She’s the singer, actress and model who everyone’s talking about. But despite the endless magazine covers, interviews and photo shoots, are we really any closer to discovering who Sky Ferreira is?
Text:
Jeremy Abbott
Photography: Angelo Pennetta
Styling: Victoria Young
“I used to spend my birthdays at Michael Jackson’s house. It was a regular nice house; it wasn’t like he was riding rollercoasters, eating cotton candy by himself, you know.” Sky Ferreira
It’s 4pm and Sky Ferreira is lighting up the camera, delicately posing on a street corner in London’s Stoke Newington. Each passing car slows down, leeringly toots a horn and nearly rear ends the car in front. Sky, unimpressed, simply curls her lip into a gentle snarl and ambivalently smiles to herself. She could not care less. The singer, actress and model is surprisingly shy and serene, this is no over-excited pop starlet hopping around, seeking the centre of attention; the spotlight naturally drifts towards Sky. Slightly burnt out from a swift trip to London from New York with barely a chance to calibrate herself following back-to-back magazine shoots, rehearsals and interviews, she becomes lively when she politely asks if she can put a playlist on. Her tracks clip from Wild Nothing and Ariel Pink to Charlotte and Serge Gainsbourg’s Lemon Incest. Hazy, cerebral pop drifts from the iPod dock. It provides a sharp insight into her muses, which it becomes clear steer way outside the standard pop music palette.
Later Sky is nimbly cruising down Dalston’s Kingsland Road, casually cutting an iconic silhouette. Scruffy bleached hair, a sheer black blouse, Prada sunglasses and a leather mini, this is trashy louche NYC glamour, the look naturally threaded into the pop heroine lineage through Debbie Harry and Madonna. Sky’s breakthrough song Everything is Embarrassing continues the rapture of Jellybean/Nile Rodgers-era Madonna, together with Giorgio Moroder’s absorbing pop moments from Blondie’s Call Me to Berlin’s Take My Breath Away, all washed through with a 2013 refresh. Throughout her music there is a coalition of euphoria and melancholy, its reflective, confessional break-up lyrics pinned down by brooding, ecstatic pop. Which is very Sky; when she opens up she can be feisty, honest and provocative, but her default appears decidedly introvert and contemplative.
Read on in The Street Issue.
Landscape image. Left: Jumper Chanel. Shirt J.W. Anderson. Right: Jumper Pringle. Top and skirt Atsuko Kudo. Sunglasses Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane. Shoes Jimmy Choo.
Cover image: Dress Miu Miu. Sunglasses Linda Farrow. Necklace Sky’s own.
.. I also like that they bother to promote her with slightly more creativity and dignity than the other girls that, at the risk of sounding 70, often look like not so expensive prostitutes.
selena gomez??? lol 
