Some Like It Haute

Eyes wide, cheeks flushed, Claire Boucher is in the middle of a rant. “There are many things about the fashion industry that are really disgusting,” she says, a little breathlessly. “The way models are treated and portrayed, the fact you open a fashion magazine and it’s 90% white girls. That is horrible.”

It’s ironic that Boucher should feel this way. In her guise as electro-pop waif Grimes, the fashion industry has clasped the 23-year-old Canadian to its bosom. She has been featured in high-end, sometimes hilariously pretentious, shoots in Vogue and Dazed and Confused, and had famous photographers such as Hedi Slimane fly her to their studios and fawn over her. Fashionistas are among Boucher’s biggest cheerleaders. Does she risk biting the hand that styles her? The thought doesn’t seem to phase Grimes one iota.
“There’s a good 5, 10% of fashion that is reputable,” she says. “A lot of aspects of fashion are really avant garde and interesting. You have people who are totally changing the way the world works.”
Either way, as she gears up for her starring role at Forbidden Fruit, Grimes is seriously in the ascendant. As a musician, she’s a hot up-and-comer, signed to ethereal powerhouse 4AD and with a rapidly burgeoning fanbase of dance heads and indie aficionados. In the fashion world, meanwhile, she’s already arrived and is regarded as, if not quite a peer to Lady Gaga, then certainly someone with the potential to operate in the same stratosphere.
“I’m surprised at the fashion attention. I’ve learned to embrace it,” she says. “It is a very powerful tool. It’s a good way to brand yourself and give context to your music. If I didn’t have so strong a visual image it might be a lot less clear what Grimes is. I mean, look at Marilyn Manson. Take his music on its own and it’s like… what is that? Nu-metal? I don’t know. Then you see his picture and the whole package totally clarifies.”
She has a point. When music and image mesh effectively, the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. That’s where Grimes is heading.
“I’ve always been into extremes,” she continues. “In high school, while I wasn’t into fashion per se, I spent a lot of time dyeing my hair black and putting in eyeliner. Even if you don’t have time to sit around all day and make art because you have a bunch of shit to do, it’s a good way to be creative.”
Grimes understands the Lady Gaga comparisons. “I don’t love Lady Gaga,” she clarifies. “Her image is 80% of what the music is about. In another context it could be very banal pop radio. It doesn’t do anything for me. Then I watch the videos and think, ‘Holy fuck’ – this is such an iconic thing.”
While she recognises the power of image, the singer resists being overtly sexualised in photo shoots. She will rock up at a photographer’s studio only to find she has a choice of two costumes: skimpy and really skimpy. Sometimes she’s declined to participate; occasionally, against her better instinct, she’s gone along with it.
“They’ll cake you in concealer, put tonnes of lipstick on,” she says. “I look in the mirror and it’s like I’m playing dress-up. I never wear make-up. I look stupid with it on. I have a real baby face so I resemble a kid who’s broken into their mom’s make-up. I can’t pull off the sexy thing.”
There are those who would disagree – and their numbers are growing by the day.
It’s a grey spring morning in Montreal. Grimes is kicking back at her management’s offices. She’s spent a lot of time hanging around here lately. The lease on her apartment ran out the other month and, with a North American tour imminent, she sees little point renting somewhere else. Until June she’s officially homeless.
“I’m starting to feel a little crazy,” she says of her stint as a person of no fixed abode. “On the other hand, I used to be a total pack rat. I had to get rid of all my stuff. Mentally, I feel as if I’m really cleared out. Everything I own is in like two bags now. That aspect feels good.”
Born in Vancouver, Claire Boucher has lived in Montreal, Canada’s avant garde capital, for five years. In 2009, before her Grimes alter ego had been invented, she gained brief notoriety when she and her then boyfriend attempted to navigate the Mississippi in a handmade houseboat loaded with chickens and 20 pounds of potatoes. The trip, intended as a tribute to Tom Sawyer, went wrong almost immediately. The engine on the boat failed and Boucher and her squeeze spent some hours floating aimlessly along the river, waiting to be rescued – which they eventually were by the police. “I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure,” said the cop who brought an end to their caper. “The problem is it’s not 1883. You can’t do that anymore. You have to follow the rules.”
Not that Grimes has noticed. She had already put out two collections of jumbled, ugly-beautiful electronica crafted in her own unique image, before 4AD offered her a deal. Boucher characterises her debut with the label as a push of the reset button. Visions is the first project she conceived as a coherent body of work.
“The other records… it was a case of my manager saying, you really should put out a record,” she explains. “So I’d choose a bunch of songs I had and release them. With Visions, I did the whole thing in three weeks. With my first LP I never thought anyone would hear it. For the second, I thought maybe a few hundred people would. Visions felt completely different.”
And so it is. The new album’s calling card is the single ‘Oblivion’, three scary-sweet minutes of weightless electronica. The song is great, but it makes even more sense when you watch the video, which features Boucher dancing in slow motion with a bunch of semi-naked hunks, then lip-synching strangely at a sell-out motorcross event at the Montreal Olympic Stadium. Shot grainily and on-the-fly, it’s oddly haunting.
“I love the aesthetics of these huge big crazy events,” she says now. “The stuff at the Olympic Stadium... I’ve never before been in a space with so many people. A lot of them were actually really hostile. They were shouting things. I was standing at the front, miming and feeling totally self-conscious. It was the biggest mind-fuck. Security kept trying to kick us out. But the place is so massive, we’d just go to the next section and start over.”
The shower-room scene of toned males dancing slo-mo, meanwhile, is a nod towards Madonna, a figure Boucher respects as someone who shattered taboos. “‘Vogue’ is one of my favorite videos of all time,” she says. “It’s fucking beautiful. There’s a feminisation of men in it that I think is gorgeous. Right now I’m into anatomy. I’m really digging the Greco-Roman aesthetic.”
Archetypally Canadian, for all the fashion world dazzle surrounding her, in person Boucher is sweet and grounded. She certainly doesn’t seem nearly as obsessed with the pursuit of ‘cool’ as many of those championing her. Otherwise, would she so readily admit to being a fan of the Garbo-esque Irish songstress Enya? “She’s a big influence,” she says. “That sound of hers – the layered vocals – is actually really unique. If you think about it, she invented a totally new way of recording. You have a vocal onto which you put all these overdubs. I take that sensibility and put big fucking beats underneath.”
The resulting noise has been blowing rock’n’roll minds all over the world. Now, it is Dublin’s turn.