Julia Fox | Richie Shazam and ES Magazine
(Picture: Julia Fox | Richie Shazam and ES Magazine)Babe, can we do the interview now?’ Julia Fox asks, walking over to me from the other side of a small studio in downtown Manhattan. For the past six hours or so, I’ve listened to the actor-model 2022’s biggest celebrity fixture and her best friends, the photographer Richie Shazam and stylist Briana Andalore, call everyone babe. We’ve spent the day together on set for this photo shoot, shimmying Fox in and out of jellyfish-like bandeaux, patent leather Pleasers and latex gloves. Under the bright, multicoloured lights, we have all transformed into ‘babe’: the assistants, the set designers, Shazam’s boyfriend, Ben Draghi, who’s doing the videography. It’s as though the other-worldly fashion — picked out collaboratively by Andalore, Fox and Shazam, who were given creative carte blanche for ES’s Fashion Week issue — has morphed us from every - day humans into alien beauties.
The looks encapsulate a style that 32-year-old Fox has practically trade-marked, what she calls ‘dominatrix couture’ (see: latex, leather, laces, denim, bikinis, thigh-high boots, opera gloves arranged in chaotic harmony). She’s been photographed in variations of the look at the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party (wearing a leather, floor-length dress with a clawed hand attached to the top, clutching her neck); exiting a Broadway play during date night with Ye (black boots and a matching Balenciaga handbag); posing for the paparazzi on the sidewalks of Los Angeles (stiletto pumps and a latex miniskirt and tube top). Walking the line between real life and fantasy is how Fox has existed from day one. And she has spun that fantasy into a booming career, one in which she is both a nuanced auteur and a pop culture idol.
