Julia Fox reigns Supreme in a chaotic new ad campaign

Julia Fox is the new face of Supreme, and with that achievement, she has given us a masterclass in taking the reins of celebrity. While she was the self-proclaimed muse of Uncut Gems, the role didn’t make her necessarily a household name — but her persona certainly has. Her admittedly stoned interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast in which she pronounced the name of the film with an odd syntax, which launched a viral TikTok reenactment trend (the pandemic has been weird), was the first clue that we might be dealing with someone who can tap into the zeitgeist at will. It was her time while dating Kanye West, though, that Fox became a name you might hear your mom refer to as “the girl with the crazy makeup;” the two spent weeks courting any and all attention possible in their own cryptic, high fashion way.

While the relationship with West was short-lived, Fox’s chokehold on our attention was not. Her brief stint as West’s dress-up doll cemented her as a pop culture figure, signature Black Swan cat eye and all. And the best part of the grift is that Fox admitted that it was such. In an Instagram story post-breakup, she referenced herself as a “#1 hustler” for orchestrating her West-assisted glow-up. But she wasn’t done there. Fox took a page out of Kim Kardashian’s playbook — exploiting West’s erratic genius to elevate one's status — and teamed up with one of fashion’s most iconic yet elusive brands, a mirror to the image it seems she is trying to secure for herself. While Kardashian found Balmain, Fox found Supreme.

In the ads now plastered all over New York City, Fox is a boozy flight attendant with a cheekily undone blouse sitting in the lap of skateboarder Tyshawn Jones. The SS22 campaign was fittingly shot by another underground hero, director Harmony Korine, whose work (Gummo, Spring Breakers) revels in the romance of grittiness and the exaggeration of the outsider. In true fashion for all three brands involved — Supreme, Fox, and Korine — the chaotic ad seems to advertise everything and nothing at the same time. It’s as mundane a shot as it is an interesting one, looking as if it could just as easily be a candid from a disposable camera lying around on a private jet as the high fashion ad that it is. Which is to say it captures the essence of Julia Fox herself: someone who seems like she would prank us with a performance piece role on Real Housewives of New York just as soon as she could star in another serious film and self-appoint herself as a filmmaker’s muse once again.