top of page
© Linda McIntosh
ARCHIVAL FASHION ZINE PROFILING
CONTRARIAN HEROINES OF FASHION,
FILM AND ART.
RUN BY JESSICA ANN RICHARDSON
& GIRL GANG OF CONTRIBUTORS
marchioness > blog
The French Dispatch (2021)
Urban Life
The ‘love letter to journalism’, The French Dispatch takes you through a series of articles about an incarcerated painter, political radicals falling in love, and a culinary crime story. Set in France, the story feels nostalgic like a retro copy of The New Yorker. Wes Anderson transported me from my couch in dreary England to Ennui, as if I were flicking through the pages of a vibrant magazine, my fingers covered in crumbs from my breakfast croissant while I sip from a cup of café au lait.
Happening (2022)
Urban Life
In Audrey Diwan’s Happening, she shows the life-altering consequences of a young woman's illegitimate pregnancy. The stakes seem impossibly severe and a thing of the past, yet not at all far-fetched when we consider the aforementioned threat to Roe v. Wade. In states like Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Alabama doctors that perform abortions outside stringent legal limits may face anything from a $100,000 fine or up to ninety-nine years in prison.
Daisy Jones & The Six (2019)
Urban Life
When I read Daisy Jones and the Six, for the first of three times, I was on a high-speed train crossing the Spanish countryside on my way to an interview that would change my life forever. The seat beside me was empty, and so the pages became my only companion. I put my AirPods on and started reading. It took me less than thirty pages to realise I had something extraordinary between my hands.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein (2022)
Urban Life
Coco Mellors’ debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, must be added to your summer reading list. It brings together everything that is at once artful, light, emotionally complex, and romantic – and I don’t just say this because I read it on a sunny balcony in Portugal. A love story gone wrong; the novel follows Cleo, a 24-year-old British artist living in New York, and her relationship with Frank, a wealthy older man. The beginning is full of hope brimming with romantic conventions and cliches that we have come to love. But as Mellors said, ‘it’s about the darkness beneath that glittering façade.’ Just when we expect the relationship, and following marriage, to save both protagonists, we are left hanging, faced with the bleakness of their new life together. It is a novel rooted in reality.
Suspiria (2018)
Urban Life
Remaking a film is never an easy feat— especially when it is a cult classic like Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Forty-five years later after the film’s initial release, Luca Guadagnino tasked himself with this rather tricky proposition. Yet his depiction of the batshit ballet school is a reincarnation as gorgeous as it is gruesome.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Urban Life
Almost every cast member in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza delves into some form of self-parody. It is a true story, weaved into a true story, weaved into fiction. Cooper Hoffman’s character Gary is a child actor-turned-salesman who, in real life, runs a production company with Tom Hanks. Bradley Cooper, star of the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born, plays John Peters, the ex-boyfriend of Barbara Streisand - star of the 1976 remake of A Star is Born. Then there are the Haim sisters – or, as they are known after time-travelling back into the early 1970s, the Kane sisters.
Her Body and Other Parties (2017)
Urban Life
Author Carmen Maria Machado melds together genres into an alluring and disturbing package of short stories in Her Body and Other Parties (2017), blurring the lines between psychological horror and science fiction with a strong feminist sensibility. The bodies of these fictional women are subjected to unsettling and grotesque horrors that directly mirror the real-world violence that women are faced with.
The Nest (2020)
Urban Life
Picture this: your perfect eighties nuclear family moves from New York City to a bleak estate in the English countryside. No, not the country, Surrey; the natural setting for a horror film. You are unable to decorate or fill the vacant rooms, so you close the doors and neglect them. The hedges are trimmed like dungeon walls. You start waking up alone after years of being greeted by your husband with a cup of coffee and a kiss. Perhaps you are going mad.
Melancholia (2011)
Urban Life
Lars von Trier’s portrayal of depression, starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, has gained infamy for good reason. After more than ten years, Von Trier’s depiction of mental health remains unique by neither romanticising nor stigmatising it. Von Trier simply portrays it as it is: insanely confusing but altogether human.
Fat Girl (2001)
Urban Life
Fat Girl (2001) sticks with you after the credits roll because it attaches itself to a known fear. French auteur, Catherine Breillat, artfully deconstructs the psychological and somatic fears inherent to the female lived experience; all of the moral and emotional offences which occur in this horror-of-a-film are so commonplace that we seem to accept and/or remember experiencing them.
bottom of page