Julia Fox Is No Longer Your Downtown Darling
Nearly 20 years ago in New York City, a young, restless, teenaged Julia Fox would wait patiently for her neighbors to throw out their trash before sneaking down to the basement and scavenging the recycling bins for magazines she could use to make collages. She would skip over the copy and head straight to the photos — oftentimes of models and streetstyle fashion — and use scissors and glue to reimagine the most striking images into her own creation.
“I guess in a way I was making a vision board… but like, not really” Fox tells me, dragging her last syllable in a long, seductive rasp. We’re sitting across from each other in a suite at the JW Marriott looking over Central Park, only a few long blocks from the Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville where she spent much of her childhood, often squatting in whichever vacant apartment her dad was working on as a contractor.
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Her long, bleached-blonde hair, which she just dyed back from the “Velveeta Gold” hair she had done for a pap walk only a few days earlier, is clipped back with silver barrettes, clearing the way for a better view of her boldly lined eyes and bleached brows.
Tucked in her hands is a light pink vape, flavored “yogurt ice cream.” “I have to order it from like Texas or something.” she says. “It’s impossible to find but I went through every single flavor and now I’m sick of all of them so I have to keep finding new ones.”
We’re at a junket for her new show on E! called “OMG Fashun!,” a reality fashion show premiering with two back-to-back episodes on May 6, that sees contestants use unconventional materials (ie: trash) to upcycle a daring fashion ensemble for Ms. Fox herself to model — and a $10,000 cash prize for the winning look. She serves as the show’s host and judge alongside the famed stylist Law Roach, who after announcing his retirement last year, now calls himself an “image architect” and only works with select clients such as Zendaya and Anya Taylor-Joy.
At this point, Fox is on her sixth hour of talking to press and I worry that she would be tired of these childhood anecdotes, like that of her digging in trash for inspiration as a teenager, that paint an easy, linear narrative from young, unruly teen to bonafide fashion icon. But while most people during a long day of press find themselves latching onto such memories as a way of making sense of their story, Fox doesn’t pretend she manifested any of it.
When I ask her if she ever envisioned herself on TV, she laughs. “No, not at all. Not at all.”
“But then again, I never envisioned myself being in movies or doing anything I’m doing,” she continues. “I just go wherever the wind blows.”
The wind, in this case, was given an extra gust from her agent who believed she could turn the upcycling videos she was already posting onto her social media into a full-fledged show. Since her breakout role in “Uncut Gems,” she’s become a staple of the downtown fashion scene, and oftentimes creates her most unique looks by putting scissors to fabric, cutting up pieces she already has in her closet to create something anew.
On her Instagram, you can find videos dating back to 2022 of her turning towels into high-fashion mini dresses; classic, high-waisted jeans into the low-waisted denims she’s since been photographed in countless times; a Hanes undershirt into a skin-baring two-piece set. Her most viral video is, of course, a step-by-step tutorial of how to create her famous blackened eyeshadow look, which she dubs the “Fox Eye,” using one charcoal eyeliner pen.
“[A show] kind of felt like the natural next step because I was already upcycling on my own and making videos about it and discovering designers and wearing their clothes so it was just like the merging of the two worlds and I guess doing it on a bigger stage,” she says.
Fox describes the show, whose first season features ten, rapidly-paced 30-minute episodes, as a mix between “America’s Next Top Model” meets “Chopped” meets “Project Runway” meets “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“It’s a fun show,” she says. ‘It’s not meant to be taken super seriously and it’s meant to really attract all kinds of audiences, like you don’t just have to be into fashion to watch this show. Everybody has trash in their house, everybody has old stuff that can be given a new life to.”
“I don’t want to see people losing and then crying about it,” she adds. “I want to see people winning and crying.”
She continues, “I was obviously like, ‘There’s no way that this would become a show,’ but [my agent] was really adamant and was like, ‘No, like we can really do this‘ And I was like, ‘Okay’ and I just took the meetings, I showed up when he told me to show up and we sold it.”
Showing up and being seen is what she does best, but she often needs someone else to push her into the spotlight. Within her exists paradoxes because as much as she boasts admirably blind confidence and assurance, she never was her own cheerleader.
“I always had people telling me that I could do so much more and I didn’t have that same level of confidence,” she says. “Like everyone around me was always like, ‘You could be a writer, you should write a book about your life, you could be a movie star,’ and I was just like, ‘You guys are crazy.’ Like I definitely did not have the self-esteem to even see that for myself.”
Much of her childhood is detailed in her memoir “Down the Drain,” which she released (and adamantly insists she did not ghost write) last year. In it, she recounts a turbulent upbringing with very little parental oversight.
Though Fox was born in Milan, she moved to New York City to live with her dad when she was six years old. Her mom stayed in Italy, and although Fox would frequently go back to visit and even went to school for a year in Como, she spent most of her formative years unsupervised on the gritty streets of downtown New York, where she became a fixture of the nightlife scene and met many of the close friends (or “chosen family,” as she calls them) that are still in her inner circle today. Two of them, the photographer and model Richie Shazam and her stylist Briana Andalore, are almost always flanked on either side of Ms. Fox while she sits front row at fashion shows and poses for “impromptu” paparazzi shoots. They were also two of Fox’s four friends that were gifted Hermés Birkins by Kanye West when she and the famous rapper had a brief affair in 2022.
While she looks back on her teenage years with fondness, it was also a time riddled with drugs, drained bank accounts, legal trouble and more than one fatal overdose within her group. To make money, she spent a few years as a dominatrix and charmed her way into bankable relationships with billIonaire men. She didn’t have grand plans for herself back then, but aspired to be a part of the the “cool, artsy downtown scene” that she unwittingly found herself a part of even before creating her own art.
“I guess always saw myself in the art world in some way, but I had a very myopic view of what the art world meant,” she says. In her wildest dreams, she saw herself living a charmed life in the city, showing art in exhibits frequented by trendy New Yorkers (maybe those with a few thousand followers and a verified check on Instagram) but she “definitely did not picture it being on this very large scale with the world as a stage,” she says.
While it was the social scene by which she was initially enamored, it was her natural inclination to turn her trauma into art that propelled her career. The first piece of art that got her press was a zine called “Heartburn/Nausea,” in which she chronicled three separate relationships in her life that were abusive, dysfunctional or codependent in different ways.
“I feel like [trauma] doesn’t necessarily need to be a necessity [for art], but if you do have it, you do need to find a way to make it useful in your life, or otherwise it’s just gonna eat away at you,” she says.
“And then when you’ve evolved even more,” she continues, “the next step is to start seeing it as your gift. Like, ‘Oh my god I wouldn’t have even made it here if this horrible thing hadn’t happened to me.’ I feel like that’s the best ‘fuck you’ to people that have done horrible things to you and then you taking that pain and turning it into a work of art or writing a song like Taylor Swift does.”
As we talk, it’s clear that she’s a lifetime away from the trauma that informed her earlier work. She now has a three year-old son Valentino with a former partner that she describes as being “inconsistent,” meaning she’s swapped the late night clubbing with 6 a.m. wake up calls to bathe him, prepare breakfast for him and drop him off at daycare before delving into her own jam-packed days.
Unlike other celebrities who are determined to keep their kids out of the spotlight, she wants to include him in the fortunate life she’s made for herself. She’ll often show up at events with him wrapped around her hip, and he most recently made a cameo in the the music video she shot for her upcoming single “Down the Drain,” which hasn’t officially released yet but is already viral on TikTok.
“I feel like by [hiding your kids] it’s almost like a disservice,” she says. “It’s like I have this very highly coveted thing, I want to share that with my son. We need him to be a nepo baby and he needs to like own it too. He can’t be like I’m not really a nepo baby, he needs to be like Yes I’m a nepo baby, and what?“
That being said, she does make sure his childhood has a sense of normalcy. She doesn’t have a nanny, is on an email chain with the other parents from his daycare and invites his school friends over for playdates. For the first two years of his life, they lived in a quaint two-bedroom apartment in the East Village, even after the money she was clearing from films, sponsored posts and event appearances (the latter of which can make her up to $20,000) meant she could surely have upgraded.
But when she posted an apartment tour to her Instagram to show off her humble abode, judgmental online comments made her question whether she should finally move into a larger space.
“I did take into consideration a lot of the comments and was like ‘Okay, I guess I could probably upgrade’ and it wasn’t like I didn’t have the money for it,” she says.
She now lives in a four-story house in Harlem with her best friend Richie and her boyfriend, who serves as “the man in Valentino’s life.”
“I feel like he’s a really good example of masculinity,” she says. “He’s very comfortable in his masculinity and is definitely the best role model I could have ever chosen for Valentino because I don’t want him to grow up aggressively macho like some other men in his vicinity are.”
“The family unit in this country is really disintegrating so we have to find new ways to remedy that,” she says. “Chosen family is the best, it’s better than biological family.”
As for what’s next next for Fox? Aside from her foray into reality television, she’s most excited about a future in acting. She appears in Steven Soderbergh’s film “Presence” which premiered at SXSW in January and is currently on set for Jordan Peele’s upcoming “GOAT,” which is set to be her biggest role to date.
When she began acting classes to help with her role in “GOAT,” the production team immediately told her to stop. “‘You’re ruining the magic,” they told her.
They realized, like most do, that her superpower is being unequivocally herself. “I just have to follow my instincts — and be around people that trust me to do that.”
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