Entitled “The Collective,” the SS24 editorial is a celebration of some of the many women who serve as inspiration for the house. In this three-part series, we capture recording sessions and confessional conversations with brand muses Lily McMenamy, Nella Ngingo, and Adina Fohlin—all people of artistic sensibility, personifying the Aeyde ideals of ingenuity and modernity. Aiming to reframe the concept of the oft-referenced muse, we invite each woman to take control of their own narrative. This is Lily.
It’s two days after the premiere performance of Lily McMenamy’s one-woman show A Hole Is A Hole, and she’s feeling innumerable things: triumphant, sensitive, giddy, but mostly, emotionally ‘hungover.’ An inevitability for a solo performance that requires so much of even a seasoned performance artist like Lily. When we speak with her on the set of our SS24 shoot, she says, “There’s a hangover when there’s such an outpouring of something that’s been bubbling inside you for so many years. But I feel good. It feels like the first step on an exciting path.”
The inaugural show in Paris complete, Lily will next grace the stage at LA’s New Theater in March, with all three dates already sold out. Lily sees the show as a “fairytale odyssey,” where she journeys through different landscapes while transforming into different characters. “It’s a purging of my experiences thus far,” she says. “I mean, obliquely. It’s quite surrealist. Grotesque. Cartoon. And combined with raw emotional stuff.”
At the age of 29, Lily, who describes herself as “on a good day, a fluid, mutable entity in the moment,” is already a vaunted performance artist with the requisite academic plaudits. She studied mime with l’École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris–noting the late, renowned mime artist Lindsay Kemp as an inspiration–before graduating with an MA in Performance Art from Goldsmiths in London.
A multi-hyphenate of the creative industries, Lily made her modeling debut on a Marc Jacobs catwalk in 2013. Since then, she has settled into her oeuvre, gracing the cover of i-D magazine and fronting campaigns for Versace. At this time, we included Lily in the orbit of Aeyde muses, noting her discerning choice of collaborators and esoteric presence.
It's two days after the premiere performance of Lily McMenamy's one-woman show A Hole Is A Hole, and she's feeling innumerable things: triumphant, sensitive, giddy, but mostly, emotionally 'hungover.' An inevitability for a solo performance that requires so much of even a seasoned performance artist like Lily. When we speak with her on the set of our SS24 shoot, she says, "There's a hangover when there's such an outpouring of something that's been bubbling inside you for so many years. But I feel good. It feels like the first step on an exciting path."
The inaugural show in Paris complete, Lily will next grace the stage at LA’s New Theater in March, with all three dates already sold out. Lily sees the show as a “fairytale odyssey,” where she journeys through different landscapes while transforming into different characters. “It’s a purging of my experiences thus far,” she says. “I mean, obliquely. It’s quite surrealist. Grotesque. Cartoon. And combined with raw emotional stuff.”
At the age of 29, Lily, who describes herself as “on a good day, a fluid, mutable entity in the moment,” is already a vaunted performance artist with the requisite academic plaudits. She studied mime with l’École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris–noting the late, renowned mime artist Lindsay Kemp as an inspiration–before graduating with an MA in Performance Art from Goldsmiths in London.
A multi-hyphenate of the creative industries, Lily made her modeling debut on a Marc Jacobs catwalk in 2013. Since then, she has settled into her oeuvre, gracing the cover of i-D magazine and fronting campaigns for Versace. At this time, we included Lily in the orbit of Aeyde muses, noting her discerning choice of collaborators and esoteric presence.
“It’s a proper story, a solo theater piece. It’s the first time I’ve written a script and the first full-length piece I’ve done. So, it’s definitely going to be dear to my heart forever.”
Taking a moment with her between call times on set, it’s apparent what creative pursuits are absorbing her right now. She recounts the breadth of input into A Hole Is A Hole, saying, “I built the set for it and designed a costume with a designer. It’s a proper story, a solo theater piece. It’s the first time I’ve written a script and the first full-length piece I’ve done. So, it’s definitely going to be dear to my heart forever.”
Born in Pennsylvania, Lily grew up a child of the Channel Tunnel–between London with her mother, iconic muse and supermodel Kristen McMenamy, and Paris with her father, club proprietor Hubert Boukobza, who passed away in 2018. She now calls London home but speaks fluent French and peppers our conversation with French words for theatrical emphasis.
When asked about her favorite part of her story so far, Lily surmises that it’s “the kindness of helping hands in unexpected places,” referencing how kind and present people have been throughout her life, particularly after the loss of her dad. She cites her mime school teacher as someone who “beckoned me towards the path of all paths.”
In the aftermath of A Hole Is A Hole’s debut, she contemplates her interactions with people and the wider world. We speak about how difficult it is to simply listen in a world attuned to incessant notifications, about emerging from the insidious socialization to people-please as women. “Ironically, this people-pleaser energy is something that actually blocks people from listening,” she says. “Giving people what they want because it pulls your focus onto yourself.”
As a retort to these social niceties, Lily speaks about the Meisner Technique and a course she recently took at RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London). She says, “It’s an acting technique where you look at someone, and you just say shit. You say how you feel in response to what they give you. It taught me the power of listening and allowed me to connect with people throughout my life on a much more profound, much deeper level.”
“I imagine her [the muse] as this source energy that sort of comes down this tube from the sky through your fontanelle, and sets you alight and pushes your fingers across the page.”
As a lauded model and the daughter of Kristen McMenamy, Lily is familiar with the concept of the muse–both historically and contemporarily. She has been pedestaled as one (continues to be) and witnessed the fashion industry’s fixation on her mother. Lily has an abstract view of the classic impression of muses, which feels immediately removed from any set context but also distinctly contemporary in take. “I’ve done this project [A Hole Is A Hole] about the eternal muse. I imagine her as a source of energy that comes down this tube from the sky through your fontanelle and sets you alight, pushing your fingers across the page.”
Here, Lily riffs on the lore behind the muses of Grecian antiquity. Reputed to be nine sister goddesses who presided over the arts, literature, and sciences, the muses bestowed great gifts on chosen ones–predominantly male creative ‘geniuses’–through the subconscious assimilation of inspiration. Lily repudiates this fetishistic view of classical muses and reverses it completely. “I feel like people really struggle with the idea of the muse. Obviously, it’s cringe. Women aren’t just props for guys to have some creepy fantasy over and be used as vessels for their own work,” she says. “But at the same time, I’ve always felt that–especially with my mum–that the object, the subject of a work of art, has a lot more power than people give her credit for. There’s something hypnotic, almost in a kind of witchy way, to beckon in that gaze. I almost think that the muse is the artist. I think the muse is the artist, and it’s the artist that’s the vessel of the muse. And that’s kind of where my show ends.”
“I've always felt that–especially with my mum–that the object, the subject of a work of art, has a lot more power than people give her credit for. There’s something hypnotic, almost in a kind of witchy way, to beckon in that gaze.”
With this stream-of-consciousness salvo, Lily speaks about reclaiming power and switching creative ownership from the artist to the muse. This culminates in a final nod to the season’s overarching theme–inspiration–the primary motivation for Aeyde’s concept of uniting community, connection, and collaboration. She’s emphatic when asked what inspiration brings to her life, saying, “It expands my heart and gets me going. Inspiration is the food of my soul—and I’m running on empty without it.”
“The Collective” Pt. 02 featuring Nella Ngingo is set to be released on Tuesday, 26.03.2024.
Discover the new SS24 Kollektion here.
