Lamar is a muse for the ages, a lens through which we can explore the love within both our hearts and others'.
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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, unspecified SHORTS, 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
NAOMI LARBI— If you weren't a poet, what would you be doing?
JOSEPH MATICK— Pushing daisies. Probably still be a Dylan fan.
NL— Well, we’re lucky that you are a poet then.
JM— Good Looking Pomes, my 7th poetry book, was a book accidentally about all the problems that are solved by staying in a hotel. People tend to come to you. I also write better when my bed is made.
He thinks for a second, and admits candidly how travel impacts his writing.
JM— I think differently in New York, I think differently in Paris, and I write differently in both. Traditionally, hotels have been taking care of poets.
NL— You’ve been dubbed the Last Living Beatnik.
JM— I feel that the baton being passed to me completely.
NL— Does it come with pressure?
JM— If being a beatnik is being broke and honest, then no. Technically, it’s the New York School, but we don’t talk about that here. But if it can't exist here, then we are doomed. There’s a dialogue between both cities; I’m just wearing the jersey that everyone told me to put on.
NL— What makes you feel safe?
JM— The ability to be wrong. I recently did a reading at Pigalle Country Club, and it scared the shit out of everyone, including me.
NL— What was scary about it?
JM— How reverent the crowd was. Which might have been in huge part regarding the lineup, including one of the first punk rockers, Cynthia Ross. The whole idea was to take a space that was always used for excess and debauchery and subvert the energy into a reading.
NL— What’s the enemy of creativity?
JM— That question! And the fear.
NL— If you listen quietly, what's the soundtrack to your life?
JM— A hummingbird with no record deal.
NL— What's your relationship to self?
JM— It feels like we just got married. Eccentric, correct, and confused.
NL— Are you poliitical?
JM— Very. I’m quiet about it and very violent, too. My violence comes out as poetry. Meet at a bar. If you're too far right, you’re wrong, and nothing's left.
NL— What is language?
JM— The only known other. I mean, I’m good with my mouth, but mouths get you into trouble. You can kiss someone, you can get punched in the mouth, or you can grab a pen.
NL— You seem to have offended a lot of people at the last reading. Do you get off on subversion?
JM— No, but I can’t apologize and certainly not now. I tend to believe what I say, and that’s that.
NL— Is there any better epoch than now?
JM— No, and if we can’t all lie to each other about that, then we should all go home.
“Those who comply will be considered.” That’s the telling statement expressed by the “moderator” (played by Paul Niebanck) in LINES, the debut play by Bellamy Brewster and Ewan Lloyd, currently in the middle of its run at Theatre 154. This particular line quietly introduces and closes the play within two monologues, but also serves as the crux of the narrative: how does institutional pressure compress and shape our personal identities?
Brewster and Lloyd sought to tackle that question with a setting that felt literal and inescapable to them both: the audition. LINES begins with Isaac—played by Lloyd himself—entering a holding room where actors wait for an audition. It’s neither clear what they’re auditioning for nor when they even begin their audition, but the holding room serves as a state of limbo, tightening their desire against their innate personalities, creating knots of tension that slowly come to a head. It’s a minimal setting that allows the characters to shine before a dark surrealism shrouds the stage, as the uncanny world of the holding room forces its hand on the unsuspecting actors.
“We pitched each other the same idea, almost like outsiders looking in on the industry… while still being a part of the industry, in a weird way,” Brewster says, describing his initial conversation with Lloyd that wound up as a script. Though both creators had divergent experiences in the artistic field—Brewster as a director and photographer, and Lloyd as an actor—they felt a shared sense of unmasking as they discussed their experiences. Both strive for lofty goals, but also had the deeply resonant experience of putting on a persona to succeed within their field, and felt a sense of disconnect with their true artistry when presented with the pressures of institutional conformity.
“There were two things I really wanted to explore with this,” Lloyd explains. “The first was how individuals interact with institutions, and how those institutions strip us of agency, and force us to compete and create artificial divisions, and operate as sort of a machine that chews us up. The other half that I wanted to talk about was performance as identity, and how everybody is constantly performing, right?” As an actor, Lloyd was hyper-conscious of performance, but would recognize it as much in day-to-day society as he would in the industry. Both he and Brewster believe that even when a person is alone, they still have a tendency to perform for themselves, acting out a version of themselves that aligns with their aspiration. “Society is just semiotics; it's like a series of signs and signifiers,” Lloyd elaborates. “Identity is performance. And we came to the conclusion together that actors, in an audition, would be a great avenue to explore both of those things.”
Brewster intrinsically understood this as well; as the visual director for Usher for years coinciding with the musician’s Las Vegas residency, Brewster dedicated his life to a singular vision, working on photography, music videos, and an album cover for the R&B legend. He spent the better part of three years living in a hotel room in Vegas rather than his apartment in NYC, where he would return sporadically to access another version of himself. “Going deeper, truly, it's about what it costs to perform,” he says tellingly, acknowledging the subtle performance required for any job and what that entails for your personal identity. “Like, what does it cost for you to do what you love to do? What do you sacrifice?”
To explore these feelings, the duo began devouring plays as they wrote their own, consuming new and old works by the likes of Wallace Shawn and Tom Stoppard, as well as diving into classic literature and drama as depicted in later scenes of the play. The characters of LINES always stemmed from archetypes, but as Brewster and Lloyd consumed these dramas they noticed how true to life each character felt; as they developed LINES they began to find the core motivation in each character rather than reducing them to simple caricatures. “There's a consistent narrative piece, but you could follow, you could pick one character and only pay attention to them the whole time and never feel like they were turning off or they were just in the background doing nothing,” Lloyd describes. “We wanted to have like a web of arcs that go up and down and intersect that together.”
As the characters in LINES enter the holding room and begin to interact with each other and the ominous moderator, they begin to grapple with themselves—and each other. One by one, personalities clash and characters test the limits of their commitment to the system that is the entertainment industry, which serves as a metaphorical proxy to the institutions that drive any artistic pursuit. Lloyd was particularly keen on exploring the structure this enforces within our social systems, upending humanistic nature in favor of adherence to said structure. “Institutional critique is a big consistency in all my works. The way [institutions] tear us down, not just as people and the unique ways in which we crack, or the ways we try to survive, but also the collective ways in which we engage with these institutions. And the way these institutions are designed to break that up, this essential camaraderie that exists between all people.”
The play stops short of providing relief from this despondency, choosing instead to push the characters far enough to materialize their identity. Still, there’s a moral to this story: this is not a world in which you can win alone. “ This beautiful and essential nature we have, that this machine has developed specific tools to tear at and to force us to confront it alone which ultimately, from my perspective, is unwinnable,” Lloyd says. “You can't fight these things alone. You can't, it will always win. The machine will always win if you attack it by yourself. You have to fight that incentive to divide and to turn on your brothers and sisters.”
The politics of institutional pressure is so pervasive across modern society that the emotions in LINES are instantly palpable. It guides the audience through the tempers that come with forcing fragile personas during what feels like a high-stakes, zero-sum era. In the midst of this moment when independence always feels slightly out of reach, at what point do we truly become ourselves? “Every time I express myself, I feel like a gas valve loosening,” Lloyd says. “But I also feel like, like, the work never really ends. I'm gonna keep talking about some of this stuff, because I've talked about it and I've expressed it and that feels good, but like…the thing is still there.” The characters of LINES may not offer a salve, but their creators see the act of creation itself as the way to challenge the implacable assault by institutions that press down on individuals. “I had a knot today that still hasn't been unraveled,” Brewster confessed shortly after a performance of LINES. “And, it makes me feel like it's cyclical. After this project is done, I'm gonna go through this again. I'm going to go through the fire for another project, and it doesn't end.”
