Sunflower Bean's Julia Cumming: Model, Hedi Slimane Muse and (Most Importantly) Kind

“It’s scary to be earnest, but if you do something with your whole heart, there’s nothing to be scared of. If you are truly following yourself, there’s nothing to run from.”

By Greg Hudson

Date February 11, 2019

It is smart that style and music are so interconnected. After all, are there every other professions extra involved with projecting a picture? Maybe politics? Actually, it’s type of a surprise there aren’t extra politicians who used to rock. (We see you, Beto.) You see a variety of rock stars coupling with fashions and style homes partnering with musicians. And if you wish to speak about every trade’s affect on the opposite, it’s mainly a chicken-egg situation.

What you don’t see typically sufficient, although, is fashions making music. And you see even fewer who’re pretty much as good as Julia Cumming. At each. As the lead singer (and bassist) of the Brooklyn-based storage rock trio Sunflower Bean, Cumming—who since 2014 has modelled for Anna Sui, Max Mara and particularly Saint Laurent, the place she was seen as Hedi Slimane’s muse—travels seamlessly between the runway and rocking out. (The band’s newest EP, King of the Dudes, dropped earlier this 12 months.) Oh, and you higher imagine she’s political.

“Modelling and being involved in fashion have given me some incredible opportunities and also the chance to share some things I’m passionate about—like activism—with a different crowd,” she explains. She offers the instance of a video she wrote and directed for Models.com that starred fashions (naturally) and defined find out how to name Congress. “As long as you do what you do authentically, there’s no reason modelling and activism can’t work together.”

Photography by Brent Goldsmith. Styling by Juliana Schiavinatto. Hair, Yoichi Tomizawa for Art Department/Bumble & Bumble. Makeup, Yuui for M.A.C. Fashion assistant, Dani Morales. Photography assistant, Ariel Sadok. Model, Julia Cumming for Wilhelmina.

And, really, that could be probably the most spectacular factor about Cumming: not that she generally is a multi-hyphenate— it’s not even that she’s so damned achieved in all of her careers; it’s that she considers doing all of it as simply a part of being her genuine self. Most individuals’s genuine selves get pleasure from staying in mattress. “When we are writing as Sunflower Bean, we are all bringing our ideas and references to the table to make something original,” she says.

“We all have different tastes, and when we share them with each other, it becomes bigger than just us. It’s our artwork we make together. Authenticity comes from your heart, and that’s what people hear and connect with.”

If that appears awfully earnest, particularly for a rock star, it completely is. It’s not simply in how she solutions questions in interviews both. Sunflower Bean’s music may be looking out, or unhappy or a celebration, however, above all, it’s sincere. That’s a part of being genuine, too. “Irony has never been that interesting to me in the context of songwriting,” says Cumming.

“I’ve always wanted the same things, which are to record and perform music and to survive. I will say that I learn so much, all the time. Every year, I feel a little more capable of living in this crazy world!”

“We have always wanted our music to feel more tangible than just the moment you hear it, not something that feels like it’s going to blow away. It’s scary to be earnest, but if you do something with your whole heart, there’s nothing to be scared of. If you are truly following yourself, there’s nothing to run from.” But there are issues to run—like her activist group, Anger Can Be Power, or, , the world. If she needs it.