The front woman of Garbage, musician Shirley Manson is one of the most iconic figures of 90’s music, both in terms of her extraordinary style and exceptional talent. Famously outspoken, she engaged audiences around the world with her intimate, vulnerable and honest lyrics about gender, identity and self-acceptance whilst simultaneously inspiring a generation into a self-styled DIY feminist aesthetic.

Dismissed as ‘the face of Garbage’ by mainstream media who presumed her ‘sex-kitten’ image couldn’t co-exist alongside the creation of rock music, Shirley’s sustained success has aggressively disproven the disappointing misogynist narratives that stalked her early career. We talked to Shirley about what it was like to be musically ignored because of her looks, her insecurities in the public eye and, of course, what lipsticks work best on stage.

We’ve spoken before about your insecurity growing up… how did that manifest when you were a kid?

I dealt with a lot of insecurity about my appearance when I was young: I was red haired, so I was different right from the start. But one day, I was getting ready for a school play of the Wizard of Oz – I was playing the wicked witch of the west – and I painted my face green, with lots of black eye makeup. I remember looking in the mirror thinking, ‘I’ve never looked this good’. Then I saw Siouxie and the Banshees on Top of the Pops, completely transformed by makeup, and I fell in love. Makeup has been a huge part of my life: I used it for escape, for transformation, for joy, as a tranquilizer, because when I’m getting ready, it calms me. And I always had a fascination with it… I was always keen to read articles in female magazines, how to do this and how to do that.

 I love that now you can get YouTube tutorials.

I can even watch Shirley Manson tutorials! They’re funny.

 Does anyone get it really wrong?

Not always but sometimes it’s really funny how they go about trying to emulate my makeup, it’s sweet. The problem is that how you evolve as a human being is through failure. But the idea of failure has become so ugly and it’s worrisome now that you can learn to do everything perfectly following people on YouTube. But, hey ho!

It’s funny how things have shifted from women in music when you started, with DIY post-punk feminism and riot grrrl, to the immaculate pop phenomenons at the moment…

[Laughs] Everyone comes out of a box now, with stylists and makeup artists. Nobody is stumbling out of the box making mistakes and doing ridiculous things like we did in the 90s. Gwen [Stefani] and I had a discussion recently about how when we came out we didn’t have makeup artists, we didn’t have stylists and we put ourselves together. And looking back at the pictures now, it’s patently obvious we did it ourselves, but there was a certain uniqueness about each person as a result.

And anyone who does stumble in the public eye is berated.

Yes! There’s pages in magazines devoted to ugly faces singers pull on stage… and it’s so destructive to the fabric of our society! The message sent to the general populous is, ‘if they’re criticizing her, how must they look upon me?’ As a result, you have so many women scared to take a chance, pull a funny face, to fail at something. They’re so scared of being imperfect. You see the same girls pulling the same face in the photographs that they take of themselves with their iPhones: safe face, safe angle. And all the girls on the red carpet pull the same positions for fear they’re gonna get laughed at.

And it’s so many girls. There are so few older women celebrated for being beautiful, being powerful, it seems like it’s becoming exclusively youth that is safe, that is seen as empowering.

I find it laughable that 19 year olds feel they have all the power because I feel like if any young woman should come into MY den, we’ll see who’s the alpha female! [Laughs] “Alright little girl, let’s go, let’s see where you can take this.” But that’s something I’ve learnt over years of trying to navigate the world feeling less than, just because I wasn’t 19 anymore. Young women undoubtedly have power – I love watching it, I love its interplay and innocence and its beauty but age definitely has its compensations. And what saddens me now is that I heard stories just over the weekend of young girls, 21 years old, having boob jobs and nose jobs and botox! At 21! They haven’t even learnt to enjoy their own face yet!

It’s preventative!

As if the worst thing that could happen to us all is age! It’s nuts. The pubescent idea is so disempowering in the first place. I feel like it’s the biggest heist that has ever been played on women, this obsession with something we can’t control. We’re all obsessed with the fear of aging, of the physical attributes of a fully empowered woman and as a result, everyone is chasing a nubile image that we can’t possibly hold onto: we’re expending all our energies grasping at sand. One wonders what we would do with all our mental powers and our faculty and our energy if we weren’t focusing it on something we have no control over and instead putting into something we do.

That’s what I love about cosmetics – they are a temporary way of expressing yourself however you want, they can be empowering rather than reductive.

Yes! I loved makeup, I love to feel beautiful, I love the fact I can play with my image and use it to my advantage much like a peacock uses its feathers to pull a following… it is powerful. I always loved Ani DiFranco’s line: “Like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind”. I wish I wrote it.

What are your favourite products?

MAC’s Lady Danger, always. And what I can’t live without is Chanel Vitalumiere, it’s my favourite foundation, dewy and delicious. And there’s a new very strange lipstick that I’ve fallen in love with, called Lime Crime… they have weird matte sticks you can put on all night long. The lipglosses are called Velveteens. They’re amazing and they have amazing neon eyeliners, too: electric blues and oranges. They stay on forever, even when you’re on stage.

Find out more on the fabulous Shirley Manson and Garbage here and @garbage

Olivia Singer discusses the role of beauty with the fabulous, the subversive, and the always cool industry-insider leading ladies. She’s Editor of Under the Influence magazine and a freelance writer who focuses on feminism, beauty, politics and the relationship between the three.

Words: Olivia Singer (follow Olivia on Twitter @oliviasinger)

Images: Autumn de Wilde (follow Autumn de Wilde @autumndewilde)

The post Beauty Talk: Shirley Manson appeared first on Wonderland.

Porn star Stoya was the first ‘alt-porn’ girl to be signed to a contract by Digital Playground, one of the commercial powerhouses of the pornographic industry. Raucously outspoken about what sex on camera means to her and the artifice manifested in her performances, writing about queer culture and heteronormativity for Vice whilst Instagramming her cats, she doesn’t conform to what we she doesn’t acquiesce to typically assumed conventions of adult performers. Home-schooled by a feminist mother in North Carolina, she now exists between New York where she works on performance art and Los Angeles, with her porn star boyfriend. We spoke with her about growing up in a powerfully liberal environment, what it’s like not looking like the rest of the Digital Playground girls and how many exfoliators she uses to keep her looking camera-sex-ready.

Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us about this stuff, I think your perspective on beauty and performance is really interesting…

I feel a personal responsibility to talk about the realities of all of this. In porn work, the actual videos and photo shoots for porn magazines, beauty is very overdone: tons of makeup, overdrawn lips, glossy. And then, all of the Photoshop that gets piled on and then the ungodly amount of money and time that I spend on exfoliating and moisturizing and hair removal on top of that. Maybe to some people I look awesome even with no makeup on, but all of this work that goes into that even that would be ridiculous if I was a secretary or a professional writer. When I retire and what I look like no longer directly affects my bank account, hell no, I’m not going to spend that much on face cream! That would be absurd!

There’s such a culture right now of examining women in the public eye with an HD lens and criticizing them for how they exist ‘off-camera’, but you’re so honest about yourself online.

I think it will be wonderful that so many people are growing up in public right now. At some point in the fairly near future, we’re gonna have to really come to terms with the fact that everyone has fucked up in public to some degree and then we’ll hopefully start to give everybody a bit of a break. What entertains me no end is that people look at me and are like, ‘you could be my daughter, you look like the girls my daughter hangs out with’ and they have to rethink the humanity of performers. It’s pretty cool. And on top of that, I just decided to get fucked in the ass on HD video and after the inside of your rectum is available in matte high definition on demand, it’s pretty hard to get embarrassed about anything. Oh, you have a picture of me throwing up in a lemonade container? Cool. The whole of the internet can see the inside of my asshole! [Laughs]

Did you grow up with a sense of freedom about yourself and your body?

Yeah, my mum is awesome. I was home-schooled with her. She was very active in women’s rights and I just grew up thinking, ‘right! It’s my body, I can do whatever I want, I can do whatever I want with career options and whatever I want with who I choose to interact with in a sexual way.’ I had this wonderful sense of entitlement to just be a person. But then what t I wanted to do was have sex in public on camera – and not only do that but do it in a very false eyelashes, high heels, all the aesthetics of the patriarchy kind of way. So she was a little bit bumpy for a few years… but she’s coming around.

I was intrigued that Digital Playground has offered you free breast implants when your aesthetic angle is so much about being lean and sexy in a less conventional way.

A lot of girls come into this because they want to be a porn star, and they have an idea of what a porn star is. And that involves huge breasts; if they weren’t born with huge breasts, then they wanna have ‘em anyway. So I took it as Digital being very kind but not knowing my personality very well. Most of the contract girls over the years at all of the different companies have had very large breasts. [Laughs] There was one point where we were all bunched up for some picture at a convention and I looked around and suddenly felt, ‘wow! I’m the only one here that’s really pale and has small breasts and dark hair, I feel kind of gangly and awkward, this must be like what puberty was like for most people!’

That’s funny. With how you present yourself aesthetically, did you grow up looking up to skinny, pretty, goth-y looking ladies?

I grew up looking up to Margot Fontaine, and simultaneously looking up to and wanting to choke my mother. But makeup for me was a stage-only thing: I wanted to be a ballerina, so it was that horrible baby blue eyeshadow up to your eyebrows and lipstick on your cheeks. I wasn’t messing around with it until I was 13, when I went through my goth phase and drew all over my face with liquid eyeliner and would wear purple lipstick with craft glitter pressed into it. Then, for the signings and being on set and all of that, there’s always a makeup artist that takes care of that stuff for you. So I started thinking about it more, like, ‘oh if I wear just mascara on the upper eyelashes and little bit of concealer, I look so professional and trustworthy and polished.’ And it became this whole fun thing, another way of how you present yourself to the world.

Are there any cosmetics that you particularly into? You must have the best exfoliator in the world.

There’s a rice powder from Pacha. And I’ve been spending a lot of time in Southern California because my boyfriend lives here, and the air is so dry! There’s this brightening serum, and almond oil, both from L’Occitane, and I slather myself in that stuff head to toe like four times a day.

So are you in LA full time now?

All my shoes moved here. And my three cats. That’s pretty much the barometer of where I live.

For me, it’s my cosmetics.

You should be a beauty editor and get sent stuff!

I do get sent stuff sometimes and it’s amazing… the novelty doesn’t wear off, either, every time I get a free lipstick I’m like, ‘oh my god, free lipstick, my teenage dreams come true!’

When I was a kid, I wanted to perform in New York, surrounded by lunatics and rhinestones and have wonderful artist friends. And every time I trip over a stray rhinestone that’s come off one of my costumes, I think, ‘man, my life is so cool!’ I want to go back in time to the little home-schooled girl who had corrective lenses and a lazy eye and braces and a back brace for scoliosis… I just wanna go back and be like ‘hang in there! It’ll be alright!’ I would also give her some makeup grade glitter instead of that craft stuff. I don’t want her to ruin her gastrointestinal tract.

Want to know more about  Stoya’s work and feminism in the porn industry? Then follow her on Twitter @stoya.

Olivia Singer is Editor of Under the Influence magazine and a freelance writer who focuses on feminism, beauty, politics and the relationship between the three.

Words: Olivia Singer (follow Olivia on Twitter @oliviasinger)

Images: Steve Prue

The post Beauty Talk: Stoya appeared first on Wonderland.