Julia Fox manages to stir morbid fascinations on almost every page of her best-selling memoir, Down the Drain. Sure, there are moments of extreme glitz—of private jets, Carbone, and thick wads of cash—but there are also stories set in psychiatric hospitals and BDSM basements. Much like her fashion choices, Fox bounces through the glamour and the grotesque all the same.
This is, after all, the woman who wore a handbag moulded in the shape of a six-foot corpse to New York Fashion Week in 2023, and a self-immolating trench coat to revisit the New York rooftop where her son “was conceived” in 2022. Just last night, Fox wore a pair of trompe-l’œil kitten heels designed to look as though they had been crafted from the leather of human skin with a Knwls bomber jacket, a kidney-shaped Razr handbag, and hand-scribbled, cropped jeans.
Fashion observers will recognize these flesh-toned pumps as belonging to the same Jean Paul Gaultier and Jimmy Choo collaboration as Taylor Swift’s kitsch Eiffel Tower wedges—the tattoo-inspired artwork borrowed from Gaultier’s spring/summer 1994 collection, where industrial barbed wire wraps around haunted mansion lettering. It’s about looking hot and hardcore, as if Julia Fox might have emerged from a dominatrix’s dungeon or a billionaire’s airplane, daring to face the “uglier” side of life.
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
