Ashley Williams makes clothes that are cute but primed for the apocalypse. The London-based designer has long championed kitsch, referencing everything from Elvis-crazed Americana to dooomsday cults. Her latest collection was inspired by the question ‘what does the end of the world look like?’, Williams explored ideas of pre- and post-civilisation, showing a collection made for ‘Bosch girls… spurred by a primordial/post-apocalyptic hunt for cute’. Models carried wooden staffs carved into the shape of Hello Kitty and wore dishevelled pink ballet flats while walking to a cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Everytime’ by PC Music’s Caro. This gown, from Williams’s AW21 Collection, draws from her archives, exploring the brand’s DNA and reimagining classic pieces with renewed vigour. With its exaggerated poufiness, the gown combines adorable kittens and puppies with a scantily clad babydoll pinup in a jarring juxtaposition of 1980s princess-style frou-frou, airbrushed sex, and saccharine sweetness. The contradictions are key: ‘I love horror movies and hardcore as much as I love Britney Spears’.

words by Claire Catterall

Xiuching Tsay’s hallucinogenic painting plays with the patterns inspired by the flows and streams of networks, both natural and human-made, making connections between animals, plant anatomy, vibrations of light and sound, and the evolution of communications technology in order to propose a new way of being in this multi-layered shared space. It is no surprise, therefore, that the artwork should be chosen by the Anglo-Polish London-based musician, record producer and DJ felicita for their second album, Spalarkle (2023) to represent their own vision of a hypnagogic yet hyperconnected new world. Both artists draw on a joyful childlike psychedelia and sense of futuristic experimentation to create a visual and kinetic exuberance that is both haunted and strange, but as sugary sweet and playful as bubblegum.

words by Claire Catterall

Nhozagri, a Beijing-based artist, created a plushie guardian angel for the Cute exhibition. The angel’s name is 'Poq...', and it comes from the artist’s fantasy universe Super Nhozagri Kingdom. Nhozagri created the world using a wide range of mediums—paintings, sculptures, zines and even dumplings—with an overarching palette of neon watercolours, fragmented stories and otherworldly characters she refers to as mollusk citizens. While fantasy-led artists are no longer seen as outsiders, Nhozagri embraces her sweet and childlike aesthetic fully and unapologetically with an anything-goes attitude. This results in in unexpected, absurd and dreamy twists in her work, which in turn reflects a generation that grew up amid cuteness’s rapid expansion and saturation. Below is a dialogue between a human and the universe as captured by Poq…: Human: What is cute? Universe: I am everchanging. When everything stopped suddenly due to an ‘error’, I saw my ‘cuteness’. I am very cute when I am still and idle. Human: The malfunction of the universe is scary! Universe: Humans should understand, applaud and accept, as fear and happiness are all cute from the universe’s perspective. The universe loves everything about humans. The plushie captures the moment when the Butterfly Sword penetrates Poq…’s throat, stunning the citizen. The Butterfly Sword is the static moment when a butterfly flew past, and the body of the sword represents the flight trajectory.

words by William Seung

Taking its cues from manga, New York-based art-collective-cum-fashion-house MSCHF’s Big Red Boots are bulbous, plastic and modelled after those worn by Astro Boy. Considered alone, they seem straightforwardly cute but when worn in real life - their smooth surface and exaggerated silhouette juxtaposed with the surrounding noise, clutter and imperfections of contemporary urban landscapes – they seem an uncanny, cyborg-like appendage. As MSCHF say, ‘When half the sneakers we see on social media are renderings we end up chasing supernormal stimuli; we come to expect a baseline of unreality. As cartoons have known for decades, abstracted forms convey their core idea with an immediacy that realism cannot: they instantly convey the idea of ‘boot’. The shape of a shoe is not the shape of a foot. Big red boots are really not shaped like feet, but they are extremely shaped like boots.’ If you kick someone in these boots they go boing!

words by Claire Catterall

Mew is a species of Pokémon, and Shiny Mew is one of the rarest Pokémon is existence. Mew first appeared in the original Pokémon Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Blue role-playing games, released in 1996, though it could only be obtained through glitches in the game's programming. Originally developed by Shigeki Morimoto of programmers Game Freak, Mew was put into the game as an in-house prank that only Game Freak developers would know about and be able to obtain. But Mew was of course discovered by gamers, and quickly became the subject of myth and legend. For years, he remained legitimately unobtainable except at some specific Pokémon distribution events or through glitching or cheat devices. Mew was officially revealed in the May 1996 issue of the weekly manga magazine CoroCoro, where the first cards of Mew, produced for Pokémon’s trading card game, were given away free. This issue offered a promotion called the ‘Legendary Pokémon Offer’, where 20 randomly selected entrants could send their cartridges in for Nintendo to add Mew to their games. Finally, with the release of the game My Pokémon Ranch in 2008, Mew became more accessible without a event-based distribution. Pokémon is a Japanese media franchise owned by Nintendo, consisting of video games, animated series and films, a trading card game, and other related media. On display are some of the earliest Shiny Mew cards, which were released via CoroCoro in 2001 and illustrated by character designer Hironobu Yoshida. Some of the rarer cards used in the Pokémon trading game were treated with shiny effect to echo an extremely rare colour variation of each Pokémon in the game, commonly known as the ‘shiny’ form. Today, collectibles with shiny, super-glossy treatment are synonymous with the rarest and most desirable trading cards with a jaw-dropping price tag attached.

words by William Seung

Shoe and accessory brand Irregular Choice, founded by Dan Sullivan in 1999, epitomises the anti-fashion sense of playing ‘dress-up’ beloved of the post-internet generation. Sullivan was inspired by the culture, food and architecture he saw in China, Asia and Japan accompanying his parents (his mother designed for the shoe brand Red or Dead) on their travels. Irregular Choice’s maximal designs feature well-loved characters such as Hello Kitty, Care Bears and various superheroes, as well as popular tropes such as glass slipper-inspired Cinderella shoes, or designs featuring garden gnomes or starry unicorns, all outlandishly detailed with bows, glitter, and often with trademark sculpted character heels. The childishness of the designs is counterbalanced by clever detail and an ‘all grown-up' perfectly formed yet also deformed edge. It would be tempting to think, in an age where young adults face futures saddled with debt and unable to access the basic material trappings of adulthood, that the popularity of such fairy-tale clothing signals a retreat into the dubious comforts of a pseudo-childhood. But far from infantilising the wearer, Irregular Choice signals a desire to step outside of societal norms, particularly the strictures of fashion, to be bolder and braver in the face of an increasingly uncertain and anxious world.

words by Claire Catterall

From an innocuous-looking storefront labelled ‘Popular Jewelry’ in New York's Chinatown, Eva Sam is the now-famous jeweller responsible for the large, colourful, ‘iced-out’ icons worn on chains by celebrities and performers ranging from A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti to dancers in Beyonce's Formation world tour. Bling jewellery is a cornerstone of hip-hop culture; a phenomenon that was recently chronicled in Ice Cold, a 388-page book published by Taschen. Increasingly, people have been drawn to wearing chains featuring cute diamond-studded characters instead of their own name or that of famous figures. Gucci Mane and Lil Yachty, have both been seen in custom Bart Simpson chains made by jewellers like Eva Sam. Pieces like these, and those on display here, recontextualise familiar characters and symbols in an ostentatious new world, employing them as technicoloured status symbols.

words by Phin Jennings

Homer is a jewellery brand founded and owned by Frank Ocean. It produces chains, pendants, earrings and other accessories that often feature soft-edged, anthropomorphic forms. Some are hand-painted with enamel in a variety of neon and pastel colours; others are studded with lab-grown diamonds. This publication, features photographs by Ocean using the same supercharged colour palette. It is printed on tissue-thin paper, allowing each image to bleed onto the following or preceding page, and many of the images are blurred or repeated. The book gives the effect that its images are passing by the reader too quickly to be processed properly. Some models wear Homer pieces, others are digitally edited so their own faces replace the ones seen on the pendants. A lime green, baby-faced mask - reminiscent of the one worn by the life-sized humanoid toy that Ocean carried around the Met Gala in 2021 - appears multiple times in the book.

words by Phin Jennings

‘I'm focused on you, you're all on me too / I'm cute and I'm rude, and you like what I do,’ sings Charli XCX in the opening line of ‘Constant Repeat’, a track from her 2022 album Crash. The cheeky, sexy spirit of this motif could be seen to encapsulate XCX as an artist: her personality, style and sound all feeding into this identity. Since 2016, A. G. Cook has worked with her as creative director. Cook is also the founder of PC Music, a record label and collective known for its often subversive, exaggerated style that appropriates and parodies the tropes of pop music, internet culture and consumerism. Charli XCX's own sound, like that of artists released by Cook on PC music, has become something of a pastiche of the saccharine, synth-driven, sound of modern pop music. XCX herself, as demonstrated in these lyrics and merchandise, is the tongue-in-cheek icon at the centre of the hyper-charged world she has built.

words by Phin Jennings

Launched during lockdown in 2020, Positive Messages is a now-defunct platform initiated and hosted online by Paris-based fashion and lifestyle brand Perks and Mini, also known as P.A.M.. It gave a range of creatives - DJ's, artists, curators, writers, editors, designers and many more - an online space to share something that they thought belonged there. It hosted music, drawings, photographs and words, brought together under a simple slogan: ‘believe that happiness will spread like ripples.’ A lot of the visual media displayed here reflected P.A.M.'s playful, conspicuous, internet-influenced aesthetic. As of early 2024, Positive Messages no longer exists online, links to it instead leading to a 404 Error page - a harsh reminder of the transience of online existence. Luckily, some work from the project was immortalised in a zine made by Swiss publisher Innen. It contains 60 pages of symbols of unbridled optimism: meadows of flowers, animals embracing, plants growing skyward and a loud message rendered in an equally loud shade of purple: ‘STAY HAPPY! STAY POSITIVE!! STAY CONNECTED!!!’

words by Phin Jennings

Italian fashion brand GCDS describes itself as ‘generating a creative universe that blends pop culture, luxury and Italian’. Run by brothers Giuliano and Giordano Calza, the brand has developed a signature aesthetic that is sporty, futuristic and vibrant. Its engagement with pop culture involves collaborations with household-name brands from outside the fashion world including Pepsi, Hello Kitty and Spongebob. Giving these brands' motifs and characters, the GCDS treatment involves supercharging their aesthetics, making familiar images feel ultra-current, perhaps even futuristic. Seeing characters many of us recognise from childhood - here, Nickelodeon's Spongebob Squarepants - recontextualised as part of the luxury fashion world, surrounded by shimmering hues of pink and purple, charges them with an as-yet-undiscovered potential. The familiar and the new, the past and the future, are blurred.

words by Phin Jennings