danielle emerson Archives | Wonderland

Tree + Me

Wonderland Staff — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:08:46 +0000

Danielle Emerson and Joyce NG hang around.

The post Tree + Me appeared first on Wonderland.

Stars Aligned: Grimes

Wonderland Staff — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 12:14:31 +0000

After the success of her self-produced, self-penned and self- illustrated fifth album Art Angels, Grimes is enjoying the biggest high of her life.

Taken from the Summer Issue of Wonderland

“Once, a girl was so wasted she fell into my equipment, and knocked everything over, and started puking onstage.” Claire Boucher, AKA Grimes, is reminiscing, via Skype, about touring on a shoestring budget. In the gap that followed her fourth full-length Visions, released in 2012, there was no money to fly in the professional dancers she now tours with, so “we’d hire dancers in each city, it was insane. Some people would be stripping, or whatever, and it all went downhill very quickly sometimes.” An ever-shifting roster of dancers wasn’t her only problem. Boucher found the very act of performing live highly traumatising. “When Visions came out, I literally wouldn’t leave this 4×4 [ft] area where my samplers were. It took me two years just to walk to the front of the stage, I was so petrified. So yeah, things have probably changed a lot.”

Obviously it’s an understatement. Despite being recorded in Grimes’ apartment over three weeks using Garageband, Visions won Grimes fame and critical acclaim in the form of places near the top of “Album of the Year” lists from The Guardian to Pitchfork to NME. With the success of Visions came three years of intense press scrutiny whilst Boucher worked on the album’s follow-up. “That whole thing with the ditched album, it’s not even true,” she tells me. “It was like: ‘She has an album, now she doesn’t, it’s a huge problem.’” In reality, Boucher was touring constantly, honing her stagecraft both as support act for Lana Del Rey and on her own terms. It took a year to make Art Angels. “A year of like, every day. I took a break in between to do the tour opening with Lana, which really helped. There was like pre and post [Lana]. I also took a break to do the ‘REALiTi’ video.Those two things really helped. It just became, I think, so much of that album was about how stressed I was making that album!”

Whilst the lyrics on Visions had been almost inaudible, on Art Angels, Boucher’s words are more obvious, easier to hear over the swooning musical backdrop. It’s something she’s clearly conflicted about. “There’s things individually in the songs that I wanted to say – I wanted the songs to be about stuff. Like all the songs are about something explicitly or obtusely. Some of the stuff I hated about my earlier music, retroactively, was there was just stuff that was just sound design, no lyrics. Which is cool in its own way, but I dunno – I was just tired of people being like ‘What’s this song about’. And me being like, ‘nothing.’”

So, her songs are now about something. What that something is though, she’s not so keen on sharing. “Like everyone thinks ‘Flesh Without Blood’ is about the media, or a boyfriend, but what people think things are about is insane sometimes!” She’d prefer if people attached something of their own to her songs.“I do think a great pop song, you can ascribe your own meaning to. Any great pop song could be said to be about love even if it’s not. This is so dumb, but there was a song last year which I thought was a love song but was about someone dying. I mean!” Art Angels contains that same looseness: songs which, for the most part, could equally be about love or dying. Art Angels wasn’t always meant to be a pop record though.“Basically, I made a bunch of stuff, then the last couple of months was refining – like a lot of these songs used to be seven minutes long. But you kind of make these soundscapes, and fuck around with them, and then at the very end I came in and ruthlessly took out everything.”

That sense of ruthlessness explodes into her music videos. In “Flesh Without Blood”, Grimes is filmed wreaking havoc at California’s iconic Madonna Inn, dressed in a cowboy hat, a Marie Antoinette outfit, and fallen angel garb. “Kill V. Maim” meanwhile serves a kind of post- apocalyptic street fighter fantasy in the subway. When we talk, she’s just finished filming another video, this time for “California”, perhaps the most upbeat track on Art Angels. “California” she sighs. “It’s kind of a nightmare… I guess for me, it’s just not a song that needs a video. It’s a self-contained song, I have no visual inspiration from it whatsoever. It’s not very vibey! I’m not hating on the song, it’s just hard to make a music video with something, that’s not – you would never have a song like ‘California’ in a movie.” She’s wrong – “California” could definitely soundtrack a movie — just probably not the kind of twisted fashion fantasy that Claire Boucher would want to direct.

The day after we talk, Grimes is set to go on tour again. This time however, there’re no strippers dancing on stage with her. Not that her dancers don’t have a sharp edge. “The girls I auditioned, I asked to improvise. And the girls I chose did the craziest, weirdest improvisations.” Surrounding herself with the frenzy of physical activity makes her feel safe. “I always liked having dancers because it’s straight-up more entertaining. I used to have this band that were unplugged, because my [male] booking agent at the time insisted ‘You need a band onstage’. And I was like, ‘If I’m paying people to perform, let’s get actual fucking dancers!’ Everyone prefers dancers to watching some guy with a bass that’s not plugged in!”

Grimes is a self-produced, self-written, self-directed, self-every- thing-ed project. Art Angels is an album which pays testament to that, a homage to her growing confidence. “I felt like there were a couple of years where I’d become so much better technically as a musician than where I was with Visions, but Visions was the thing standing in culture, dictating how people saw me. But it’s nice to get all that out, because now I feel more relaxed.” Here Grimes stands, at the very front of the stage.

All clothing and accessories by LOUIS VUITTON SS16

Photography: Joyce NG

Fashion: Danielle Emerson

Hair: Rick Gradone using R+CO at Atelier Management

Makeup: Kelsey Deenihan mark. Celebrity Makeup Artist at The Wall Group

Fashion Assistant: Abigail Hazard

Words: Jack Sunnucks

The post Stars Aligned: Grimes appeared first on Wonderland.

Is There Life On Mars?

Wonderland Staff — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:50:03 +0000

Crazy golf meets couture.

The post Is There Life On Mars? appeared first on Wonderland.

Soko

Wonderland Staff — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 12:23:30 +0000

Actor and musician Soko tells us about, well everything.

The post Soko appeared first on Wonderland.

She’s All Swishy In Her Satin And Tat

Wonderland Staff — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 11:14:56 +0000

The post She’s All Swishy In Her Satin And Tat appeared first on Wonderland.

WONDERLAND NOV/DEC ISSUE – OUT THURSDAY!

Wonderland Staff — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:32:34 +0000

Our latest issue of Wonderland drops on shelves this Thursday starring the Princess of Pop, Taylor Swift, as cover girl

Shake it off with the Princess of Pop

TAYLOR SWIFT

The teen dream WILLOW SMITH

Head over heels with HEDI SLIMANE

A double fantasy PERFUME GENIUS X PORTISHEAD

In la la land with TINASHE

Last issue we brought you the meanest of the Mean Girls and this time it’s the most heavenly of heroins. We thought long and hard about who reigns Queen in the land of pop purity. The question remained, who better than one-time Wonderland cover girl Taylor Swift? (Cue X-Factor voice over) The 7-time Grammy winner, multi-platinum selling, global superstar, with over 75 million downloads worldwide and the only female artist in history to have 3 consecutive number 1 albums. The answer: Noone. We caught up with a little more mature, more open and more LOLz Taylor about her love life, or lack thereof, the hidden messages she embeds into her lyrics and her desire to make a really unpretentious yet nonconforming pop album.

Elsewhere in the issue you’ll find 13 year-old Roc-Nation signee Willow Smith whipping her hair back and forth, Mona Matsuoka with crazy braids, Devon Windsor equipped with pristine Farrah Fawcett ‘do courtesy of Wonderland’s Fashion Director Matthew Josephs and hair-goddess Roxy Attard and Perfume Genius shot in LA by Hedi Slimane – get your hands on all 322 pages this Thursday.

ON SALE IN SHOPS THIS THURSDAY, PRE-ORDER AT MAGAZINECAFE.CO.UK.

FASHION EDITOR: Danielle Emerson

PHOTOGRAPHER: Thomas Whiteside

Taylor wears BOSS.

The post WONDERLAND NOV/DEC ISSUE – OUT THURSDAY! appeared first on Wonderland.

DIESEL BLACK GOLD

Wonderland Staff — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:01:37 +0000

Ice white denim is given a tough edge with grommets and distressed details in Global Creative Director Andreas Melbostad’s spring collection.

All clothing from DIESEL BLACK GOLD Spring Summer 2014 Collection.
Photographer Piczo
Fashion Editor Danielle Emerson
Hair Hiroshi Matsushita using KIEHL’S SINCE 1851
Makeup Thom Walker using CHANEL LE LIFT and S 2014
Fashion Assistance Elizabeth Fowler
Models Diana Moroz at IMG London, Niall Underwood at FM Model Agency, Rebecca Marcos at Models1, Charles Markham at Premier Model Management and Lewis-Chesson Grieve at Nevs.

The post DIESEL BLACK GOLD appeared first on Wonderland.

RYAN LO – GRUMPY DOLLS

Wonderland Staff — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 13:17:13 +0000

Jack Sunnucks talks Sylvanian Families and Bunny MacDougal with ex-Fashion East designer Ryan Lo.

Ryan Lo’s spring collection was his last under the nurturing umbrella of Fashion East, the not-for-profit organisation helmed by Lulu Kennedy that gives a runway platform to young designers. Next season he’ll be showing, but as a presentation on models. Throughout his time with East he’s stayed true to his aesthetic, that of a sweetness so sickly it’s almost sinister. Ryan is very shy and hides behind a vividly bleached bob, shifting position constantly whilst he swigs from a litre bottle of ginger beer, pulling at his now infamous “PU**Y CUM ASK ME OUT” t-shirt.

When asked about his amazingly (non) offensive slogans, Ryan says he was watching a documentary about phone sex which made him laugh. He wondered what was offensive enough to get him on the Daily Mail, and “I thought ‘Fuck’ is just not enough, it’s just normal, so I came up with this and ‘Your Mouth Is My Toilet Paper”. My mum hates that t-shirt.” This is the subversive heart of the Ryan Lo label. This season he was inspired by the Sylvanian families he played with growing up, and thus the girls marched out with animal features painted on their faces. It was so incredibly frou frou and “fifilala” in this quite bizarre way, as if the toy animals had broken out of their plastic tree houses and gone clubbing, but weren’t really into it. He’s always inspired by dolls and toys, especially by the Blythe dolls so popular in Asia, saying: “There’s something a bit sick in a way with the eyes and the proportion. They look innocent but they’re not that innocent, toys for young adults rather than teenagers I guess.”

Ryan didn’t always want to work in fashion, in fact: “I didn’t want to work in fashion at all, I just wanted to buy clothes”, at which point he dissolves in a fit of giggles. After finishing school and having the dreaded conversation with his mum about what to do with his life, he elected to come and study at the London College of Fashion, having never been to the city before. At the time he was only 16, which gives a clue to the grit at the centre of his soft-seeming universe. Tellingly, one of his TV icons is Sex and the City arch bitch and matriarch Bunny MacDougal, Charlotte York’s pitbull of a mother-in-law who clads herself mainly in hideous pastels. “She wears all these pastel colours and sweet things but she’s a bitch, that’s quite Ryan Lo. And, my girl, she’s more slutty and out there.”
One of his inspirations has always been Sonia Rykiel: “She did like sex toys and lacy bras… the showgirl spirit, it’s French and a bit poetic with stockings and suspenders.” Like Rykiel, Ryan tries to avoid trends. “I always know what I want to do for the next two seasons, but then I’m usually one season behind trends! It’s either really weird or really on-trend! Sometimes I think I should skip one season ahead.”

What makes Ryan’s designs so exciting and different to current modes, is that they’re decidedly “occasion”-oriented, and not really for popping to the shop. “I’m slowly expanding to the everyday, but I guess it’s for when you go to Claridges to have tea; for ladies who lunch. I quite like ladies who lunch. Very Uptown.” I ask him if there’s strength to be found in looking like a birthday cake, if a woman so saccharine can survive. “I think so. It’s multi personality basically, so she’s a bit grumpy and only sometimes sweet – she has a strong personality, she’s not boring.” Sounds like the designer himself – sweet and grumpy.

All clothing Ryan Lo S/S14, Tan Leather Clogs by Louis Vuitton
Photographer Liam Warwick
Fashion Editor Danielle Emerson
Words Jack Sunnucks
Hair Stylist Hiroshi Matsushuta
Makeup Artist Thom Walker
Fashion Assistance Toni-Blaze Ibekwe
Makeup Assistance Anna Richie
Model Daisy Davidson

The post RYAN LO – GRUMPY DOLLS appeared first on Wonderland.

Little Mix: Salute

Wonderland Staff — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 12:43:51 +0000

Your Saturday night starts right here!

This week see’s X Factor graduates Little Mix debut their second album under Simon Cowell’s SYCO label. Salute is a perfect mix of 90’s club pop and R&B. With a slightly matured sound and lots more attitude, it’s easy to see that the girls have gone away and thought about the direction in which they want their music to go. Much like their pop rivals One Direction, Little Mix look likely to conquer the US and deservedly so. We met up with girls a few weeks ago in East London and took some pictures to confirm that Tulisas’s ‘lil muffins’ are all grown-up.

Photography by Liam Warwick

Styling by Danielle Emerson

Photography assistance by Andre Titcombe

Styling assistance by Daisy Davidson

Hair by Aaron Carlo at Headmasters using Kerastase styling

Make up by Adam Burrell using Mac

–

Perrie wears coat and neck-scarf by Miu Miu, Vintage pink silk slip by John Galliano
Leigh-Anne wears army print dress by Christopher Kane
Jade wears vintage Dior polo shirt from Vintage Modes, Sliver PVC skirt stylists own, Pink leather handbag by Hanae Mori from Vintage Modes and pink earrings by Juicy Couture
Jessy wears pink cardigan by Red Valentino

Group shot from left to right
Leigh-Anne wears pink mohair skirt suit by Jonathon Saunders, vintage mustard mary janes by Prada; Jade wears vintage Dior polo shirt from Vintage Modes, Sliver PVC skirt stylists own, Pink leather handbag by Hanae Mori from Vintage Modes, Pink earrings by Juicy Couture, vintage pink mules by Russell and Bromley; Perrie wears vintage pink silk slip by John Galliano, pink neck scarf by Miu Miu and pink sleeveless jacket by Topshop, black suede court shoes by Jimmy Choo; Jessy wears vintage pink dress and belt both by Prada, vintage blue blazer by Celine from Vintage Modes and nude court shoe by Jimmy Choo.

Perrie wears leopard print coat by Christopher Kane (menswear)
Leigh-Anne wears pink mohair skirt suit by Jonathon Saunders
Jade wears vintage orange wool jacket by Charles Anastase and necklace and hairclips both stylists own
Jessy wears vintage pink dress and belt both by Prada, vintage blue blazer by Celine from Vintage Modes

The post Little Mix: Salute appeared first on Wonderland.