Björk is wearing a pleated organza harness and dress embellished with crystalline edging and sequin fringing and latex bodysuit custom-made by Alessandro Michele for GucciPhotography by Nick Knight, Styling by Edda Gudmundsdottir
From Björk and Ocean Vuong’s compelling conversation about motherhood and familial bonds, to Harley Weir on the relationship between art and pornography, we look back on our most popular features of the year
1. When Icelandic singer Björk first met Vietnamese-American poet OceanVuong in 2019, her mother had recently passed away. When the two sat down in conversation for AnOther Magazine’s Autumn/Winter 2022 cover story, motherhood, guardianship, and familial bonds still proved as powerful a theme as ever. “What I realised with your music – and this album especially – is that we all have a mother, but we also have people, friends, family who mother us,” Vuong says. “Mothering is also an act without gender as well as a biological reality – it’s both.”
Wool bandeau, Bermuda shorts and neck piece by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
2. Suffering a dark of the night soul aged 16 is earlier than most. But after completing a summer programme at the American Ballet Theatre in New York, that’s just what actress Margaret Qualley endured. Invariably, it proved profound: “I realised you don’t even love [it]. You’re just doing this because you want to be perfect, and you’re about to waste your whole life because you’ll never be perfect.” By the time she was cast in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, she was well on her way to tapping into her purpose and intuition. Gracing the cover of AnOther Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2022 issue, Qualley sat down with Sirin Kale to discuss how she has learnt to take up space and trust herself.
3. Harley Weir is the London-based image-maker who has produced epoch-making photographs, whether that be Billie Eilish for Gucci, Doja Cat, Pamela Anderson and Charli XCX for Marc Jacobs, 21 Savage for Another Man or Young Thug in Molly Goddard for Dazed. Sins of a Daughter, her latest solo exhibition, saw Weir collate 30 of her own photographs in an exploration of trauma and shame. Dissecting the relationship between art and pornography with Violet Conroy, Weir noted, “There’s no designer vagina, they all look so different and they’re all beautiful in different ways.”
Compact viscose body and thigh-high leather boots with cotton ruffles by ALAÏAPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
4. Ana de Armas made a pilgrimage to Marilyn Monroe’s marble crypt in the quiet corner of Westwood Village Memorial Park on the day she began shooting Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s visceral biopic of the icon’s famously tumultuous life. The challenge de Armas faced was to distinguish the separate entities that formed the whole: on the one hand, Norma Jeane Mortenson was the product of her distressing and troubled childhood, whereas Monroe was the alter ego she allowed to take centre stage. In a lengthy profile from AnOther Magazine’s Autumn/Winter 2022 issue, Hannah Lack went to find out how de Armas managed to strike the perfect balance.
5. When the latest The Lord of the Rings instalment, The Rings of Power, landed on Amazon Prime earlier this year it caused a frenzy. The most expensive TV series of all time – the production budget reportedly costing nearly $715 million (£615 million) – it also came highly anticipated, after fans patiently waited two decades since the Peter Jackson trilogy was first released in 2001. Speaking to Ted Stansfield, Welsh actress Morfydd Clark ponders on what it meant to play Galadriel, and why Tolkein’s fantasy world has more parallels to reality than people think.
6. Jinkx Monsoon grew up in Portland, Oregon with an alcoholic mother, but it wasn’t until many years later that she realised how much of this troubled figure had been incorporated into the drag act that would see her travel the world as an internationally renowned queen and much-adored persona on RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. “Jinkx is a single mother, the odds stacked against her, she’s frantic, she’s chaotic,” she laments. In her attempt to win the acclaimed title of ‘Queen of all Queens’ on the show, she chats to Amanda Feinman about therapy, witchcraft, and philosophy.
7. “I think it much more conjures something provocative than something soft,” acclaimed designer Simone Rocha muses on the concept of girlhood and girlishness. In discussion with Laura Allsop about the all-female exhibition she curated, girls girls girls at Lismore Castle Arts – which included artists like Louise Bourgeois, Luo Yang, and Cindy Sherman – the Irish designer explained the process behind the curation. “I wanted to pick artists whose works, to me, had this almost subversive, very provocative and visceral interpretation of femininity.”
8. Before taking to Substack in July to write her column Out of It, Mary Gaitskill had no online presence. Perhaps this was purposeful – her novels resist moral dogma and the sort of binary thinking that is so pervasive on social media. Instead, the American author prefers to imbue her work with an uneasy sense of ambiguity. “Literature is not dead, but it’s de-physicalised, it’s disembodied,” she said in a Q&A with Emily Dinsdale. In speaking about her decision to go online, she ruminates on how literature has also been digitised and what that means for humanity.
9. Artist Carolee Schneemann was no shrinking violet. From thrashing around in raw meat to producing a scroll out of her vagina, Schneemann was never far away from inciting intense provocation through her embodiment of womanhood. “No wonder male audience members expressed anger or approached her violently,” notes writer Philippa Snow. “She made fools of those who dared to see her as a naked bauble by reminding them that even hot girls bled, got angry, were artistic geniuses, and occasionally took pleasure in being gleefully unhinged.” As her retrospective exhibition Body Politics opened at the Barbican, Snow, artist Sands Murray-Wassink, writer Lauren Elkin, and editor and creative consultant Isabella Burley spoke about what the late pioneer meant to them and how her legacy lives on.
10. Following on from The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s second novel Either/Orfollows its protagonist Selin as she drifts through Harvard while pining for her lover, who remains oblivious and mostly absent from the novel. Although not overtly political, the book came in the wake of Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” comments, #MeToo, and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. In conversation with Dominique Sisley, Batuman discussesromantic longing, the power of the body politic and how it intersects with art.