MAYA JAMA wears JACKET by HERMÈS, UNDERWEAR by FLEUR DU MAL, SHOES by LANVIN ARCHIVE @ RELLIK LONDON.
Stay informed on our latest news!
A Private Love
Today, we aim to strip back Maya’s self-professed alter ego, her television self, to reveal something rawer, more exposed. She says it feels natural to her, because day to day, she isn’t in full glam. Maybe it’s only novel for those of us who don’t know her personally. We only know her from the outside, staring through a warped screen. Maya is acutely aware of this fact. “No one’s really going to know you unless they actually spend time with you,” she affirms when she loosens up later in our conversation.
Getting to know Maya begins with something light: learning how she gets hyped for a shoot. From soulful house to Goldie Boutilier’s Cowboy Gangster Politician, music is essential. As soon as she wakes up, she turns on the speakers; it’s the first step towards “feeling sexy about yourself.” It’s an inch closer to confidence and self-love.
“I feel like a distant vicar or something,” she jokes, reminiscing about the three marriages that have occurred during her time hosting Love Island.
Is the show really about love? Or is it about fame, desire, and validation? She thinks the show sits somewhere in between, though she’s keener to reassure me that most contestants find love whether they expect it or not. “[It’s an] extreme holiday romance, basically,” she finishes. I appreciate her sincerity, but I cannot quite suspend the belief that this is the whole picture. With brand deals and social media success on the horizon for the contestants, the reality show can feel inherently transactional and performative, like an artificial celebrity-making machine. Perhaps we’re being too cynical.
AYA JAMA wears HARNESS by HERMÈS, SCARF STYLIST’S OWN, SILK BRIEFS by AGENT PROVOCATEUR.
But how much of love does Maya think is real, and how much of it is performance? “It depends on where you look, because I feel like I love wholeheartedly. I could ignore the world if I’m with the person I love… I think my love is pure love.” She diverts the conversation back to herself, yet remains guarded, prepared even. It’s intriguing: What she says is deeply romantic but lacks distinction or vulnerability. Love is harder to unpack amid glam, where the private self disappears into a public persona.
The room falls into a brief silence, save for the rhythmic scraping of Maya’s nails being filed, as I ask about her controversial fashion opinions. For once, she pauses. “I love them on other people, but I don’t like loafers on me.” She suddenly turns to me. “Have you got a loafer on?” The once quiet room breaks into laughter as we all glance down at my shoes: a well-loved, heavily creased pair of leather loafers.
“I never fell out of love with a skinny jean,” she continues. “Don’t shoot me.” She admits she may still own a pair but has largely “been bullied out of them.” Her hair and makeup team jumps in to defend skinny jeans. Perhaps Maya’s love for them will lead to their revival, an unassuming renaissance.
MAYA JAMA wears SKIRT by MIU MIU ARCHIVE @ RELLIK LONDON.
MAYA JAMA wears EARRINGS by ANTHONY VACCARELLO for SAINT LAURENT.
Skinny jeans aside, Maya is most open when talking about her role in The Gentlemen. It feels like a full-circle moment. Acting was her first love, but an early rejection from Skins, a seminal British teen drama, temporarily derailed those ambitions. The show would go on to define 2000s youth culture in the UK. “[At the time] I was like, ‘fuck acting. Never doing this again.’” Joining a show directed by Guy Ritchie fully completes the circle, seeing Maya reclaim the raw grit of Skins after years of polished hosting. Moments like this have shifted her perspective on rejection completely: “As I’ve gotten older, I just see it as redirection.”
Yet, this role felt kismet. Acting had completely faded into the back of her mind as her presenting career took off. “I achieved pretty much all the dreams I had as a presenter,” she reflects. “I wanted to try something new and challenge myself again.” She found exactly that when joining the show for Season Two, as being the newcomer meant working alongside a cast and crew who knew each other very well. Maya had to find her feet in this dynamic. “I didn’t think I was that shy,” she confides.
Acting meant unlearning the hyper-charismatic on-camera persona she has built over more than a decade of presenting, one where focusing on the lens is essential. The largest hurdle to clear was embracing the fiction, channeling another character, but Maya found it deeply rewarding. At the end of a day of shooting, she had surpassed the limits of her ultra-likable image and was genuinely proud of herself.
Maya doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon. She needs the thrill, the frenzy of ambition, of taking risks. “It’s exciting. Why not do it while you can?” She remains tight-lipped about her upcoming projects and new role, but Maya wants to break away from people’s expectations. “I want them to love me for my skill, even if it’s as a villain.” It sounds ironic from someone with such a curated identity, yet her reaction is telling. Playing a villain would be an act of reaching for recognition beyond the singular persona she presents. She continues, mentioning the challenge of separating an actor from their character; playing a villain would completely deconstruct the stability of her existing archetype.
MAYA JAMA wears TOP by RICK OWENS, BRA by ALEXANDRE VAUTHIER ARCHIVE @ RELLIK LONDON, GARTER BELT by AGENT PROVOCATEUR, SILK BRIEFS STYLIST’S OWN, TIGHTS by FALKE.
MAYA JAMA wears SKIRT by MIU MIU ARCHIVE @ RELLIK LONDON.
Trolls are the other side of this coin. Yet, Maya doesn’t let them get her down. “I feel sorry,” she says, “like you’ve got time to do that.” It’s a mixture of empathy and curiosity. “I don’t know anyone that sits and trolls a stranger,” she laughs. In a world filled with trolls and haters, crazy rumours are never far behind. “I’m always defending not having had a boob job. I’m not against it in the future but, so far, the tits are real,” she tells me with a giggle. She isn’t defensive. The idea is amusing.
Her laughter subsides as we return to love, unconditional love. “It is seeing someone for every flaw and imperfection… and still loving every part of it,” she smiles. “Riding through the tough bits is unconditional [love].” Her answer shows a vulnerability, as a layer reveals itself. Above all, she chooses to highlight the fundamental importance of acceptance and perseverance.
What is Maya’s greatest love story? I expect a lengthy anecdote, but what she says cuts through the abstraction of her other answers: it’s her mother. “I feel like we grew up together,” she says. “She had me at 19 and did everything herself. She was just a baby.” Family is at the center of love for Maya. “Now we’re more like a sister-motherhood. She’s still learning from me, and I’m learning from her.” It’s a relationship of safety, of shared experiences and mutual growth, a sacred one. A sanctuary away from prying eyes.
From the light-hearted fun of wearing skinny jeans, to embodying villainous characters, or growing through life with her mum, to Maya, love isn’t a singular convention. It’s a lifetime of private moments shielded from fame, a love held together by memory, not performance.
Recommended articles
Inside Madonna's Club Confessions NYC
As we skip the sprawling line and get the good kind of profiled (“You two are going to Basement, right?), my heart beats a little faster. We’re heading into Madonna’s Club Confessions, a celebration of her now No. 1 album and 15th album Club Confessions II and speaking of sanctification, or maybe it’s just the queen in an angelic wig, the vibes are giving heaven. So, here we stand, in a room so queer I feel the urge to give a land acknowledgment for myself and all the semi-straights taking up space. I do my best. I dance so hard I rip a tear in my see-through Victoria's Secret dress. I air-kiss, cheek-kiss, and actually kiss friends and acquaintances. I shake my ass, respectfully, when Fcukers take the stage, as is my birthright as a New York City dirtbag. I succumb to the free drink tickets. I spot my favorite niche celebrities in the VIP: Kim Petras, Myha'la, and Richie Shazam. I have another Absolut vodka soda that tastes nothing like the one I ordered the round before. I dance with my friend Eduardo between the blurry photos we take on our phones.
Madonna takes the stage with Stuart Price. I inhale deeply — the same air as Madonna. "Are you hot?" Mother scolds from her DJ tower. "Take your clothes off!" she adds with a smile, each of us howling back in her direction. We all look around, making eye contact in the agreement of our bliss. In the words of "Danceteria": "Everyone here is a work of art."
Are you hot?" Mother scolds from her DJ tower. "Take your clothes off!
I’ve borrowed too many cigarettes, made too much small talk about the heat wave breaking, and the drinks have made the marquee blurry. It’s time for me to head home, but not without feeling grateful for what I’ve witnessed. In a world that so often feels like the end of days, what a glorious embodiment of revival, of beginnings, of reckless abandon, of unbridled queer joy. As prep provider and event sponsor, MISTR’s CEO Tristan Schukraft said after the festivities: "Dance floors have always been places where we celebrate who we are."
Waiting for my Uber, scrolling through photos and reading that Lindsey Graham had passed away, likely as we danced to Madonna's "Hung Up," I can’t help but recognize his words as true.
Fashion Belongs to the Streets
LYAS wears SWEATSHIRT by OTTOLINGER
LYAS wears HAT STYLIST’S OWN, TOP STYLIST’S OWN, PANTS by ACNE STUDIO, SHOES by COURRÈGES
"I'm never led by fear. I'm led by curiosity and passion and fantasy, trying to create a world for me that I see myself in."
— Elias Medini
He grew up in a provincial French town with two schoolteacher parents. A happy childhood, he says, but one in which he never quite felt he was where he belonged. He was a queer kid with a Muslim upbringing that was open-minded, almost enough. So he escaped inward first, through cinema and eleven years of drama at the local Conservatoire, and then outward to Paris, where he arrived determined to reinvent himself.
Fashion became his laboratory. Not fashion as aspiration, or fashion as status. Fashion as a series of propositions about identity. The red lip he wears now is not an aesthetic accident. It is a claim. It is, he says, something that has been feminine coded for so long that when a man wears it unironically, without the vampire deflection, without the safety of black nail polish, it becomes a statement of ownership. "Men want to appropriate feminine culture without taking the risk," he says. "I think it makes my lips sensual." He is colour blind and cannot always replicate the same shade. He does not especially care. It is always red. That is all that matters.
The story of La Watch Party begins, as the best stories do, with a rejection. In June of last year, Medini was not invited to the Dior show, a show he had attended before. He boarded a plane, furious, and spent the flight trying to find a way back. He considered sneaking in and filming it. He thought better of that. And then, somewhere over the French countryside, it arrived: an epiphany that would become the center of his whole creative life.
Why not just watch it in a bar? Like a football match. Something that belongs to everyone.
He dragged his own television to a Paris bar. He invited his community, a few years' worth of English-language social media followers who had gathered around his particular frequency of fashion commentary, irony, and conviction. They watched the show together in real time, strangers pressed close around a screen, the way people used to gather around things that mattered.
LYAS wears JACKET by ALAIN PAUL, SHORTS by LUEDER, SHOES by JUUN_J
LYAS wears custom MASK by RAPHAEL IGNAZI, SHIRT by ERL, PANTS by ADIDAS, SHOES by REPETTO
"It's crazy to think it didn't exist before. Why has no one had that idea? Good for me. Now everyone has that idea."
— Elias Medini
This is what separates the genuinely original from the merely clever: the ability to imagine something that has never existed and feel not its absence but its inevitability. The watch party feels, in retrospect, obvious. Of course, people should be able to gather around fashion the way they gather around sport. Of course, the ritual of the runway deserves a room full of believers. Medini was simply the first person willing to be delusional enough to make it happen.
He uses that word about himself, delusional, and wears it like the lipstick: unapologetically, because he has figured out what it actually costs. "If you really believe in something, even if it seems impossible for so many, you're going to find a way to make it happen," he says. "You're fearless." The delusion is not a failure of perception. It is a method.
I think about my own early years hovering around the edges of Paris Fashion Week. The borrowed names, the faked confidence at the door, the way certain shows would say no and no and no and then, just once, yes, and that yes was enough to sustain you for a season. There was a particular kind of education available only to people who wanted it badly enough to embarrass themselves to get it. Medini had his own version: taking the train without a ticket from his hometown, spending an afternoon visiting every bakery in Paris trying to get a heart-shaped cookie recreated so he could bluff his way into the Vetements Spring Summer 2019 show, eventually arriving in a three-euro thrift-store outfit with fake tattoos on his hands and the nerve to say, at the door, do you know who I am?
They let him in. He stood. The show changed him.
LYAS wears COLLAR by DIOR, SHIRT by VAQUERA, PANTS by ADIDAS, SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN, SHOES by REPETTO
"It showed me a new way of seeing high fashion," he says. "It was paying homage to the streets, not trying to inspire them. Before that, fashion for me was a bit Chanel, and I didn't connect with that." What he found in Vetements in 2019, and what he has been building toward ever since, is fashion as something that comes from somewhere real rather than descending from on high. The watch party is that logic followed to its conclusion: if fashion belongs to the streets, the streets should be able to watch it back.
This summer, La Watch Party goes on tour. Lyas is taking the screenings to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, cities that fashion tends to fly over on its way between the capitals. The idea, he explains, is not just to bring the shows to new audiences. It is to find out what happens when a YSL runway lands in a room full of people who have never been invited to care about it before. What does it mean to them? Is it art? Is it absurdity? Is spending three thousand euros on a jacket something they consider, even for a moment, as a kind of beauty?
"We want to go where people don't really give a fuck about fashion and see what their point of view is," he says. The tour finishes back in Paris with a party. It is a provocation shaped like a celebration. Very him.
"This industry is less guided by love than it is by money. We're trying to put the church back in the centre of the village."
— Elias Medini
LYAS wears TOP by LOUIS GABRIEL NOUCHI, GLOVES by ALAIN PAUL, PANTS by ADIDAS, SHOES by GMBH
LYAS wears COLLAR by DIOR, SHIRT by VAQUERA, PANTS by ADIDAS, SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN, SHOES by REPETTO
He says this near the end of our conversation, and I find myself writing it down the way you write down something you already know but have not heard put well until now. It is, I think, the clearest articulation of what La Watch Party actually is. Not a content strategy, not a community-building exercise, not a brand. A congregation. A reason to gather. An argument that fashion, at its best, is a thing people can share.
At Office, when we throw a party, I always want five or ten percent of the room to be people who were not on the list, people who wanted it enough to find their own way in. They make the best parties. They are the ones who still feel it. Medini has built his entire project on that energy: the people who cannot get in yet, who will be making the industry in five years. He is leaving the door open for them. Or rather, he is building them a different door entirely, in a bar, with their own television, and theirs is better anyway.
At the end of our call, he says something I keep coming back to. He talks about the lipstick: how when he goes home to his parents he does not wear it, how he becomes Elias again, and how the removal of it does not make him more himself. It just makes him less open. "It shows I'm open to the world when I'm wearing it," he says. "When I'm not, don't talk to me."
He is always going to be wearing it around me. I am sure of that.
LYAS wears SUNGLASSES by RAYBAN, T-SHIRT by NATASHA ZINKO, PANTS by LA MASKARADE, SHOES by ACNE STUDIOS
LYAS wears SHIRT by GMBH, SHOES by GMBH, SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN
