because he’s no longer a star. He spent all his money. He’s living a life of memories. He’s gotten himself involved with bad things, drugs and alcohol. He still has an agent. And it is a metaphor for anybody who’s had success and is now forgotten.”
To Bob-Waksberg, BoJack was, in some ways, like an exorcism: “I could get out some of my darker feelings into this show,” he says. But as sad as the series could be, he wasn’t trying to fetishize bleakness. He recalls a note a fan sent him after Season 4. “Which has one of our more hopeful endings,” Bob-Waksberg says. “But he had just seen Episode 11, and he emailed me saying, ‘I understand what your show is trying to tell me: Life is bitter and hopeless and it’s never going to get better, and I should stop hoping that it’ll get better or try to make it better. It’s just one slow slog down the drain.’” Bob-Waksberg responded by telling him to please watch Episode 12. “And then he did. He’s like, ‘I feel much better now.’ I was like, ‘OK, good.’”
As the seriesmoved along, everyone in BoJack’s orbit tried to pull themselves up from the depths, even if it seemed impossible. As they grew, so did the show—both thematically and narratively. The audience got an inside look at every major character’s psyche, including Todd’s. Paul was touched when the kind goofball became TV’s most prominent asexual character. “I love that they decided to just tackle his identity and [him] trying to understand, wrap his own hands around like, ‘Wait, who am I truly? Who am I?’” Paul says. “And then obviously he realized, ‘Oh, I’m asexual.’ He didn’t even know that was a thing. And so many people come up to me, and I can tell right away that they want to talk to me about BoJack and specifically about asexual identity. And a lot of people said, ‘Look, I didn’t even know that was a thing. I just knew that I was different and I was just trying to find my place, and you really shined a light on something that I didn’t even really know existed, even though I’m living in that skin.’ It’s pretty amazing.”
Bob-Waksberg and the writers weren’t afraid to try new things. “At the beginning of just about every season, Raphael would pitch us a bold idea for one episode somewhere in the upcoming season,” says Fetter, now vice president of scripted series at Netflix. “He would pitch it off the cuff, and it always felt like it was going to be a terrible episode, leaving us skeptical. But inevitably, he would execute that big idea in such a mind-blowing way.”
One of those episodes barely had any dialogue. And it was set underwater. “I said, ‘Really?’” Eisner recalls. Bob-Waksberg told him yes. That idea became Season 3’s hypnotic “Fish out of Water.”
Then there was Season 5’s showstopper. Bob-Waksberg had always liked monologues. He wondered whether he could pull off an episode that was one long speech. “Just Will talking for 25 minutes,” he says. In the Emmy-nominated “Free Churro,” which Bob-Waksberg wrote, BoJack gives a wrenching eulogy at his abusive mother Beatrice’s funeral.
At most table reads, Arnett goofed around with Tompkins and Sedaris. This was different. He was the only actor there. “I thought, ‘I wonder how this is going to go. I guess we’re about to find out,’” he recalls. “And it was just very strange. And then reading it out loud, it worked. Which is just such a testament to how strong the material was.”
That day, the room was completely silent. “You could hear a pin drop,” Bob-Waksberg says. “It was just like everyone was on the edge of their seats. It was such this beautiful, intimate thing. It was incredible.”
In 2019, Netflix announced that the sixth season of BoJack Horseman would be its last. “It was such a dream job, and we were hoping to do it forever,” Paul says. “And so it was a bit of a hard pill to swallow when Netflix said, ‘Look, we love you, but we’re going to do one more season, and that’ll be it.’”
While making the final BoJack episodes, Bob-Waksberg didn’t allow himself to be wistful. He still had an ending to write. “It’s hard to internalize this idea of appreciating what you have while you have it,” he says. “There are moments where I enjoyed it, where I was having fun, where I thought, ‘This is cool. We’re doing something great. Look at me. I’m at TV fantasy camp.’ But I felt so much pressure all the time. Every season I thought, ‘This season has to top the last season, or people are going to hate us. People are going to hate me. This is the time where I let everybody down.’”
But that time never came. In the last scene of the series finale, BoJack and Diane have an intimate conversation on a roof. “Because we’d set up that imagery earlier, and that felt like something we kept coming back to,” Bob-Waksberg says. The question he had was “How do we get to that roof?”
Well, first BoJack hits bottom. After breaking into his old house, he nearly drowns in the pool. Then he’s sent to prison. He sees the sentence as comeuppance for a lifetime of shitty behavior. When he gets out of jail, he’s relieved to find that all the important people in his life have freed themselves from his grip. And BoJack, it seems, has freed himself from his own desperate need for validation. “I liked the idea of this final line, which Diane says, ‘It’s a nice night.’ And BoJack says, ‘Yeah, this is nice,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “Because it felt like so much of BoJack the character is him regurgitating the past or having anxiety about the future. And one of his difficulties is just being present in the moment. And so in a small way, giving him that, right at the end of the series, felt pathetic and rewarding and appropriate.”
“I think Raphael is right,” Arnett says. “BoJack spent so much time and the show spent so much time looking back at what made him so flawed and so worried about how he was going to be perceived and how he could manipulate people in situations. I think at the end of the day, all of that was sort of futile.” Arnett knew that BoJack was never going to be redeemed. “He wasn’t given the tools to mature and grow up, and we sort of see why. So how could we expect him to be this great guy?” he says. “I always thought it was kind of a miracle that he ended up being a functioning person at all.”
If there’s one thing that Arnett took from playing BoJack, it’s this: “Be honest with yourself about where you’re at. That’s what it taught me. I don’t always get it right, but I think I’m getting better at it.”
As the discussion of mental health issues has become less stigmatized in America in the 10 years since the show premiered, dozens of TV series and movies have depicted people dealing with past trauma and depression. But few, if any, have resonated quite like BoJackHorseman. “That’s one of the best shows that I’ve been in any way involved with in, I don’t know, 50 years,” says Eisner, who had a hand in Happy Days, Cheers, and Family Ties.
There’s a reason why Netflix’s Hollywood office has a big conference room named after the show. “I do think that BoJack Horseman showcased our ability to push boundaries in different mediums and certainly jump-started more animation and comedy in general,” Fetter says. “It’s probably the series most writers tell me they love all these years later.”
In the middle of working on BoJack,Hanawalt bought her first horse. “I found her on Facebook,” she says. “It was an impulsive purchase.” She also got her own anthropomorphic, animal-centric show, Tuca & Bertie, which ran for three seasons between Netflix and Adult Swim. Hanawalt hopes that there’s still a place for the kind of series like hers, the kind of series that BoJack helpedusher in. “I want there to be room for more experimentation and a little weirder stuff,” she says. “I like that. Keep it weird.”
Right now, Bob-Waksberg is working on his next project. This time, he plans to put a little less pressure on himself this time around. He’s come a long way in the past five years.
Before the last half season of BoJack Horseman was released, there was a premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Bob-Waksberg took the stage to start the screening, with a note written down to himself at the top of his speech. Take a breath and take in this moment.
“Because I felt like I hadn’t done that for the entire run of the show,” Bob-Waksberg says. “That’s something that I’ve tried to take with me since then, to not get so—like BoJack—hung up on the future or the past that I forget to be in the present.”
Financial institutions are looking to AI and generative AI to mitigate the rising risk of cyberattacks as fraudsters take advantage of the technology. Generative AI has allowed financial institutions to beef up their cybersecurity but has also lowered the barrier of entry for low-skilled adversaries to launch sophisticated attacks, according to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s 2024 […]
For a special summer issue of W, we asked a few of our favorite photographers—who are all inveterate travelers—to suggest some of their go-to destinations, cherished memories, and personal snapshots. The results were as varied as they were surprising and, hopefully, will inspire you to take a journey of your own.
Jamie Hawkesworth
Somewhere Along the Road to Inverness, Scotland, 2021
“This was my first time traveling with my dog in the camper van around the U.K.…lots of bones, lots of beaches. Glorious.”
Jeff Henrikson
Côte d’Azur, France, 2023
“When I look at this photograph, I remember thinking about my daughter becoming a big sister. At the time, my wife was pregnant with our second child, and I was thinking how moments like this would soon be much different as our family was expanding. Our daughter was obsessed with having a baby brother on the way, and we were focused on giving her and ourselves the best summer we could before he arrived.”
Mert Alas
Ibiza, 2014
“Night and day with Kate in July.”
Tyler Mitchell
Switzerland, 2024
“This was my first time in Switzerland. But it felt like the most elevated, pure water, pure air version of the lakes I grew up going to with friends in the Metro Atlanta area. It gave me an immense sense of calm and inspiration.”
Angelo Pennetta
Puglia, Italy, and North Cornwall, England, 2023
“My father is from Puglia, so I’ve been going there for as long as I can remember. The top photograph was taken at Ponte Ciolo, which is a deep canyon at the end of a hiking trail called Sentiero delle Cipolliane. My partner, Fran, and I recently renovated an old stone mill cottage in North Cornwall, close to where her family lives. The photo below was taken from the coastal path, which takes you to lots of remote bays and tidal beaches.”
Stephen Shore
Madison County, Montana, 2020
“I first went to Montana in the summer of 1979. My wife, Ginger, and I spent three months camping and fly-fishing there. In the spring of 2020, we drove there from New York and spent five months at our house in the hills outside of Bozeman. I gave myself two projects: to write a memoir and to begin photographing with a drone.”
Daniel Arnold
Superior, Wisconsin, 2017
“There was an eclipse—barely saw it, but it happened. Nobody cared much. We were all still aglow from the monarch butterflies my mom had hatched that afternoon with my brother’s kids. One nature miracle a day will do the trick, even on vacation.”
Rafael Pavarotti
Italy, 2022
“These are memories of wonderful sensations and emotions. Precious moments. I was feeling free. Surrounded by joy, comfort, nature, adventure, music, dance, and friends.”
Carlijn Jacobs
The South of France, Various Years
“The South of France is only a three-hour train ride from Paris. It’s mostly a place I go when nothing has been organized but we still want to go somewhere nice. Every summer, I travel with a group of friends and make it not about the destination but about the time we have together.”
Tina Barney
Sun Valley, Idaho, 1979
“I lived in Sun Valley during the school year from 1974 to 1982, and the best fun of all after skiing downhill almost every day was to cross-country ski up north, where there were spots you could have a picnic by a stream or find a hot tub.”
Westerly, Rhode Island, 1979
“The lifeguard seemed as if he were conducting an orchestra. This photograph was taken at a water slide we used to go to on days we wanted an alternative to the beach where we usually hung out. It was on a strip filled with games, rides, and places to grab an ice cream cone or some popcorn.”
Joshua Woods
Accra, Ghana, 2021
“This was my second time in Ghana, when I got the rare chance to photograph the fashion designer Ozwald Boateng. It’s a special place. As an African American, I find exploring the history and lands of the ancestors is always healing to the soul.”
