Last timeFKA Twigsperformed as part of New York City’s Red Bull Music Festival four years ago, she took to the stage in a massive hangar space in Brooklyn surrounded by ten dancers who were all decked out in gothic, club-readyAlexander McQueenlooks. It’s an undeniably hard act to follow, but the British singer may have one-upped herself this past weekend with her new show, “Magdalene.” Fans were treated to a sneak peek of the spectacular costumes, designed by rising London fashion star Ed Marler, thanks to her stylist Matthew Josephs. He posted an Instagram image of twigs in as a modern dayMarie Antoinette, wearing a full taffeta silk ensemble in rehearsals, what he described as a “shirt x robe à la Française.”
With a total of seven baroque-inspired looks, Twigs’s performance wardrobe at the Park Armory this past weekend was nothing short of ethereal. She kicked off the show dressed in what looked like an 18th century courtier’s ensemble—neatly cropped jacket with accordion sleeves and ruffled bloomers—tap-dancing furiously for the crowd as the curtains pulled back from the stage. Then, against a backdrop of blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds, she emerged in a haze of smoke wearing all white, like she’d just floated down to earth with her extra wide-brimmed feather-trimmed hat.
At one point twigs did seem to be suspended in mid-air, twirling down a pole in the same mesmerizing way she does for her new “Cellophane” video, decked out in a frothy corset, matching bikini bottoms, and mile-high perspex stripper heels. For the grand finale though, the aforementioned Antoinette-inspired ball gown took the spotlight as a cloud of glitter rained down on to the audience. As far as princess-worthy fashion moment go, this one took the crown.
In 19th-century rural China, peasant women of the Jiangyong County in the southern Hunan province developed a secret script named Nüshū. Its characters, mastered by women and indecipherable to men, appear in thin, downward-slanting wisps, like spider legs dancing across paper. Women used the writing system to communicate their most intimate thoughts to one another in China’s heavily gender-divided society—a disparity that still endures today.
These ancient origins have inspired the founders of a new NVSHU, an all-female music collective founded in 2018 among the ever-expanding skylines of modern-day Shanghai. Lhaga Koondhor (aka Asian Eyez), Amber Akilla, and Daliah Spiegel began the project last year by offering deejaying lessons to femme, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ people in the local electronic music scene. But beyond that, they hoped to provide these marginalized individuals—among them, emerging producers, DJs, and artists—a gathering place in the city.
Daliah Spiegel, Amber Akilla, and Lhaga Koondhor
PHOTO: MATHILDE AGIUS / COURTESY OF RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE
Although this class of DJ workshop has become increasingly prevalent in the West, in Shanghai, NVSHU is the first of its kind. As expat DJs, Koondhor and Akilla bonded over their parallel histories of navigating the white, male-dominated Western club industry. Despite coming from different backgrounds—Spiegel, originally from Vienna, relocated to Shanghai in 2014; Koondhor and Akilla moved from Switzerland and Australia, respectively, in 2017—all three strove to activate “a space that allows female and LGTBQ+ people to DJ without feeling intimidated,” Akilla says. In their eyes, NVSHU is more of a loose network of instructors and participants with similar values organized over social media rather than “a closed members club,” Koondhor says.
NVSHU offers lessons in both English and Mandarin, and while its founders are English speakers, they are careful of imposing their native language onto local students and extend that sensitivity to every corner of what they do. As an expatriate, Akilla is acutely aware of the limits of trying to transfer Western ideas of feminism to Shanghai; the goal of NVSHU is to empower marginalized individuals through music education, but they are also wary of engaging in overtly political discussions with their students. “I can’t tell a woman who is growing up here how she should perceive her sexuality or her gender identity,” Akilla says. “That’s a form of colonization. You can only support people on their journey.”
Lhaga Koondhor and Jirui Lin
PHOTO: MATHILDE AGIUS / COURTESY OF RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE
Discourse on feminism is fundamentally different in China than in Australia and Europe; both share the goal of gender equality, but, in recent years, the Chinese Women’s Rights Movement has faced rigid government repression. In its early days, China’s Communist Party enforced state feminism as part of its ideology, with equal labor fueling the country’s economic resilience—so much so that during the ‘50s and ‘60s, the nation boasted the highest female labor force participation in the world.
Market reforms over the last few decades, however, led to a disproportionate number of women losing jobs compared to men, and since 2007, the Chinese government has peddled propaganda encouraging young, educated women to get married, have children, and realign themselves with traditional gender roles. Those in their late 20s who refuse to comply are deemed undesirablesheng nu, or “leftover women,” but in response to this, the China’s Women’s Rights movement has found ways to evade the country’s Internet censorship and gather force on social media—even adding their voices to the global #MeToo movement.
NVSHU's founders consider themselves devoted feminists and allies, but their central aim is to facilitate empowerment through individual personal expression—itself a radical act. “We want to encourage people to explore their creativity,” Akilla says. “We’ve started with music as the tool to do that, but we hope that the confidence people get from learning with a practice like deejaying can support them in other parts of their life.”
Jirui Lin
PHOTO: MATHILDE AGIUS / COURTESY OF RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE
The goal of NVSHU, then, is to apply an inclusive vision to Shanghai’s emerging nightlife scene, which exists as a unique space for people to explore their creative freedom. The city’s nocturnal world is, after all, still a relatively blank canvas. Due to the strict policies enforced by the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong in the ‘60s and ‘70s, certain musical genres and instruments were fiercely regulated for decades; following Mao’s death in 1976, the country entered a new era of modernity and accelerated economic progress, but there was still no popular nightlife in China until the ’90s. The underground club scene, as a result, is still in its infancy. NVSHU and their contemporaries—left-field collectives such as Asian Dope Boys and record labels like Genome 6.66 Mbp—are actively sculpting this subcultural landscape on their own terms.
For Koondhor, electronic music provided the conduit for her own personal expression. In her teenage years before she entered the music industry, Koondhor worked in a buttoned-up finance apprenticeship at a Swiss bank, following in the footsteps of a family line of bankers. “The weekend was my escape,” she says, an opportunity to transform into a more fearless version of herself. Club culture became a playground for brash style statements—a black marker under her eye à la Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes or DIY shredded jeans. Akilla, who has always favored a more androgynous wardrobe of sneakers and oversize suit jackets says that “mainstream rhetoric has a very narrow constraints on femininity, so one thing the underground has taught me is how to learn and redefine beauty for myself.”
Lhaga Koondhor, Jirui Lin, Amber Akilla, and Daliah Spiegel
PHOTO: MATHILDE AGIUS / COURTESY OF RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE
The collective is living proof of music’s role as a powerful medium for expressing your identity:NVSHU’s Red Bull documentary, which was released in February, features one of their mentees Jirui Lin, a girl from the coastal Guangdong Province with a taste for techno, gabber, and grime music. In the film, she wears black harness fetish-wear and adorns her face with temporary tattoos in rebellion against her traditional parents.
“Being here, I’ve started to reshape what freedom means for me,” Koondhor adds. As the city’s freedoms continue to evolve, [NVSHU is standing at the vanguard, with more and more women encouraged to follow their lead.
Amber Akilla, Lhaga Koondhor, and Daliah Spiegel
PHOTO: MATHILDE AGIUS / COURTESY OF RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE
This house in San Francisco might be the most insanely decorated house we’ve ever seen. It’s also the most expensive house for sale in Fog City.
And for good reason. Le Petit Trianon is an historic, 20-room house that spans 17,895 square feet. It includes nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, three powder rooms, two kitchens, two wet bars, a ballroom, several offices and a massive central atrium. The mansion also comes with an intriguing history that includes bankruptcy, abandonment and a squatter who christened it his “thug mansion.”
Today, every room is creative and drastically different from the last. And it’s up for sale at $30 million. Want to see what it looks like? Come take a walk though San Francisco’s most expensive (and possibly most colorful) home.
The History
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The home is known as both Le Petit Trianon, and the Koshland Mansion. The mansion was built in 1904 by Marcus Koshland; his family’s business, the Koshland Brothers, was a lucrative wool import and export company. Marcus and his wife traveled to France and were enchanted by Versailles — particularly the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s chateau built by King Louis XV. When they came back to San Francisco, they had a mini Petit Trianon constructed on Washington Street close to The Presidio.
Fast forward a century later. Halsey Minor, the guy who founded CNET and co-founded Salesforce.com, purchased the mansion in 2007 for $22 million. Minor was rich; CBS purchased CNET for $1.8 billion in early 2008, and Salesforce.com had gone public with a $110 million IPO in 2004.
But then Minor fell to a one-two punch: the 2008 recession and a battle with depression.
The History, Continued
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Speaking to TNW, Minor says his 2006 divorce caused him to slip into a depression, which made him withdraw from family and friends. Minor poured his money into lawsuits and lawyers until he declared bankruptcy in 2013.
“I didn’t talk to anyone. Often, I didn’t even show up in (bankruptcy) court, because I was basically in my house all the time,” Minortold TNW.
Minor put the home on the market for $25 million in 2012, but the house was in terrible shape for the price. La Petit Trianon sat abandoned and fell into disrepair.
Until one unlikely person moved on in.
A Squatter’s Palace
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By 2015, the home was listed at $17 million. But there didn’t seem to be much interest nor buyer foot traffic in the run-down slice of Versailles, because a 39-year-old man moved on in with ease.
A Squatter’s Palace, Continued
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Jeremiah Kaylor, a homeless man, wandered into the property in 2014 via an unlocked back door.
“When I first saw it, I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is my headquarters. This is my thug mansion',” Kaylor told the San Francisco Chronicle duringa jailhouse interview. Kaylor found the main house barren, but used a ladder to climb in, where he said he lived for over two months.
He also may have been hoping to run into Taylor Swift. It was reported that the singerhad been eyeing the mansionfor purchase; Kaylor believed he and Swift were soulmates.
Kaylor also believed everything in the house belonged to him.
And a Squatter’s Storefront
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Kaylor also stole approximately $300,000 worth of artwork and sold the pieces to local pawn shops. Most of the pieces were recovered, and Kaylor was eventually arrested, even though he tried to claim ownership of the property under “adverse possession laws,” as he told the Chronicle.
Eventually the home did sell, this time to Ronald Jankov, a venture capitalist and founder of Global Link 1 Capital. Jankov renovated the property, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the house took on its incredible new look.
Every Room Is Different
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But not everything you see comes with the house. Listing agentJoel Goodrichtells us that most of the furniture from the showcase has been removed. Although these designers are just a phone call away.
At the mansion’s heart is a three-story atrium. This one has been designed with a living wall near the stained glass skylight window. It was designed byBrandon Pruett. There is an elevator, but it’s currently inoperable.
The deets: Justin Bieber made a tidy $700,000 profit after selling this house to Khloe in 2014, shortly after the reality TV star divorced NBA baller Lamar Odom.
The home has a stunning courtyard with a fireplace.
Like much of the Kardashian-Jenner clan’s dwellings, the house is decorated white and black with a minimalistic design. This photo is from 2017 and features her — while being filmed — watching a Cleveland Cavaliers game, while her then-boyfriend Tristan Thompson played. The two broke up in 2019, with Khloe saying that hecheated while she was pregnantwith their child.
