Vanity Project

It’s no secret Vanity Project are obsessed with Sydney and this week, they are fortunate enough to sit down with legendary performance artist Sydney Jarrett of Post Poems Collective. Their reappearance is a long time coming, and this time we’re here to say: Butch Is Not A Dirty Word!

They trace a history of deep and abiding camaraderie, from the working class history of Stone Butch Blues, to activist-sadomasochist Bloodsisters. They ask each other, where are you on the butch/femme scale? How ethical is it to share an ethical lesbian porn subscription with your ex? What does pre-workout and creatine have to do with it? Are lesbians really that unfunny? Ellen put it simply: Yep, I’m gay!

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Vanity Project’s new treatise is as follows: if you are thinking about giving a standing ovation, vomit. If you are a little too drunk, vomit. Do you believe in bulimia? Vomit. Are you an exhibitionist looking for a new act? Get vomited on. That’s what’s known in these parts as a Roman Shower! We’ve done piss, we’ve done smell, and this time we’re espousing an abject-driven cultural study with a new subject: barf. 

Sure, our compulsion to talk could be likened to word vomit, like a cultural hangover you get from gluttonous over-indulging. The girls sit over the toilet-bowl-cum-microphone and tickle the tonsils in the hope of bringing up something worthwhile.

Such sites include pregnancy-induced vomit scenes in Wild at Heart (1990), erotic vomiting scenes in Sex In Public (1998), Lady Gaga and Millie Brown at SXSW (2014), Dodie Bellamy clogging Eileen Myles’ toilet (2015), Laura in Spewcastle, and American Horror Story: Delicate (2023). Emetophobics need not apply...this may well be our messiest episode yet...

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: ⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

"What turns you on?" Laura asks Charles. "Oh my god...so much!" There is a spectre haunting the consciousness of gay people and this week the girls are speculating about the size of that spectre. In this Patreon exclusive, Vanity Project takes on Troye Sivan’s new album, Something To Give Each Other. 

The album is surprisingly dense with provocation. Rush, the song about amyl-infused chemsex, naturally stimulated discourse about body positivity (see also: Lizzo) and got the girls to loosen their lips about Australia's sweetheart. The album’s promotion had some inciting remarks from Sivan about his own unbelievable positionality (see: topping and bottoming), and the music video for One Of Your Girls awakened something in Laura that she may never recover from.

Vanity Project’s unique perspective is the only one that can decode it all. This is actually something we wanted to clear up. We think that, in the sort of consciousness of gay people, we’re some crazy power bottoms or something, which is just...not the case.

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: ⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

Laura and Charles sit down with new friend, writer, and illustrator, Indigo Bailey (recently published in Kill Your Darlings, Island Magazine, and editor of Voiceworks) for the latest instalment of our long tradition of Diva Double Features. This time we take aim at one-miss Juliette Binoche. The latest, but not last, of this fabulous cohort of VP-adored women, is gently and thoroughly celebrated in this new edition.

Laura gushes about the deeply evocative and kinda lesbian Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) while also wrestling with the high vs. low-brow casting of Chloë Grace Moretz. We rewind time to Binoche's early career, revisiting the deeply whimsical and still potent Mauvais Sang (1986), where in Paris, the new sexually transmitted virus STBO is ravaging the young and loveless sex-havers. Vanity Project says: this is a crisis!

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

International Lesbian Day may have passed us by, but we did watch the movie Bottoms (2023), and even still no one wants to say The L Word. They don’t even say the ‘b’ word... We finally thank Janey Jacke for letting us talk about ‘topping and bottoming’, and what it means to be a card-carrying member of the Topping and Bottoming Union.

We traverse prostrating at Beare park, preying and being predated, prostridation, and the location of the prostridate. The gay vs lesbian topping and bottoming reversal could be the thing that drives us apart. Or it could be the thing that finally draws us that much closer. Keep going! I’m so close!

Between us down there Vanity Project is joined by a real-life Angel. This is the Spring Summer 24 crescendo, and we’re finishing with one night in Paris. Angel Robertson offers insight into the exquisite pain of designing, and the slightly less exquisite agony of a bug infestation in the beds of the city of love. 

We talk Balenciaga and being someone else, Vaquera and doing yourself, and Rick Owens and the perfect mourning attire. How do you put persona in a tchotchke? And isn’t the exquisite pain of correctly pronouncing trompe l’oeil better when you can just ask someone else to do it for you?

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

The girls are back with bestie-of-the-pod Carmencita! Like a hard cock, they reluctantly rise to the occasion and continue to talk about fashion week in Milan. Over a couple of wines, the girls are suddenly seduced by slippery gossip, desperately derailing what is usually sartorially focussed and semiotically incisive discourse. Sorry!

It’s bisexual awareness week, and we’re raising consciousness by Dressing For Pleasure. If New York was about bondage, and London was about flogging, then Milan is the city of Body Inflation. We horse around with cabbage patch dolls, Gigi Hadid, and Alex Consani in Blumarine, and get stuck at AVAVAV. Laura is for once, on the pod, brutally honest. About the clothes this time, she says: "I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me".

Australia's very own Tr*nny and Susannah are back behind the mic reporting on the inner-beauty pageant that is London Fashion Week. They discuss the relevance of London and the UK as a fashion metropole for global fashions. God only knows why FKA Twigs and Cara Delevigne are raising consciousness (kissing) on the West End at Vogue World!

If 4 slim people equals two multi-racial models then how many c-sections does it take to neuter the Mowalola show? This is the place where Caravaggio and Cronenberg convene at the naval-height altar of the low-rise mini skirt. Stefan Cooke is waving his freak flag with more hardcore craft and softcore BDSM on the runway, while JW Anderson is un-stuffing his stuff and molding Play-Doh clothing for fun. Fashion is child's-play! Surely Freud would agree: you can't spell artisanal without anal!

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

To paraphrase Collina Strada, “Everything sucks. We’re all doomed. The world’s on fire, but we’re doing another episode about fashion shows because that’s what we know how to do”. Strap in for the first episode of four weeks of epic fashion week coverage and conversation recorded on the anniversary of 9/11. Remember, every flight starts on a runway...

This week, the girls discuss seatbelts and safety at Helmut Lang, Collina Strada and her x-static X-men, the abject hideousness of the image, pubes at Dion Lee, the Hari Nef Method, offense, defense, and the skin wars at Coach. This may be Vanity Project’s most explosive fashion pod yet…

Vanity Project is moving to fortnightly paywalled content. Pledge allegiance to the struggle: https://www.patreon.com/vanity_project

After a few too many trips to Melbourne, Laura and Charles ask one another "Are you having fun down there?" The girls inflame the age-old rivalry between the two Australian cities, insisting that nobody in Naarm is getting any. Sydney is the city of sex and Vanity Project Knows Good Sex.

This episode is no limits! Topping and bottoming! Undress! Dental dams and dog dongs! Feel the rush as we engage in harmful hearsay about Troye Sivan and what is (not) happening in his sexy Architectural Digest house... Vanity Project are here to tell you that we like it raw!

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