It’s Julia Fox’s Post-Apocalyptic Fashion World (and We’re All Living In It)

Fresh off the ‘OMG Fashun’ premiere, the boundary-breaker and her stylist/best friend Briana Andalore discuss the series that reminds us fashion is “all just smoke and mirrors.”

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Julia Fox will never buy anything at full price.

Why would she when she can:

1. Wait for it to go on sale.

2. Source it secondhand.

3. Make it herself.

“Even if I have the money to buy something, I still won’t because I wasn’t raised that way,” she explains. “It just feels weird and I don’t like it.”

While options one and two may be a lower lift, Fox would pick option three in every instance if she could – especially when the materials at hand include butterflies, blood or BDSM equipment.

This is exactly what she gets to do alongside three “fashion disruptors” on each episode of OMG Fashun, her brand-new, seriously unserious fashion show. Driven by her lifelong passion for upcycling and seasoned by Fox and co-host Law Roach’s banter, OMG Fashun consists of a “style challenge” and a “design challenge.”

For the “style challenge,” participants are tasked with turning “basic into batsh*t.” They’re given a staple item like a jersey or a white t-shirt and must rework it without a sewing machine. For the design challenge, contestants must craft an original design using five pre-selected materials in the “Fox Box,” an array of items hand-picked by Fox and long-term stylist Briana Andalore that range from wacky and weird to straight-up what the f*ck.

Fox and Andalore – who have been working together since starting their short-lived Franziska Fox brand in 2014 – collaborated on selecting each episode’s “Fox Box” goodies, looking to tie each compilation to a theme or issue that Fox feels passionately about – sexual wellness, respecting the natural world, and f*ck single-use plastics, to name a few.

“I didn’t want fashion people, I wanted funny people. Someone who the fashion industry would hate is someone I would love.”

All the while, Fox, whose outfit is also built from the “Fox Box” components, sits alongside Roach and another special guest judge, waiting for the contestants – whom she sourced herself alongside Andalore – to wow her, as they vie to “go viral” as opposed to the alternative: “getting canceled.”

“I didn’t want fashion people, I wanted funny people,” Fox says of selecting both the disruptors and the guest judges – including Real Housewife Phaedra Parks and drag queen Violet Chachki. “Someone who the fashion industry would hate is someone I would love.”

As contestants showcase their creations on models referred to as “Julias,” the judges offer up their unfiltered (and often unhinged) feedback on the designs. The prize for victory? Fox wearing the winner’s design in one of her iconic catwalk shoots.

“We live in such hard times, so I wanted people to laugh,” Fox continues of her low-stakes approach to OMG Fashun, which has led to her pulling up to one design challenge in a padded muscle shirt and jockstrap, another in a dress built from dry cleaning bags. “Fashion is funny. I do what comes naturally and that’s why trends get started – because it’s not compromised,” she says.

“I wish everyone had fun with it like us. We make funny things,” Andalore adds.

“All the worst things have already happened to me, so now I’m just living in my post-apocalyptic world where I know what matters and what doesn’t.”

Fox can agree she’s fearless in her choices – “I’m just like not really afraid you know,” she admits. “All the worst things have already happened to me, so now I’m just living in my post-apocalyptic world where I know what matters and what doesn’t.”

Fox and Andalore grew up in New York City, raised on a steady diet of Washington Square Park thrift shops and NYC’s “anything goes” mentality. “I’m always, like, shape-shifting and trying new things. There’s no like “right way to be” in my mind,” says Fox. “I think you can be anything you want to be, and I don’t think I would have been that way if I didn’t grow up in New York,” says Fox.

“We’ve evolved but honestly we’re sort of the same,” Andalore laughs. “We’ve always been into little things. Skimpy things. Complex things. Odd things. We’ve never really been conventional.”

While dripping in internet-era humor and refreshing realness, OMG Fashun has plenty of industry credibility, thanks in no small part to Roach — who often references archival collections (he loves early McQueen) and past runways — acting as Fox’s partner in chaos.

“Have you ever had a juicy dominatrix experience?” Fox asks Roach in the show’s third episode.

“No, but I’ve worn McQueen,” he replies.

Despite leaning heavily into different realms of the fashion space, Roach and Fox typically align on their final thoughts. “We could both recognize when something was spectacular,” Fox notes.

Fox also breaks the old workplace rule of “not sh*tting where you eat” by working closely with her “soulmate” and “sister” Andalore – the mastermind behind nearly all of Fox’s viral ensembles – on OMG Fashun.

“I wanted the challenges to relate to social issues without being preachy or self-righteous,” Fox explains, with one design challenge’s Fox Box including all single-use plastic pieces spanning tampon applicators and plastic straws and another consisting of mushrooms, hair, insects, bones and flowers. She even tapped the SEKS boys to design her first episode outfit – a horned bodysuit built from deconstructed butterflies and repurposed furs – as the label’s founders love animals.

“Like, if I want to go out and look absolutely grotesque, it is my right to do so.”

At its campy and colorful core, OMG Fashun is about spotlighting the different interpretations of whom Andalore refers to as “true innovators”, but it’s also about more than that for Fox – reclaiming something she’s felt she’s lost in recent years, especially to the male gaze – her autonomy.

“It’s my right to dress or represent myself anyway I want. Like if I want to go out and look absolutely grotesque it is my right to do,” she asserts.

Challenges also tie back to Fox’s personal lore. When she surprised the disruptors by adding blood to the Fox Box in the first episode, it referenced her practice of painting with blood in her younger days.

“This is just who Julia is,” Andalore adds, pointing to the duo’s spontaneous “minimal planning in advance” way of operating. “She’ll wear something nobody will dare to wear and it’ll change people’s perspectives on it.”

“It’s all just smoke and mirrors,” Fox tells her contestants in the second episode. When asked to elaborate on that sentiment, Fox, who, in her own words “dresses like a little boy” in her free time replied: “When the clothes come off, we’re all just regular people. It’s all a performance”

The fashion industry’s unpredictable shifts — and avenues opened as a result of chaotic collaboration — are the crux of OMG Fashun. “The show is a collaboration between us and the designers,” says Andalore, who cites her interns, friends, and assistants as key contributors to her creations. “Sometimes I’ll see something and Julia won’t but just as often she’ll pair or wrap something in a way I’d never considered before. Everyone interprets it differently and that’s art.”

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