You were the world, you were the sun.
You stood out in a green t-shirt.
Your guitar solo sounded like a possessed cat.
I was amazed, I was in awe.
How many girls are there in the world like this?
A rarity in this deadbeat town.
A warm feeling in the corner of my stomach.
A spine jolt at any word said to me, any smile given to me.

Euphoria and pleasure, molecules touching.
Twisted sheets and callused hands.
Young skin, the softest I had ever known.
Where am I, and how did I get here?
A biopic and a box-office failure comedy.
In each other’s pocket.

The moons passed, the candle flickered.
The 12-bar blues was wrong, but you could not accept.
Your pitch was all over the shop.
Tone-deaf, some would call it.
But I did not want to harm your feelings.
You’re perfect, and there’s nothing else to it.

The rains came and went, and there we were.
Perched atop a hill in a new city.
I forced good feelings into my stomach.
I wrote and wrote songs, I poured them out.
You didn’t care. You never cared about my music.
All right for you, taking on the world.
Shaking percussion across hand-railings.
That’s pretentious. It all sounds the same.
This strange behaviour automatically makes you better than me.

A night comes where I wish to stay in.
Perhaps watch a Jim Jarmush film.
No, let’s drink plenty of cider and head out.
Visit the valley. Go to stupid clubs where everyone is cooler than me.
My father’s suit, I brandish it.
I am verbally knocked down by the filth of the valley.
I should have stayed home.
You and your stupid friends are drunk,
And I join you on a 2am bus home.

We lie in the shadows of the nest.
I talk of the cigarettes.
I do not wish to walk through this smoke with you.
Stop it now, do it for me.
You didn’t give a ****. You would continue.

You never cared about my music.
Whenever I picked up a guitar, I got bad vibrations.
Any of your perfect hipster friends pick up my guitar, instant praise.
Play that again, Oscar.
That’s not a person’s name, that name belongs to a Muppet.

I should have done what I wanted.
I should have bought my groceries separate.
My money flew away in the breeze. My job wasn’t enough.
You didn’t care.
It was all about you. You couldn’t get money from the government.
It was all about the scene.
Putting on your most op-shoppy clothes, heading out to roll cigarettes and drink with other pretentious lower-class folk.
******* cardigans. Get the **** out.

I hate the way you didn’t give a **** about the songs I wrote.
I hate the way we’d always have to buy dark chocolate because the normal kind hurt your teeth.
I hate the way we’d never hire out a zombie film because you thought they were real.
I hate the way you cut your hair to look like Agynes Deyn. You didn’t look like her.
I hate the way you’d bag out our old town and think you were so much better because you lived north now.
I hate the way you told me about the clone of me you were seeing. He even played a Jazzmaster and had the same haircut as me.
I hate seeing new photos of you looking so sick. Every photo you’re holding a cigarette.
I hate thinking about what you’re up to right now.
I hate how you always come into my mind when I’m trying to get on with life.

But what I hate the most is the fact that I know you never think about me, ever.

And I think about you almost every day.

6/10/11 12AM

Before the hordes of his extended fashion family descended on Somerset House last night, Sam McKnight was pacing through the two floors of an exhibition of his life as one of the great sessions hairstylists. He stopped in front of a formal British Vogue portrait of Princess Diana, taken by Patrick Demarchelier in 1990. “I put on the tiara and had to make her hair big for it,” he remembered. “But, oh, God, then we had such an amazing day afterward. We were chatting and she suddenly asked, ‘If you could do anything, what would you do?’ And I said, ‘I’d cut it off!’ And she said, ‘Well, let’s do it now!’”

Thus, Diana, Princess of Wales, got the best slicked-back look of her life, the cut that defined her chic, grown-up, independent years—and her cutoff from her marriage. “I didn’t realize at the time,” McKnight said, “but in retrospect, with everything that was going on in the background, she wanted a change.” McKnight, after that, became Diana’s entrusted hairdresser. As photographer Nick Knight puts it elsewhere in the show, McKnight has that general effect on women when he’s working. “When he goes near the girls, they relax.”

It’s a testament to McKnight’s popularity in the magazine and fashion show milieu he has worked in since 1977—nearly 40 years!—that so many (who are sometimes so difficult) cooperated and gave permission, and that Chanel and Vivienne Westwood lent spectacular clothes to illustrate the interpretive cut and ****** of what a great hairstylist contributes. Straightaway, as you step off the street into the exhibition, you’re plunged into the next best thing to a backstage hair-and-makeup station and the kind of frenetic scene that goes on minutes before Chanel, Fendi,Dries Van Noten, or Balmain shows take to the runway. In place of the mirrors there are videos—say, of Kendall Jenner getting her Balmain hair look at a recent presentation—which have been recorded by GoPros worn by McKnight’s assistants. Every facet and every angle of the transformations—sometimes with four pairs of hands working on one girl’s hair—are captured.

From then on in, it’s easy to see how this exhibition will become a magnet for kids who want to experience the atmosphere of fashion and worship at a temple of a sublime hair alchemist. Shonagh Marshall, the curator at Somerset House, has run the numbers on the hairstylist’s Vogue covers, many of which are displayed on a faux newsstand. “Sam has been involved with 190 Vogue covers, which is more than any one photographer, or anyone else over that time,” she reported.

That’s not bad for a Scottish lad, born the son of a miner in 1955, who made his way to being a central team player with photographers and editors in the high supermodel years. Glorious images of Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington,Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz abound. “It was a golden era. We were on the road the whole time with Patrick Demarchelier, traveling the world with the same 10 people,” McKnight said, laughing. “We were making it up as we went along, really.”

The massive sweep of the show brings out the important collaborations of his career, with photographers Demarchelier, Knight, Tim Walker, and more; with fashion editors Lucinda Chambers and Edward Enninful; and makeup artists Mary Greenwell and Val Garland. It’s studded with celebrity—Lady Gaga, Tilda Swinton, Kylie Minogue—and honors the spectacular shape-shifting talents of Kate Moss, from her early days as a fresh tousle-haired ’90s teen in love on a beach: “Johnny Depp was there,” McKnight recalled.

There are the moments when McKnight changed models’ fates with short, blonde crops—Jeny Howorth’s in the ’80s and Agyness Deyn’s in the aughts. We see his process, with the hairpieces, wigs, and frizzing techniques integral to creating Westwood and Chanel shows, in both videos and installations masterfully laid out by Michael Howells. Right at the end, there’s a room Howells describes as “Sam the Man,” the walls checkerboarded with pictures of flowers from his garden and the ridiculous varieties of wigs he poses in on his Instagram feed these days. It’s testament to the energy and humor of a talent happily adapted to an industry that is constantly working on the new, in the now; an inspirational treat for all those who remember and for all the many thousands of young eyes that will be opened for the first time by this extravagant journey through one man’s career.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/long-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/vintage-formal-dresses