#FreeGwyneth
Ciao <3
In our Artist’s Way group this week, my friend told me that she knows a guy who signs off all his morning pages that way and I love that and can’t stop thinking about it, so now you get to think about it too.
Anyway:
We’re here. Mess is back. And although my life remains in minor upheaval, I feel weirdly, suspiciously calm about it all. And I will also have more to share on that front next week, I promise.
My porcelain mug class went great, for those curious. It was way easier than I thought it would be, just a little slip casting and hand building situation. I also learned from all the women at my table that I apparently have a secret, innate talent for marbling. Who knew! Of course the only natural gift I possess would be the ability to dump a bunch of paint in a plastic cup and blend them up with a fork just enough to produce a professional-caliber swirl. Even the teacher mistook my cast for one of the examples, so I guess if you want a marbling consultation on your next project please hit me up?? In true Artist’s Way fashion, that Artist’s Date also came complete with a very heavy-handed synchronicity which is that the class took place in the very same building where I had my first — and all-time worst! — full-time magazine job. A job that I’ve spent literally the past decade fully unpacking all of the weird professional trauma that boss instilled in me. Very cool stuff.
And I have no idea what this means, but I’ve also been reentering my Nirvana phase for the first time since I was probably 18 years old. Is it the need for a release valve on all this raw teenage angst? A resurfacing of my subconscious desire to rage against the machine? All of that remains to be seen. However, listening to them again did remind me that Nirvana is also weirdly my first real memory of television. I distinctly remember my sisters watching the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV in our living room, which means I would’ve been like 3? Clearly I imprinted.
Anyway, Ye Olde Mess: Met Gala 2008 has been curated, organized, and partially written. As I said, life upheaved, so apologies for the delay. But it will be completed this weekend and arrive in inboxes shortly thereafter. And I highly recommend you become a paid subscriber before you miss out on all the beauty and the glory contained within. Please join us.
Also hop on in the Discord if you’re interested because if 560+ Messketeers are wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Ok, enough with the dilly-dallying.
Sylvester Stallone getting elbow deep in some oil paint is exactly how I feel having now completed the Artist’s Way. Please clap.
BREAKING NEWS: Burberry found dead after this week’s episode of Succession. For those who don’t watch, the above diatribe was delivered in response to a commoner’s $3,000 bag covered in high-visibility Burberry tartan. People seemed a little confused about the reasoning behind Tom’s attack on this particular purse. I think more than being about the brand or style of the bag, it’s a statement about loud versus quiet wealth and also the basic inability for non-billionaires to ever purchase their way into these upper echelons even when they’re literally in the same room. Because simply by buying into the idea of visible signifiers of wealth, such as a designer logo, you’ve already failed the test. The logo isn’t a signifier of status to the truly wealthy, but rather of a gauche kind of social striving. Hence, why you always hear about how the 1% love The Row, Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli, etc. All completely unbranded and completely absurdly priced brands. That said, I do also think Burberry has very much become a shorthand for the type of brand a shopper not deeply familiar with the luxury market thinks is luxury. Like a Michael Kors, for example. Or the fact that every woman in Manhattan seems to own one of those Louis Vuitton tote bags, or at least the Canal Street knock off of it.
But by far the most shocking thing that happened to me this week is that Brooklyn Beckham and I may have finally found some common ground. Because I really saw myself reflected back in his response to this question. Am I clothing expert? NOPE x but fashion is my passion <3
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
And of course, how could we not briefly touch down on the Harry Styles and Emily Ratajkowski of it all, getting caught in 4K making out in Japan. I was actually surprised to see how many people, including a number of our own Discord users, immediately assumed this was yet another pap set-up. Not so surprising I guess considering EmRata has been on a tear of stunt dates lately. And after months of me asking why she suddenly seems so desperate to generate all these pointless headlines despite having never had a problem getting press naturally in the past, I finally have my answer. Considering it just came out that her ex-husband is a predator, I now see why she might want to create some google search results distance between herself and that man.
Anyway, all that said, this is one of the exceedingly rare instances where I believe this hookup is authentic. Why you ask? Because in my heart of hearts I know that these two incredibly hot people have never been told that they are bad at kissing or dancing and so this is now how they actually kiss and dance. Seems like authentic hot people shenanigans to me! Now, what I do not believe is all this talk of Emily begging for Olivia’s forgiveness. And while I also don’t believe it, I am partial to the conspiracy theory floating around DeuxMoi that this is all the result of a threesome invitation gone awry.
However, I also find the fact that she was Harry’s crush a decade ago to be kind of…creepy? despite the internet’s insistence that I find this discovery cute. Then again, as someone in the Discord pointed out, maybe they really are soulmates because she is perhaps the one woman on earth perfectly suited to take on all of his crazy fans and not be fazed by the trolling in the slightest. All I know for sure is that North Face needs to give Emily a raise immediately.
And in other relationship news, I can’t believe these two didn’t make it. A source revealed to Billboard this week that Lana Del Rey is maybe, probably engaged and her fiancé is shockingly not this man, Jack Donoghue, the last man I knew her to be in a relationship with. I can’t quite believe this redneck romance is over. Based on this picture alone of the two of them posing outside the Cook County Department of Corrections for no ostensible reason, they seemed like a match made in Americana iconography heaven. Alas. Mazel to her and her new music manager betrothed, I guess. I look forward to her forthcoming Something Blue album dedicated to the topic of matrimonial bliss and housewifery.
Now this I can very much believe. In fact, I don’t know why this is even being reported on because it should just be considered a given at this point. Cage did dismiss this story, however, saying he wasn’t in character the whole time he just still had the fangs in so they made him talk funny…..funny enough that the director thought he was method acting for months on end, apparently. But the inventor of the shamanic nouveau acting style can’t fool me. Personally I think the spirit of Vlad the Impaler possessed his body so he just doesn’t remember filming this movie at all.
And this week an incredible question was raised on the Lemme TikTok account. Kourtney, of course, flipped the insult into a joke for content to sell her gummy vitamins, but I do think it’s something genuinely worth their consideration. As Kourtney said, “that would be nice” and, yes, it would in fact be nice because they all absolutely could retire and would still never hurt for cash or attention because of it. I also feel like after a decade of forcing themselves down the public’s throat, people would actually have a lot less animosity towards them if they’d just step back for a second and stop trying to pawn some new subpar product off on us while simultaneously occupying every square-inch of tabloid space. This is also very much in line with my old post-divorce vision for Kim to inhabit the framework of a real A-lister and radically pull back from public life and social media, Beyoncé-style. Truly, why not retire (aside from the insane greed)? Besides, there’s nothing celebrities love more than to retire and come back two months later to great fanfare. It’s “KUWTK is ending” all over again.
Speaking of the Kardashians, as some of you may have noticed, I’ve been mum on the topic of Kim for weeks now. Not due to any reason in particular except that her outfits have gone from boring me to tears to not even registering at all on my radar. A very precarious place in pop culture for someone who’s supposedly a trendsetter to exist. But I just had to quickly pop her back in here to say, we are absolutely not doing these boots again. Kim is still regressing further and further back into her style from a decade ago, and I regret to inform that we already hit the suede thigh-high boot and duster combo total saturation point in 2015. We gotta move on.
I also just had to include this picture of Kim with the moms of all of Saint’s friends because one of my absolute favorite forms of content from this family is when they willingly put themselves side-by-side with regular-degulars. It throws the insanity of everything they’ve done with their faces and fashion into sharp relief and once again provides us with a baseline in the reality they’ve long since jettisoned. I know Kim’s been playing around with the alien visuals for Skims, but if she wants to look really out of this world there’s no need to bus in the green little men. All she needs to do is walk through the halls of any mall in America. I honestly think the more we get to see these women immersed in the unwashed massed and lit exclusively by fluorescent lighting, the more interesting they become.
And again, this seems like a vague gesture at relatability, giving followers a “behind the scenes” look at preparing for a Good American casting. But as always, it actually just ends up underscoring how far adrift this family is in the sea of celebrity. Specifically, it seems to me like maybe not the best idea to depict a girl pinning your jeans to make them tighter around your knee cap in an ad for your jeans…..If you can’t find pants that correctly fit your leg as one of the foremost purveyors of cheap, extremely stretchy denim, I have concerns. There’s definitely something there about the Kardashians’ obsession with the simulacrum of work without a consideration for what the actual function or goal of that labor is, but we can save that for another day.
At least Khloe seems to be very happy with all of this work.
It’s always amazing to me the speed with which we cycle through trends in today’s street style economy because just as soon as we get nipples and g-strings on the red carpet, it already feels like we’re overdue to move on to the next iteration of scandalous dress. Such is the nature of the content monster. When there’s a bottomless demand for more clothes, more headlines, and more outrage, fashion has no choice but to churn out the shocking apparel at a faster and faster rate, shifting the consumer’s Overton window increasingly in the nudist colony direction. It also doesn’t help that this particular set of Saint Laurent samples is getting lent out to every Delilah Belle Hamlin and her mother this month. I really feel like the only place we can go from here is ditching the faux modesty of the sheer cover-up altogether. It’s that or merkins, ladies’ choice!
And metal mesh is definitely one way to start edging in that direction. This is Madison Beer wearing Paco Rabanne, a tough look from a typically cool designer. Creative director Julien Dossena isn’t totally to blame for this, however, as this piece has been pretty substantially altered from how it appeared on the runway and I can never understand why celebrities do this. Nine times out of 10, their idea for the dress is way worse that the original. Anyway, she clearly wanted this to be more overtly sexy as they chopped the skirt into barely a fringe, throwing the equilibrium of the outfit off entirely. And once again, while I get that the concept of a bra made exclusively out of steel washers is sexy, unfortunately, it also offers zero support, leaving the girls to wander askance. Something I feel like would not be that difficult to solve with the tightening of a strap or some sort of metal wiring through the cup. And finally, much like Delilah last week, Madison also tried to circumnavigate some illusion mesh panelling with a sheet of clear latex around the midriff that isn’t quite working. In this case, I wonder if part of the weirdness of it is that we can’t see a belly button so there’s no sense of a real body being behind the port holes. It almost looks like a sheet of taupe-colored plastic.
And Katy Perry is forcing me to once again ask why in the world anyone is still wearing head-to-toe Alexander Wang in the year 2023. A year when trans people are particularly under attack, and yet Katy — whose entire career would not exist without the queerbaiting that launched her to stardom out of Christian campfire singalongs — has chosen to wear this ugly and ill-fitting attire designed by an alleged sexual predator who specifically targets trans people. It makes me feel like I am beating my head against a wall that this is still going on. Because on top of every other horrible thing, as with all these cancelled designers celebrities can’t stop supporting, the clothes are BAD. They’re not even getting a fit off for supporting a credibly accused sex offender! Talk about insult to injury. Someone on Twitter also called this outfit a chewed piece of gum stuck in the shower drain and I can’t unsee it.
This week, I also brushed the thick layers of dust and grime of my It-girl siren and tentatively plugged it back in because Iris Apatow is setting off my internal alarm system. The nepo baby-ing, the no eyebrows, the casual friendship with a burgeoning pop icon, all capped off with an 80s-inspired outfit that is at once completely on-trend, yet also extremely specific to her tastes — I’m intrigued! We just might have a new Bella in our midsts. Consider Iris officially added to the Mess rosters.
On the topic of Bella, while Dakota was pulling inspiration from the Hadid school of fancy vest dressing, we also got one more take on the flower boob patch by Loewe this week courtesy of her sister Dakota Fanning. And I’m officially back on board! I think we learned after that doubled- up misstep the other week that the anthurium has either got to be giant or asymmetrical to avoid Nipples of the Future syndrome. But man, when it works, it really works. Also, more broadly, I think there’s something to the whole one-shoulder boob reveal that someone like Saint Laurent might want to look into for next season.
Saweetie also jumped aboard the object as shirt bandwagon, covering her bikini top in a whole lot of Hello Kitty paraphernalia. This also reminded me, wasn’t there a celebrity who wore a bunch of Tamagotchis as a halter top? I can see the shirt so vividly in my mind’s eye, but I cannot picture who it was on. A deranged part of my brain keeps screaming James Charles, but I have found no photographic evidence to support that delusion. So, if you know who might have done such a thing, please reach out!!
But leave it to queen of the endless trend churn, Rita Ora, to once again show me a fresh way forward. Not only has she found a means by which to max out the number of layers possible to place upon the human form, but she’s also found a way to do so while keeping everything completely see through. While the end result should be Joey from Friends wearing everything he owns at once, instead Rita has created some expert-level peekaboo outrage-bait. Does it look a bit like a baby that got tangled up in its swaddling? Yes. Someone wrapped up in toilet paper like a mummy? Absolutely. But I still think there’s some serious potential here. Stock up on your TP and spools of yarn now.
And, as always, I’ve saved the absolute best for last. As you’ve probably gleaned from my coverage of Megan Fox’s cast (or lack thereof) and Ashley Park’s bedazzled ankle brace, one of my favorite types of accessories are medical equipment made absurdly glam. And eye patches are one you simply do not see enough of out there.
But unfortunately, just like Hailey Bieber, the time has come for me to enter my “nature era” and log off for the weekend.
Until we meet again, please remember that I do not give a flying FUCK about Fonts… Weirdo shit.
Now sally forth into the world as smugly as Jameela Jamill replete with your insider information of all of the dumbest beefs and ugliest togs celebrities’ had to offer.
I’ll just be here quietly disassociating like Lily Allen on the red carpet until we meet again.
Until then, keep on rockin’ in the free world.
It’s once again time to face the final curtain and by final curtain I mean my creative sales pitch to convince you to subscribe. If you revel in the Mess compiled here week after week like a pig in mud, then may I kindly suggest you get those trotters trotting on over to emilykirkpatrick.substack.com to sign up for a paid subscription today. And since birds of a feather flock together, I’ve got a feeling you know more than a few fellow swine who would delight in all the filth we’ve got going on here, so why not do them a favor and sign them up for a free subscription. And please consider communicating to the world your rarified status as a haute connoisseur of trash by treating yourself to some Mess Merch today.
For those who seek total D-list immersion, allow me to suggest the ~ MESS DISCORD ~ which is essentially the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank. It is a sensory overload tank filled with bad fashions, hot goss, and 560+ Mess readers ready to talk it out.
And before I set my iPhone to DND for the rest of the year, I would never be able to forgive myself if I forgot to heap my highest laudations upon the great material mystics known as the OG Mess Masters. These wise interpolators of the internet’s finest meme fodder have a passion for perverse glamour that cannot be satiated. And if you find yourself to be of a similar persuasion, for just $5 a month, you too could find yourself elbow-deep in my backlog of celebrity blackmail. So please sign up to be a paid subscriber today before you miss out on the 2008 Met Gala and, in the meantime, catch up on my 1998 VMAs red carpet breakdown.
As always, if you can’t afford to pay for more Mess, just ask me about getting a comped subscription. I promise, it’s no big deal. And if you send over a screenshot of your donation to any abortion or bail fund, your next month of Mess is on me.
Farewell, you beautiful masterpieces!
