Emariamhe writes for us as both performer and reporter from Klein's performance last month at the ICA, which was supported by Angel Gray - who jawnino talks about in this interview for Hollywood Superstar Review at EXIT, Glasgow.
We just want to know, why does the ICA soundsystem suck so much?
“We love you Klein!” a fan shouts. “God loves you too,” she replies. A descent. At times, moments of pure white clarity. The distortion resounds and it creeps all the way up through my toes.
At one point, figures surface onstage, taking shape against the smoke. A girl frantic on the phone. Boys doing balloons. Girls taking selfies. A man taking in the glory. My cue, a flurry of camera shutters. I’m right up there with them. Each character, so preoccupied with theirits own story, paints a larger picture of discordance.
Cheers, hollers, applause. I look towards the crowd: I find them expectant, willing. Klein bounds onto the stage, stepping up to the hype. Twirling and posing, she is spectacle. I return to the audience, she enters into a domestic. The trouble dissipates, and she’s left lonesome once again.
Back on the ground, I observe Klein at work. Concocting loops, she plays a Nollywood-esque synth. The kind that signals trouble. It distorts itself beyond recognition. “See it here,” she echoes. Or is it, “seek it?” She blows a whistle periodically, as if we should be alert to something. What is to come?
She sparks up. Delightfully punk in this institutional context. Clouds of smoke billow, subduing the light. The sound gets contact high, rounding it all out with glimpses of ambient. Electric, acoustic, found, live — it all grinds to a halt. “See you at the Oscars!”, and she’s gone.
It's another Gen-Z play! Not in Los Angeles for once!
Zoomers have realised that there are innumerable project spaces for fine art, but there’s only like 5 theatres. Value of the artist work is therefore higher in this space? Hm. Supply and Demand at a crossroads of the art object (hello!)…
Eliza Ovey, takes us to another Yassified theatre of the Absurd, in part II of the Thespain Section of the Gen-Z aesthetic rundown. It's a nice companion piece to the observations from Aria Dean's piece for Artforum on the 'queasy merger of the art theatre and the experience economy', a relaxed reading perhaps...
Next up in the canon of referenceless reference. Criticism and Joy abounded for the same reason‚ who was this non-theatre interloper (Hunter Boyd) who gets a first production at the ICA?
It took three directors and Sophie Barshall (of Toe Rag fame) to bring Hunter Boyd’s conceptual tragedy for one night only… It’s three shows in one! Recession indicator anyone?
--Eileen Slightly
Out of a rubble of cardboard, toy cars, instruments and ripped clothes, and amidst still-withering actors, panting from emotional outburst, a woman emerges, wrapped in an emergency foil blanket. Like a nurse in the midst of a natural disaster, she hands out aid to the victims on-site, in the form of a wad of paper. The antidote? My Tragedy, a play by Hunter Boyd.
The script, written by Boyd, and then interpreted three times by respective directors, comes with instructions. Italicisation and formatting are supposed to help the directors dissect, reinterpret and bring to life his sporadic writing. In the lineage of cut-up poetry, Boyd’s script is more vibe-based than narrative.
References to perfume names and their catchphrases are set beside nods to the celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, as well as orgies, the fast-life, death, and tragedy. Together they paint an image of the hellscape miasma of late capitalism, which flagellates itself endlessly (or, in three parts). The order of each act was decided on the day. Boyd gives away his power, either as the only person capable of deciphering the text, or because he doesn’t know either, and passes on the challenge to his directors.
The woman in foil who has just handed me the script is Martha Sapsed, one of three actors in Jaya Twill’s iteration – otherwise known as Act 1.
ACT 1 Jaya Twill
Two women costumed to look like perfume bottles, in the silhouette of a 60s paper dress, pose and strut around a Don Draper type. In varying stages of shirtless undress, he combs his hair back as the perfume bottles circulate him like sirens. What ensues is a violent and hypothetical orgy of strobe lights, the women ripping their dresses off to be left powerless, squirming on the floor, as the man cries into his hands in trembling remorse.
I’d like to take notes but I only have a broken pen and no notebook. The first scrawling I left on my palm reads ‘Neon Demon’. A 2016 horror directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, where the greed and competition of the Los Angeles modelling industry culminates in identity-theft, murder and cannibalism. The oozing appeal of sex and capital are eaten up by its own festering logic.
Twill’s interpretation is the most pop, with its hark to a vintage hey-day, endlessly replaying, like a spinning doll in a little girl’s jewellery box. It is also the most seamless, and the one I find the least penetrable. Twill was originally supposed to star in her own production as one of the perfumes, but was unable to because of a lime bike injury the week before.
Her waist length hair, pristine appearance and born-in-america smile would have been a welcome meta-injection.
The three actors tentatively get up and dust themselves off, ready for another groundhog day...They pass the baton.
ACT 2 dir. Emma Alvin and Gulliver Whitby
A brand new cast of the Village People emerge onto the stage in a homoerotic wrestling match. The leather daddy is still here in his jockstrap, but we now have a pregnant woman, a muscle man, a party girl, a maid, and Peace. Crying for most of the act and dressed in black, Peace is played by Viking Stendahl in holographic face paint. Emma Alvin and Gulliver Whitby’s direction is a steamy neon apocalypse to Twill’s dusty rose. It is the most sensorial of the three, and does the best job at encapsulating the erratic and competing voices of Boyd’s script. The actors strut up and down the aisle, kissing the audience and yelling into their ears. Our mother-to-be forces someone to feel her bulging stomach. A choir of pleading screams collide into harmony.
Several times, the cast leave the stage, stranding one person behind to deliver desperate soliloquies. They reenact the roles of their attire like forgotten half-ideas of their social obligations. Planes are heard overhead as the costumed leather militant completes his horseshoe transformation back into fascist autocrat. A Cindy Sherman masquerade relaxing and contracting from human-centipede symbiosis and back into disarray.
The Party Girl, played by Miriam Simanowitz, closes the act with a monologue of her own. In a Blade Runner mist, she clutches herself cold. What do we do now? She begs in a forged french accent. Ruminating on this mess of broken images, she works herself into a Dyonisian trance. Cathartic, she walks straight into death. A final hot flash fades into black.
Despite their attempts at antagonism, a wall of spectator-comfort was never fully breached. I heard Simanowitz was meant to smoke a cigarette on stage but the ICA wouldn’t let her. Antonin Artaud is rolling in his grave – I blame smoking bans.
ACT 3. dir. Alex Heard
Alex Heard’s production is when the budget is revealed. A cardboard Emerald City is carried in by a cast wearing hoodies and dragging their feet. Dressed in civilian clothing, they look like a group of stand-ins that didn’t have time to change. And then the piano starts, and a light shines on a woman in sequins, Trisha’s own Jazz singer, Zoe Portela, whose mouth opens in an unexpected, sensual crooning, typical of a forgotten style of lounge singing.
The response to Heard’s production was a repeated question about casting: where did he find these people? Aside from the singer and pianist, there was also a four-part string quartet and a classical dancer.
The stage looks like a Peter Greenaway operatic ensemble.
The Civilians linger in the sidelines, endlessly rearranging laundry on a clothes rack, a woman and man play push and pull at a dressed-table, crawling about, mouths filled with fecal-nutella, and the string quartet continues to play as the ship keeps sinking.
The script is taken at its most literal. Lines are supposed to be understood as conversational dialogue between characters, they come out ill-fitted and revealing of the limits of Boyd’s exercise.
If it weren’t for the first two acts, I am not sure that I would be convinced by Heard’s absurdism. But by this point, as the words have become a hammered-in mush, I find that it does the best job at exemplifying this hamster-wheel of a play, rolling forward into further and further nonsense.
The civilians have started WWE-style massacring the set, getting at the cardboard with their teeth, throwing clothes and toys across the room. In a pathetic puff of smoke, a man’s face is projected behind the stage, obscured by static and smoothed out into Mark Zuckerberg uncanniness. He is like Oz in the rubble of Emerald City, disappointingly too real.
EPILOGUE
All that’s solid melts into air, the Marx quote reappropriated in Marshal Berman’s 1982, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, examinationinto the experience of modernity, is repeated multiple times in Boyd’s script.
Talking to hipsters and more experienced theatre connoisseurs after the show, some complained that the script demonstrated an amateur grasp on theatre’s history.
They were perhaps rightfully offended that Boyd had managed to ‘waltz’ into the ICA on his first run.
If you have been to art school, Berman’s book is a familiar first year reference (it just so happens to sound exactly like a perfume slogan). To those hipsters, I ask you to let your hair down; My Tragedy was a formal exercise and experiment in surrendering control. The blind communication between the writer and his directors was both the selling point and its limitation, edging on gimmick but surviving nonetheless.
There is a trend in northern Europe for Kunstverein's to pick up the hot young gallery/curator/film screener of their city and put them in the spare room of their Museum. Kunstverein Hamburg (and curator Milan Ther) is making a SMART decision by placing Chess Club — because the freedom it gives them to speak to an audience outside of regular programming. They can cross connect older monagraphic exhibits with younger artists in order to plug them into a younger (hotter) continuum.
Hollywoods favourite part of these "projects" is that they usually are announced through instagram posters, thus attracting a select community who organise thwier social events through the algorithim.
Otto Bonnen doing the "Backroooms" of KunsthalleZurich during Danielle Baumans, now at the Kunstmuseum Lichenstein; Kunstverein Braunschweig having a bar program by Anna Erler and Lennart Koch, "Poem Untitled" and Amanda Weimer of Chess Club in the spare room of Kunstwerein Hamburg.
Our Hamburg correspondant, Mercy, writes to us reporting upon a screening which occured in summer. I guess what Hollywood is thinking, is, WHY DO THESE KUNSTVEREIN'S WANT HOT YOUNG CURATORS ANYWAY? WHY DONT THEY JUST HIRE THEM OUTRIGHT? WHY ARE THEY SATELLITE PROJECTS?
Hollywood thinks that... the concept of the "satellite" is actually sexier than we suppose. Stay small for as long as possible, as they say, and mine the currency of the avant-garde for as long as possible.
— Syndey Sweeney
It’s Hamburg, July 30. It’s hot and it is raining, and people are gathering in and around the Kunstverein Hamburg. This year, the institution has opened up its usual programme to house chess club, a project space initiated in 2022 as a residency that expands its institutional framework in a young and witty fashion. Hamburg, somewhere between Berlin and Paris. Behind its first layer of preppiness, the city shows a close-knit community with a dedicated attention to and attendance at what is contributed in the name of frivolity and art. That night, we lie scattered across beanbags between Nina Porter’s solo exhibition, the group show curated by Anthony Huberman and Milan Ther, and, most importantly for us in this context i feel it all curated by Amanda Weimer. The exhibition, bringing together eleven artistic positions through and around the medium of photography and collage, is accompanied by that evening’s screening of four films by artists also participating in the show.
In Tim Hardy’s Scenes(2025), we are taken to suburban Australia. Feeling like an introduction from the still image to the moving one, the film is an assembly of scenes: canaries in a cage, an improv class in a pub, or a group of girls doing test shoots at a modelling school. I feel like the silent participant in local community events and public life, where movement and narrative remain subtle.
Costume Party: Fame, Love, Beauty (2026) is a two-act drama and short film by Collezione Nancy Delroi from Milan, created together with artist Witt Fetter and writer Isabel Consolani in Stromboli, recontextualising the myth of the Judgement of Paris through its three aloof allegorical figures: Fame, Love, and Beauty. “War. Sperm. Cock. Shit. Whore.” We are Paris, watching the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite discuss and perform their virtues through a war on meaning. The myth continues with Paris choosing Aphrodite after she promises him the most beautiful woman in the world. We still hope to move beyond the mystification of female sexuality and female intelligence in culture; a mystification inherited from antiquity and still reproduced in both high and popular culture today. Rather than offering an escape from this system, the work seems to negotiate with it from within.
After Costume’s Party’s Sylvano Bussotti-esque damned pounding and strumming of the piano, the program is followed by Matt Gess’ Untitled (2024), paired with a discordant musical composition by Oliver Coates. If every photograph is a memento mori, the short film shows the ritualistic bringing to life of a figure enacted by artist Nova Needham. Put motionless on a pedestal under a London bridge, in a form resembling the crucified Christ, the blond is slowly revived to gaze back at us. It is unsurprising that Matt Gess's work has qualities of a fashion film - in super 8 beauty the protagonist feels like a sexy war cyborg, who’s sentience remains only suggested.
The screening concludes with The Other Queen of Memphis (2024) by Belgian artist Luna Mahoux – a hybrid documentary on Memphis rapper La Chat (Chastity Daniels). As its heroine drives through the city, we see atmospheric shots of clubs and other locations important to her, interwoven with archive footage and the story of a life fully lived. The Other Queen of Memphis is a break from the previous films in the programme, as the focus shifts towards a celebration of community in the context of Memphis’ social reality. Alongside La Chat’s music, the film is scored by experimental musician and artist Embaci, underlining the bittersweet legacy of memory, loss, and cultural inheritance.
The central presence of women and beauty forms a coherent thread through the films, no less represented by chess club’s taste for uncanny glamour. If beauty can be understood as both material and practice, Paris’ sacrifice of the city of Troy for his love of it becomes clearer through its power. But seduction is not about desire; it is about play.
"I can tell by your sound that you do it because it's in right now."
"300SkullsAndCounting has chiptune screams. Jenny Sparks is a bassline curator who has developing a curious aesthetic for years. The whole album is audible proof of my theory that screamo is the substance that brings people together.
Their album THIS IS SPA TOWN in an outcome neither genre was built for, but as our reporter Teo points out, is inevitable. This therefore becomes PART THREE OF OUR SERIES ON GEN-Z AESTHETICS.... MUTATION IS THE AESTHETIC. Apparently, Jenny Sparks promo'd the album by carrying around a huge JBL at Czech music festival Creepee Teepee. For keen listeners, the album is full of easter eggs of nostalgia for their own adolescence, which because of the trend cycle, is also everyone else's adolescence, now."
But we are here to give a voice to Teo,
AND TEO THE HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR ARGUES THAT
“if you scream loud enough... the culture might drift towards you.”
300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks want to incinerate London venues and assault hipster sensibilities. It seems that the only thing they revile more than trendy music is boring music- that is if the two aren’t synonymous. And not being trendy, or worse, boring is a game that they are particularly good at; their gambit being a carnivalesque genre collision that is the exact intersection of the 300skulls' chip-tune screamer and Jenny Spark's bassline curator’s solo work and taste.
Perhaps what marks London’s current underground as the epicentre of new musical output is that its most eminent contributors share an ethos rather than an underlying sound; namely, the consensus that as an artist, you ought to give yourself total and utter permission to do whatever you want, no matter how outdated or uncool- bassline, screamo etc…The idea that anyone would even try to replicate this sound is hilarious, but not so unlikely at a time when x publication can say something about laptop twee and all of a sudden everyone is making music that sounds like belle and sebastian processed through a calculator. So 300 screams the sheep away; “kill you in the bace” narrates an altercation with kids at Ormside, “I can tеll by your sound that you do it 'cause it's in right now” sounds like a cry from the weird kids at school trying to scare away the popular kids. And “You can tell that I do it 'cause I'm out of touch” assumes a new meaning considering the duet's newfound virality. On paper, they’re bitingly out of step with today’s easily reiteratable, monocultural, musical fads; but 300 and Jenny suggest that if you scream loud enough, persevere, and dare to stick to your emo-and-bassline-loving guns well enough, the culture might drift towards you.
Both bassline and screamo originated as countercultures led by teens who didn’t have much else; kids who sought to turn the barest of sounds into sounding outrageous- pantomime-esque, artificial caricatures of EDM and hardcore respectively; and so the combination is doubly outrageous. The two sounds are antagonistic throughout, but what threads them together is 300 and Jenny’s seeming brotherhood. A bit like their ex’s, the femcels, the new album is packed with teases into their studio and real-life antics; 2 of the tracks being phone calls, placing ribeye orders, and the artists giving live comments on the music throughout. You can imitate chord progressions but you can’t imitate the zany synergy of the split-brain these two seem to share. Accidents and inside jokes seem to be the whole point of the collaboration; beyond anything, they’re making music for themselves, which is probably why everyone loves it.
“Use a fucking cymbal; to decapitate a hipster” is a gorey image that sums things up pretty well; splitting ears as much as emotion, 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks’ music feels like an emblem of the unconformity and audacity that is required of artists to make music in London.
June 2025. A Reel comes up on my feed of Addison Rae wearing pink sequined Minnie Mouse ears as she talks about idyllic days in Hawaii and Maui Babe’s Browning Lotion. I watch the entire thing waiting for some verbal acknowledgment of the Minnie ears either from her or the interviewer or really anyone in the room. There’s absolutely no mention of it within the video but somebody in the comment section said “Can she let these damn minnie mouse ears GO.”
I don’t share the comment’s negativity – in fact, I thought it looked super cute because that shade of pink matched her personal color type (my guess being that she’s a Clear Winter or Bright Spring). But I had a moment of relief like, thank god somebody finally acknowledged the ears?! The presumed normalcy of it was making me feel crazy, when you would think that everybody else treating the Mickey ears as a casual outfit accessory were the ‘crazy’ ones. But is it really all that crazy? If ‘crazy’ means 1. stupid or not reasonable; 2. mentally ill; 3. annoyed or angry (according to Cambridge), then, well, the Mickey-ears-as-casual-accessory aren’t all that. They’re more ‘campy’ than they are ‘crazy,’ but even camp as a descriptive term doesn’t cut as deep as I need it to. To me, the adoption of Mickey ears as a casual styling object is beyond camp: it’s beyond a mere injection of fantasy into the mundane or an occurrence of absurdity made quotidian. It is a sartorial phenomenon that attests to the absurdities of our present milieu.
The Disneyfication of styling and contemporary art became more widely visible in the year 2025, but I’d pinpoint 2024 as the beginning of this current wave of it. At the time, I was doing research on the late Americana aesthetic – Disney of course being a significant subsection – and began saving these examples that I’d see in my corner of the Instagram Universe. Consider me your ride operator, and this to be a roughly chronological, cyberethnographic ride through the various Disney motifs that I feel define this moment – a beginning attempt to trace its aesthetic lineage and what it reflects about our cultural psyche… if you will… Seatbelts on!!!
First Stop: A Brief History…
Mickey and Minnie ear headbands originate from a visual gag in the 1929 animated short, The Karnival Kid, in which Mickey Mouse does a gentlemanly tip of the ‘hat’ towards Minnie Mouse using the cap of his head. This silhouette of his ears attached to a bowl-shaped black cap was made into physical headwear for the Mouseketeers in the 1950s TV show The Mickey Mouse Club before becoming the headband we are familiar with today. In Karnival Kid fashion, Rei Kawakubo reimagined the bowl cap silhouette on a wool baseball hat for Comme des Garçons Homme Plus F/W 2013, with the Mickey ears abstracted further in a later collection on hoodies and dress shirts in Comme des Garçons Shirt Men's F/W 2018.
Arguably, the most iconic abstraction of the Mickey ears on the runway is Jeremy Scott’s S/S 2007 collection, “Right to Bear Arms,” which mutated Mickey iconography with militaristic symbols and garb like bandoliers (those cross-body bullet straps), ballistic helmets, and guns shooting out heart-shaped peace signs. In talking about the collection, Jeremy Scott said, “I think the use of iconography is powerful in conveying a clear message: visuals are more instant than words. An image of Mickey Mouse is understood in Mumbai, Timbuktu and Los Angeles in the same way. It’s a clear message even if you subvert it by, say, putting Mickey ears on an army helmet (as I did in 2007). People get it.” The collection is not just a testament to the potency and immediacy of Mickey’s iconography, but it is significant for how it helped set the precedent for abstracting that iconography and subverting it into an edgier, mutated aesthetic form that remains seductive today. Even now, one can post an image of Mickey Mouse with an AK-47 or mutated with some other semiotically-potent symbol like the Chanel logo or marijuana leaf and it would land with an Instagram audience. We witness these aesthetic mutations become archetypal forms in real time.
Snow White and the Tainted Princess
In late 2024, if your Instagram algorithm was in tune with mine, you may have seen these posts of Daniel von Steun’s photo series or Manon Macasaet in a Snow White costume shot by Richard Kern. Both Daniel and Manon’s images take Disney princesses – traditionally symbols of purity, grace and altruistic beauty – as subjects to corrupt. Snow White smoking a blunt, Belle sprawled out amidst a beer-littered post-frat-party-like scene, Cinderella who loses her glass bong instead of a glass slipper at the ball – there’s an undertone of rebellion, defiance, and sexuality. These images call into question what is and isn’t permissible when wearing a Disney costume. The simple act of wearing one as an adult to any of Disney’s theme parks is in fact strictly forbidden for reasons that you can probably imagine, but the most interesting one being for fear of disrupting the illusion and sanctity of the ‘real’ character.
In the 2009 video art piece Real Snow White, Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala wears a Snow White costume as she attempts to enter Disneyland Paris. Outside the ticketing gates, a crowd of parents and children form around Takala, asking for photographs and autographs. One parent asks, “Is she the real one? She’s so kind.” A guard then pulls Takala aside to explain that she isn’t allowed to enter the park because “it’s about the mix with the real… the real character working here…” More guards come to the scene to tell onlookers that “the real Snow White is inside the park.” Before being escorted to the restroom to change out of the costume, a guard adds that Takala can’t dress as Snow White because the real Snow White can not drink, smoke, or do “bad things.” The conditions of entry prevent the threat of perverting and corrupting the real Snow White, both in imagination and ‘existing’ physically within the park. The costume poses a threat to the realest fake that must eliminate anything realer or as real as it in order to be the most real. What the work best illuminates, however, is how the fantasy of the innocent Snow White doing something bad is so obviously real – realer than Snow White herself. The sartorial proliferation of Disney princess costumes within the Instagram Simulation seemingly leans into this titillation – between real and fake, moral and immoral.
Mickey as Surface Graphic and Jumping Symbol
I remember the moment, circa 2025, when I began seeing popular independent stores like Desire Attire and The Grotesque Archive stocking shirts with Mickey graphics on them. Mickey and his little round ears felt like this symbol magically appearing on the surface of these clothes, and thus on the surface of these images, and therefore the surface of my Instagram Simulation in such a way that felt like residual animal tracks across a plain that I was to investigate as clues.
There truly is something magical about the way that a sign ‘jumps’ between material, surfacing and resurfacing out of seemingly nowhere onto vintage tees to contemporary artworks. Works like Millie Rose Dobree’s Still Not New and i am LOSt (both circa 2024-25), and Tasneem Sarkez’s Protect her (2026) pastiche Minnie and Mickey Mouse iconography on their surfaces, and disrupt the subjectivity of their characters. Dobree remixes Disney motifs as a means of remediating the objects that are “predetermined to us as happy,” while Sarkez takes and visually blends the Arabic phrase أسترها يا رب (“Protect her, O Lord”) with Minnie’s image to draw attention to the simultaneous ubiquity yet instability of these cultural registers and how their meanings are constantly recontextualised.
Growing up in Orange County, California, I was always surrounded by the spread of Disneyland’s tentacles that extend beyond its Anaheim city limits. What this materially looked like was Disney merchandise in almost every thrift store you go to, typically children’s clothes and Mickey graphic tees. In Anaheim or even Los Angeles, it’s really common to see, like, a Hispanic middle-aged woman wearing a Mickey tee as just part of her casual outfit. This distinction between Mickey-tee-as-fashion-item in a local fashion context vs. its 2024-2026 Instagram fashion context is a testament to the propensity of Mickey iconography to hold different meanings even when styled in identical ways.
This Era of Instagram Where Everyone’s in Minnie and Mickey Ear Headwear
The aforementioned Instagram comment fatigued by Addison Rae in Minnie ears has most likely seen this post of hers from 2024, as I feel we all may have. Although she certainly wasn’t the first to do it, I will venture to say that there is something about how this specific image operated within the wider Instagram landscape that solidified and legitimised the Minnie ears as a legible styling object.
One of the ways a certain style or aesthetic (especially one that is more unconventional like this) is made permissible to a wider audience is through the power of celebrity. There are certain figures whose bodies or image can act as vessels for shifting the connotation of a particular style from weird, kitschy, lame or overly experimental to one that is cute, cool, cunty, campy, or desirable, and therefore emulatable. It’s figures like Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey, Kate Moss (or even Mickey himself), for example, whose images often circulate within some aesthetic context (e.g. when posted by pages like @bathmat3000 or even certain ‘taste authorities’ like styling / creative directors). I feel this to be a part of the reason why we gravitate towards certain images as vibe-posting favorites like Lana’s Carmen MV outtakes or these paparazzi photos of Elle Fanning that seem to recirculate on my feed every few months. It’s less about these figures being tastemakers themselves and more about how their image functions as a taste-signalling and taste-shifting commodity.
To recirculate these images now (that nostalgically recall the 2010s era of Mickey fashion that ranged from edgy UNIF tees and being the go-to graphic top for millennial fashion bloggers to runway collections like Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's S/S 2012) becomes a way to cash in on its current revival. While I can’t speak for every so-called taste-authority’s motivation for circulating such images, I do think that this ability to be aesthetically literate and to display this image-acumen does lend oneself some form of cultural soft power. At the very least, it’s a means of signaling Yeah I see this Mickey thing happening rn too – that which this essay is admittedly the ultimate embodiment of.
It would be impossible here to cover every interesting aspect of the modern Mickey ear headband – the mind control conspiracy theories, the fervent collector culture, the customisation and knockoff economies, designer collaborations, and so on – though all imbue the ears with different meanings and connotations. In their intended function (their first-order meaning, or denotation as Roland Barthes puts it), the Mickey ear headbands are an essential accessory to wear at Disney’s theme parks. Normally, a souvenir is bought as an after-the-fact object, a token to take home to one’s everyday life to remember a particular moment or place. But the Mickey ear headband is unique as a souvenir that is not just bought after-the-fact but preemptively too, as an accessory to buy at the entrance to wear into the park. It is a peculiar souvenir that enables the ability to consume the memories before having formed them. Of all of Disney’s merchandise, the Mickey ear headbands are possibly the strongest cog in the Disney-as-nostalgia-producing-machine. Irrespective of any original function as souvenir, preemptive-memory-object, or fan accessory, the headbands in contemporary Instagram styling function most as nostalgia-perpetuating, taste-signalling costume.
The sartorial proliferation of Disney headwear in recent years evinces a widespread longing for the comfort and psychological sanctuary of the past. In Walt's Utopia: Disneyland and American Mythmaking (2015), cultural mythologist Priscilla Hobbs describes “rejuveniles” as adults who “do not desperately cling to childhood to the point of neurosis, but instead to balance the hardships and monotony of adult life with the playful happiness they remember from childhood. Adults who return to some aspect of their childhood are looking for more than a simple regression. They are hoping to rejuvenate meaning using the tools available.” While the post-2024 Disneyfication of styling isn’t necessarily a phenomenon born from some online army of rejuvenile adults, the point about “rejuvenating meaning” rings true.
I don’t believe it to be coincidental that the Mickey-ears-as-casual-styling-accessory surfaced as a legible thing [I hate the word “trend”] in 2024 – a year characterised not just by economic stagnation and continued political unrest, but a year whose milieu felt like some post-woke, politically-fatigued rightward swing of the pendulum. All of this amidst the boom in tradwife content, the Labubu craze, Trump’s presidential election win, Brat Summer, Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar beef, and Dubai chocolate slop – a nauseating year of the Internet that felt like some kind of mass cultural psychosis. The gravitation towards a fantastical, absurd accessory makes sense to me within this surreal, blandly-extreme atmosphere. On a political level, I don’t see the Mickey headband as a direct reflection of some nostalgic longing for a ‘better’ America or state of the world (although this certainly is a part of it), but rather a reflection of a collective psyche that may have felt simultaneously manic yet jaded. Throughout 2025 and even now in 2026 (KiiiKiii just posted this pastel Mickey shoot and Cannelle is styled in them for her new Sunshine music video), it doesn’t feel like a surprise to see a new post almost every week implementing Disney motifs in some manner. Its proliferation within the Instagram Simulation is a testament to a shared image reality that speaks to and from this cultural unconscious.
Mickey I’ve Got Your Gloves… And Your Head
In June 2025, Poison Candy Apple (Manon Macasaet’s brand) posted images of Beanie Boylston styled in the gloves, a yellow tutu, royal blue tights, and peppermint candy hair clips as she holds a miniature figurine of Snow White in her gloved Mickey hands. The outfit’s colorblocking with Snow White’s signature royal blue and yellow is reminiscent of the Disneybounding subculture, in which adults, unable to wear ‘realistic’ costumes to Disney’s theme parks, wear some kind of vague abstraction of the character’s look. Disneybounding adults (who certainly fall into the category of the aforementioned rejuvenile) are often bullied on TikTok by Zoomers and Gen Alpha teens who think it’s cringy and embarrassing, so let me be the first Gen Z-er to come out and say that I think it’s actually really cool and endearing. I am also intrigued by the other photo in the carousel that has Boylston standing in front of a castle drawn in chalk, posed with one gloved hand with the middle finger up and the other atop her chest as if the gloves were a bandeau bra. The middle finger subverts Mickey’s innocence - but perhaps more fascinating is how the gloves visually operate like a bra and how this pose is its own semiotic form.
In November 2025, @omweekend posted an intimate Mickey and Minnie Mouse bedroom shoot to promote OMIGHTY’s new pieces. The models wore enlarged costume heads of Mickey and Minnie’s faces, their smiling expressions ominous and creepypasta-ish. ‘Mickey’ reaches from behind ‘Minnie’ to lay his globular, white hands over her chest. Later in the carousel, Minnie sits in a kneeling position with her gloved hands over her pink top that is barely peaking through, rendering the gloves almost into a bra. The pink OMIGHTY top underneath reads “Precious Little Angel In A World Of Pain.” Again, these images are effective because of the underlying, seductive transgression they exude and the edgy perversion of Disney characters. It is this affective quality that can solidify a pose (Mickey’s gloved hands posed over a female chest) into its own aesthetic form that is then further emulated by others.
When I think about the gloves, I’m always reminded of musician and artist Trinity Ace Gardner’s work, whether it be her @dieselsugar Instagram page or image / sculpture works like Lamb (2024) or An Attraction (2025; exhibited in CAMPUS’s recent show “Terror Campaign”). I asked her about her hashtag #MickeyLifestyle, and while she says that it’s somewhat unserious as a joke, I think that its satirical nature makes #MickeyLifestyle – as a hashtag, caption, personal mantra, performance concept and phenomenon – potent.
For Gardner, #MickeyLifestyle is about “living while embracing the sacrifice of performance, knowing that once you become an image, you no longer completely belong to yourself, and reveling in the beauty of that.” Mickey is one of the most proliferated icons, endlessly reproduced and projected onto, “in the same way that Christ takes on the burden of humanity… Mickey is the Jesus of America.” In using the gloves in her work, Gardner points to a particularly fascinating aspect of its origins in Disney’s 1929 film The Opry House. At the start, none of the characters are wearing the gloves but upon arrival at the Opry House, Mickey appears on stage with the gloves for the performance as he dances in contorted, bizarre ways under a hypnotic spell. At the end, Mickey awakens from the spell, immediately ashamed at the awareness of his performance, shrinking into himself with his gloved hands over his face. Gardner specifies this moment that we see large, black holes at the palms of Mickey’s gloved hands as significant for how the markings resemble stigmata – the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ.
After the Opry House performance, Mickey’s gloves never come off – his performance continuing into perpetuity. The psychological gravitation towards the gloves, heads, and princess costumes in contemporary styling and art are perhaps indicative of a performance fatigue we feel from the constant demands to be online and to perform a self. But it also infers a fatigue from performative wokeness and the hypervisibility of geopolitics (and the subsequent digital activism it demands): Gardner mentions our gravitation to Disney symbols as possibly being “a symptom of the prolonged exposure to the disaffected, nonchalant, irony-ridden affect dominating cultural landscapes online for the past several years. It emerged perhaps as a defensive reaction from a post-pandemic shame, in the wake of our mass cries of care and political engagement going unheard, and an oversaturation of lengthy captions from unqualified sources. Suddenly Paris Hilton, Cheez-It, and your high school bully were all weighing in on the atrocities, signaling their disavowal of the violence committed by the police during BLM. Few were left unscathed by the pressure to publicly signal their wokeness and immense care for the cause out of fear of being perceived as complacent and therefore complicit in the systemic political and racial violence taking place. While many were well-intentioned, many of these cries read as performative in retrospect. Millions who posted the Black Square will take that shit to the grave.”
On our way to the Terror Campaign closing reception, Trinity and I were in my car talking about what it feels like to sniff things out early and for them to become true (exactly as we thought), and the kinds of frustration-like feelings that may come if we feel we didn’t actualize that pseudo-clairvoyance in time, or early enough. We were individually thinking about (and even making work about) things like mint green and Mickey motifs in 2024, and to see them fully fledged in 2026 has this peculiar way of creating these insufferable feelings around publicly caching and actualizing one’s aesthetic literacy or cultural acumen ‘early’. But beyond staking some position as a taste-authority or aesthetically-attuned clairvoyant (neither of us think of ourselves as The Authority anyways and would probably identify more as merely acute observers), I think it’s important to recognise these internal frictions that come with being online—especially within these fashion, music, and art -inclined spheres where aesthetic acumen can lend one power in some way.
The Final Stop of our Ride… Closing Remarks…
While the impetus for writing this essay certainly stems from some self-indulgent motive to make known to the world that I Saw This From Miles Away, the biggest motivation was to write a response to the Dazed article “Was 2025 the year we embraced ‘whimsy’?” The proliferation of Disney motifs in Internet culture is certainly an embrace of whimsy, its softness, hopefulness, and playfulness, and that article associates the trap of nostalgic aestheticism with “whimsy capitalism.” However, we can go beyond mere whimsy. 2025 was the year that the state of our surreal world began to make itself known to us. The Disneyfication of styling can be read as a manifestation of our cultural psyche – one whose delirious, overexposed, hyperconscious, fatigued and jaded unconscious is soothed by the fantastical and the familiar. It is a system of signs at work, materialising themselves in our shared image reality as the residue of our disorienting contemporary life. To look at these images is an attempt to decipher and begin to grasp what it means to observe the surreal milieu of the 21st Century—to feel as if you must be dreaming… Or simply living in Disneyland…
"I CAN TELL BY YOUR SOUND THAT YOU DO IT BECAUSE IT'S IN RIGHT NOW"
"300SkullsAndCounting doesn't care for analysis of his music. HSR are the hipsters he wants to dismember. But we like that! Idk how Jenny Sparks, bassline curator, feels about it. Taylor Richardson played his harlem spartans bassline remix at our party last Friday- cue the crowd going wild. Hollywood Superstar is recognising that there is a tendency of screamo to be the sound glue that brings the new together? Teo our music reporter, comments on the nature of generational tastes and the 'buy low, sell high' approach to culture...
“if you scream loud enough... the culture might drift towards you.”
300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks want to incinerate London venues and assault hipster sensibilities. It seems that the only thing they revile more than trendy music is boring music- that is if the two aren’t synonymous. And not being trendy, or worse, boring is a game that they are particularly good at; their gambit being a carnivalesque genre collision that is the exact intersection of the 300skulls' chip-tune screamer and Jenny Spark's bassline curator’s solo work and taste.
Perhaps what marks London’s current underground as the epicentre of new musical output is that its most eminent contributors share an ethos rather than an underlying sound; namely, the consensus that as an artist, you ought to give yourself total and utter permission to do whatever you want, no matter how outdated or uncool- bassline, screamo etc…The idea that anyone would even try to replicate this sound is hilarious, but not so unlikely at a time when x publication can say something about laptop twee and all of a sudden everyone is making music that sounds like belle and sebastian processed through a calculator. So 300 screams the sheep away; “kill you in the bace” narrates an altercation with kids at Ormside, “I can tеll by your sound that you do it 'cause it's in right now” sounds like a cry from the weird kids at school trying to scare away the popular kids. And “You can tell that I do it 'cause I'm out of touch” assumes a new meaning considering the duet's newfound virality. On paper, they’re bitingly out of step with today’s easily reiteratable, monocultural, musical fads; but 300 and Jenny suggest that if you scream loud enough, persevere, and dare to stick to your emo-and-bassline-loving guns well enough, the culture might drift towards you.
Both bassline and screamo originated as countercultures led by teens who didn’t have much else; kids who sought to turn the barest of sounds into sounding outrageous- pantomime-esque, artificial caricatures of EDM and hardcore respectively; and so the combination is doubly outrageous. The two sounds are antagonistic throughout, but what threads them together is 300 and Jenny’s seeming brotherhood. A bit like their ex’s, the femcels, the new album is packed with teases into their studio and real-life antics; 2 of the tracks being phone calls, placing ribeye orders, and the artists giving live comments on the music throughout. You can imitate chord progressions but you can’t imitate the zany synergy of the split-brain these two seem to share. Accidents and inside jokes are it; beyond anything, they’re making music for themselves, which is probably why everyone loves it.
“Use a fucking cymbal; to decapitate a hipster” is a gorey image that sums things up pretty well; splitting ears as much as emotion, 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks’ music feels like an emblem of the unconformity and audacity that is required of artists to make music in London.
Artist Take
/ 11 October 2026 / By: Sydney Sweeney
T.Archivist is an instagram page that epitomises what we here in HOLLYWOOD call "The heydey of the instagram archival impulse".
Following on from our piece with @BATHMAT3000 Hollywood is attempting to understand the affect of estoteric knowledge and book collecting upon the now-all-powerful-algorithimically-dictated explore page.
T.archivist also runs Pinakotheca shop - where they sell actual rare books, some of which form the content for the page itself.
As seen in Artforum's lifting of articles from its archive to post to its instagram, the fetishisation of the past is very **en vogue: an archive page will post an image of Klee's "angel of history" next to a batch of post-war japanese erotic illustration.
If you're cult event/erotic book/ political assasination/far left leaning exhibition isnt chronicled in a series of slides, did it even occur?
In 2050 your children will run an archive page that places images of Luigi Mangione leaving court alongside photographs of Mazzy Joya by Richard Kern.
Is the archive a response to loneliness? Is the archive a house of ghosts?
The whole of the internet is a house of ghosts. When you die on the internet, you die on repeat for eternity everytime you death is shared again.
Is life what you expected when you were a kid?
I didn’t really have many expectations for the future as a child, but I would say I never would have came up with what I do now, or the people I have met, or the places I have been.
What do you think about storing stuff on the cloud?
I don’t have an issue with storing things on the cloud, I will say it isn’t very safe or reliable but for stuff like 100s of gigabytes of high res scans, it can be pretty useful.
What is ur relationship to your schizophrenic device?
Conspiracy theory/ cultural event you would want dramatised.
https://gideonkeys.wikidot.com/
While this doesn’t exactly fit the confines of conspiracy theory, The Gideon Keys is probably my favorite thought experiment/ work of internet fiction. What if every major city in the world had a bunch of magical phenomena that you could interact with or witness? What if a certain record under a shelf at an antique store would give you a live feed of someone's thoughts when you play it. As long as you put it back when you are done, nothing bad will happen to you. Or what if every blood transfusion done in your county comes from the same donor? The donor being an endlessly bleeding headless corpse that has been held by the district hospital in a secret room since the 1870s. Much of this phenomenon is localized and presents itself through regional institutions, unique to your area.
Is there anything that separates erotica and pornography?
Erotica is made with artistic intent in mind, whereas pornography can only have art as an afterthought. Porn must be explicit; erotica is suggestive. Pornography is seldom ‘tasteful,’ but erotica relies on taste, and is typically presented as a cultural work, fashion, literature, or, again, art itself.
Favourite books on your erotica section of your website?
Koji Wakamatsu- Pink Film Collection: My Eros Feast, 1970. A collection of stills by the highly acclaimed Japanese director.
Richard Cerf, S/T, 1990. Amazing and unique artistic direction.
Yoshifumi Hayashi - La Jeune Mariee D'un Materialiste Enceinte De Cerveaux, 1994. Morbid and incredible drawings.
Koji Wakamatsu- Pink Film Collection: My Eros Feast, 1970.
Richard Cerf, S/T, 1990.
Yoshifumi Hayashi - La Jeune Mariee D'un Materialiste Enceinte De Cerveaux, 1994
Favourite erotica book in general
Romain Slocombe, City Of the Broken Dolls, 1997. All of Slocombe’s books focus on paintings or photos of women wearing casts. Eyepatches, bandages, and crutches, usually bound to hospital beds or under bright neon lights as they would walk through the city's dark underbelly. Healing and trauma as fetishism.
An artwork you would own? Do you have a dream group show you would curate? (artistic dream blunt rotation)
When it comes to works that I would exhibit in my house, I strongly prefer American folk art. Bill Traylor, Howard Finster, Eddie Arning, any sort of objects adorned in the Tole painting style (of which my great-grandmother was internationally famous for making), tramp art carvings, antique 1920s quilts and 1800s primitive chairs and frames. Things that, outside the artists who I name-dropped, with some dedication and persistence, I can curate myself through estate sales and abandoned houses.
How do we protect physical media?
Make copies.
How does your archive influence other people? How would you like it to?
I have had a lot of people tell me I had introduced them to something that changed their worldview, or influenced them to make their own art or curate their own collection. That’s what I want to do.
Favourite architectural style: Post-modernism, Gothic revivalism or Playboy mansion.
I enjoy a lot of Federalism, Georgian, Gothic Revivalism, Greek Revivalism, and Victorian architecture that can be seen in the coastal southeast.
This was written as part of the "One-Day Cultural Takeover and Exhibition Powered By Nike SNKRS on September 12, 2026, in Milan, Celebrating The Archival Air Max Dolce sneaker." We were pleased to perform as Hollywood Superstar Review.
For six hours, two actresses read out passages from their assembled books while answering questions from the public. For six hours we wore T-shirts and clothes that matched the assembled art as styled by an archive Dolce XOXO had found for us. For six hours, all we ate was the rice crackers hidden in a 3-D printed pink futuristic 3D printed henry moore, desk while flanked by two besuited security guards.
HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR LIVE BLOGGING 6 HOUR PERFORMANCE TYPE TYPE
More institutions, please!
On our screen visitors saw displayed:
‘After the post-avant garde’ article by Sean Tatol
The Hollywood superstar website
Pitches we receive
PR emails we receive
Text messages to one another.
And also the following books on our desk:
Culture and Value: Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. G. H. von Wright (1977; English 1980)
The Damned: Joris-Karl Huysmans (1891; Penguin Classics, trans. Terry Hale, 2001)
Narrative Mortality: Catherine Russell (University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
"Dear Superstar, there are many men with means, and there are a few men with taste, and there are about forty-five men with means and taste, and none of them are doing what they need to do- which is to solve the socio-econo-ethico conditions of my thirst.
On the fact that there are no good bars to drink in, in London, perhaps we can say that these men ought to be a change in this department. And before you protest, please don’t fool yourself: when I say that there is nowhere to drink in London, I am not saying there is no cherished drinking institutions. I am talking about the overabundance of mediocrity that leaves me absolutely parched of meaning. Why is there nowhere that has the design element, the exclusivity of clientele, the mystery that is necessary in order to make something like this work out?"*
In any case, we have two things to say right now on the decorative state of the domestic:
The post-internet age is one in which the bar has been left behind. We are programming and broadcasting from our bedrooms, homemade negroni in hand, pint can in hand. We proceed to socialise domestically because of zoning laws prohibiting live music and late nights, because a drink costs an hour of minimum wage work, because we can already see everyone we need to see on Instagram. We invite people into our homes physically because the rigour demanded by public space is too much when the social contract has been worn so thin.
After all, since we were young we had the history of the entire world shot into our brain as we were wrapped up in our barbie/superman/nonbinary bedspread.
The domestic has already been so public for all of us that the ‘reveal’ in person (because of course there is no such thing as a blind date) becomes about subtlety. It is fitting that London bars are a blank relief of anonymity, when so much of life is lived looking at usernames and overly curated online worlds. The great relief of Wetherspoons, the great relief of their lack of music. The even greater relief, sometimes hipster relief, sometimes not so hipster relief of a Samuel Smith pub, and their similar lack of music. All of these places are amazing places where you can go and be nothing, as a relief from the supreme individualising process of creating a private property authorship of your own life. But these places are only open for so long, unless you have a daddy/company card: we only have so much money, but we all really love to hear the sound of our own voice as we trail off into the night. So we invite people inside, for economic and social reasons.
Those whose lives are not overdetermined by the social or the economic are the errant, arrogant sons of financiers and those navel-gazing daughters who did not want to become consultants. The unprofessional trustafarians, distracted and stimulated into becoming artists as an excuse for their own failed identities. What else? What else is there for them to do? I have an idea- how about instead of making your lives so incredibly boring, you might want to fall out of love with your punk, industrial teenage heroes and become a Malcolm McClaren. Perhaps I am leaning too far into familial, socially reproductive determinism here, but I can’t help but wish for some people to be the businessmen their fathers wished for them to be.
Dear Superstar, when I was being educated at the finest school in all the land, I was taught the most incisive, cutting, high level of the snake-eating-itself of institutional critique. This level of meta-critique means that I might have been put into this situation in which we find ourselves writing at this very moment, which is wearing sneakers to promote a shoe in the city of fashion, Milano. At this very second, we have been installed in a small fashion institution in the railway arches, 200 meters from Milano Centrale Station.
When I was taught to criticise, it was always as if I were inside the railway arches, in the bright white of an installed space. Clean, white, pink. Promotional and perfect, my feet fit exactly in these shoes. This is where I am meant to be. This place is good; we are tucked away in the centre of the exhibition. At this very second, people are looking at me writing, half-pretending to be writing. LaLaLa. We are here performing for six hours, and the lighting is fluorescent but perfect; everyone’s skin shines expensive like the sweat on an Arabian horse. Men come up to me and ask those obvious kinds of questions that you forget people use to flirt: “Are you an artist?”
No, we say. We are bloggers. We are here to blog about the topic: why we should be having more guys design places like Max’s Kansas City- we need more restaurateurs in London. Restaurateurs who don’t care about food. Food is what you care about to care about your body, but if you go too far along that road, you end up like Bateman. If there is anything that we learnt from American Psycho, it's that restaurants were invented so business people could prevent themselves from disclosing the true brutality of their fantasies!
Lets have a restaurant where you can only see each other from quite close up, red lights and a band in the next room. Let’s have a bowl of chicken wings for the table and a large bucket of Sangria. Let’s have it as a chain; as a public members’ club that wouldn’t have you as a member. If you got money, come talk to us. But first: let's collect ourselves.
Essay
/ 8 October 2026 / By: Hollywood Superstar Editorial
Hollywood Superstar Review gets a bit more than a mention probably more a Segway into a broader argument in the new “ANONYMOUS” issue of Texte Zur Kunst alongside @divacorp_usa.
The piece is called “AUTHORS I RESPECT, OR; EVERY TEXT ONLINE IS A JOB APPLICATION” By Anke Dyes.
“In a post from April 21 of this year, the art criti- cism blog Hollywood Superstar Review apologized for covering yet another exhibition at @reena_spaulings. In the intro to the review, editor Sydney Sweeney (one of the pseudonyms used on Hollywood Superstar) explains that some shows simply have to be reviewed because they result in good discussions.”
