'I only did Victoria's Secret so I could fuck a supermodel, and I did.'

So announced Rie Rasmussen after her walk down this particular runway in 2001. An unapologetically loud voice during the two years she spent in fashion, she seems just as difficult to bypass as an artist, film maker and actress. Indeed, her work speaks for itself. Her powerful and widely acclaimed work in film - (her debut Thinning the Herd, a thriller short, was nominated for a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004, and her first feature length film, Human Zoo, premiered at the Berlinale film festival last year to favourable reviews) - is inspiring enough, but it is her paintings that pull me in.




I admire this work. It manages to convey the depth of the raw emotion involved in sex between men and women without a romantic overtone; there is tenderness, for me, illustrated in the softness of the markmaking, but it is interspersed with a drama that sometimes verges on aggression. They are very primal stories, and, I think, all the more stunning and beautiful for that.

MANIAMANIA mania

Jewellery is my thing. It is my great love. I wear it all the time, and my preference is usually big and clunky and OTT. Too much is just enough, in other words. The other day it struck me to count the necklaces I was wearing after I took my earphones out, thinking they were broken, and realised the curious sound I could hear over Joanna Newsom was me, jangling -I had on five, and they were not small. Now, this is a personal best of course, but my point is this: I overload on my treasures because I love them; they have become great friends in many cases, mostly because they have often come from great friends.

Naturally, I have a little wish list of bits and pieces to add to my collection, but officially topping it, as of today, is the Immortals ring from the 2010 collection entitled 'Real Life Awaits Us' by ManiaMania.

Just gorgeous, and a little rough around the edges, which, come to think of it, is my preference regarding most things in life.

I also have a major girl crush on the designer of this beauty Tamila Purvis, who, if not rough around the edges, is definitely gorgeous, and definitely amazingly talented. Photographed wearing her designs here by Garance Dore (another source of abiding admiration) she looks exactly how I want to look when I pile on my jewels of a morning: Chic, and then some.

"...the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark."

William Shakespeare