Late(r) Summer Zeitgeist

Serial killers, hardcore, queer photography and youth in revolt

Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere in The Shards. Credit: Vogue

Late summer, and apparently my attention has turned towards pastel-hued menace, hardcore subcultures, queer bodies and serial killers. Here’s what I’m watching, looking at and reading right now.

The Shards finally arrives on Disney+

The TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards arrives today on Disney+ in the UK. I went deep with the book a couple of years ago, loving Ellis’s blend of teenage ennui, Hollywood glitz and the expected perversion lurking beneath the surface - with more than a hint of Manson Family menace.

So I have high expectations for the TV version. Ryan Murphy’s recent output has sometimes tended towards excess piled upon excess, but The Shards may actually be the perfect material for him. From the first images, he has gone full throttle on a shrink-wrapped version of 1981 Hollywood, from the immaculate interiors to the pastel-hued preppy fashions. Wes Bentley as Terry Schaffer is already giving me Richard Gere in American Gigolo, if Richard Gere had taken a distinctly sleazier turn.

Wes Bentley (left) as Terry Schaffer in The Shards. Photograph courtesy of FX.

Stone Island’s calm and chaos

Stone Island isn’t a brand usually on my radar - too Oasis, too laddy-casual for my liking - but its newly launched creative documentary project, The Calm and the Chaos, has caught my attention.

Photographer and filmmaker Isaac Lamb spent six months documenting hardcore and metalcore scenes across Europe and North America, photographing bands in a mix of current and vintage Stone Island. It speaks directly to something I wrote about in my last post: fashion often seems most exciting when it belongs to people who are busy doing something other than fashion.

Clothes acquire meaning through use, community and allegiance. Removed from the showroom and placed inside rehearsal rooms, venues and subcultures, even Stone Island starts to look different to me.

Two photographic countercultures

Two photography exhibitions are also high on my list.

At Auto Italia, Sensual / Mutual brings together work by the pioneering non-binary photographer Del LaGrace Volcano. Spanning several decades, the exhibition traces the dyke, leather, fetish, queer and gender-variant communities Volcano photographed in San Francisco, Santa Fe and beyond - not simply documenting these worlds, but participating in their construction and visibility.

Del LaGrace Volcano, Charmaine and Velinda, Scott’s, San Francisco, 1981. Installation view at Auto Italia, photographed by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Auto Italia.

As Volcano put it in a recent Guardian interview: “The world wasn’t ready for me.” Perhaps now we are finally catching up.

I’m equally intrigued by Youth, an exhibition by Thai photographer Chardchakaj Waikawee at Graces Mews in Camberwell. Between 2008 and 2020, Waikawee photographed young people living around the edges of Bangkok society, many facing poverty and limited access to education or healthcare.

Chardchakaj Waikawee, Untitled (Mohawk and Mercedes) and Untitled (Family Portrait), from the series Youth, 2008–20. Courtesy of the artist and Graces Mews.

What stands out is the defiant individualism of the people he encountered: a highlighter-pink mohawk emerging from a Mercedes sunroof; a tattooed young couple posing tenderly with their baby; identities assembled through hair, clothing, tattoos and attitude, even when the usual markers of social identity were precarious or absent.

Waikawee shot the series using cheap, expired and sometimes damaged film, retaining its scratches, distortions and imperfections. It’s a beautifully apt visual language: unstable lives producing images that remain vivid, resilient and entirely their own.

Youth is at Graces Mews until 19 September.

Current read: Furious Violet

Finally, I am utterly gripped by Sarai Walker’s Furious Violet, discovered via a recent New York Times summer reading recommendation. It completely feeds my voracious appetite for true crime and crime noir, with the bonus of a literary debacle being gleefully unpicked.

Violet “West” Shelley is a Mountain Dew-fuelled true-crime writer travelling across the US from one serial killer story to another when she becomes the target of a stalker claiming that Violet is her mother. The problem: Violet is childless.

What follows draws her back into the obsessive fan culture surrounding her own mother, a Sylvia Plath-esque poet who died by suicide shortly after Violet’s birth. That fanbase has always taken an uncomfortable interest in the daughter left behind—and may know far more about her than she does about herself.

As funny as it is genuinely gripping and disturbing, Furious Violet brings me straight back to what I loved about The Shards: American fiction unafraid to be as savage about American culture in its humour as it is in its depiction of humanity’s darker impulses.

Very, very recommended.