I can think of a dozen things I’d rather reveal than the contents of my Instagram Explore page. Nothing knows me better. For the past few weeks, my algorithmically-formed feeds, be it on Instagram or TikTok, have presented me with an unflattering picture of myself. I’m finding cursed things funny, weird people hot, and my listening habits have transitioned from the pep and fizz of typical Pop Girl Summer (Chappell, Sabrina… you know, the girls) into something more abrasive. The digital tarot cards are telling me that Pervert Winter has arrived.
Yes, your Deloitte girls and gays have had a fabulous Brat summer, one that creeped into autumn and never seemed to end. (We love you Charli, you know that.) But the transition into a new seasonal feeling has happened with all the subtlety and slowness of a multi-car pile-up. There’s a chill in the air and my trench coat is buttoned to the top.
Last night, a friend and I were texting. He said he’d seen Robert Eggers’ fucked up vampire romance Nosferatu and loved it. He’d left with the stunning realisation that his sexual appetite was sated not by the sight of Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a tight waist-coat but of a seven-foot Transylvanian vampire with his dick out. “Me being more attracted to an undead corpse over ATJ needs to be studied,” he wrote. Being horny after a sex-starved week back home post-Christmas is hardly a revolutionary concept, but it does feel that we’re all preparing to lean into our darker, more unorthodox decisions right now.
One such person is Ethel Cain who, after rejecting the idea of being framed as a “pop artist” in 2024, decided to make an album – named Perverts, of course – that was inscrutable and brave and grating. 90 minutes long and comprised of industrial pink noise and undistinguishable vocals subsumed by fuzzed out electric guitar, it feels antithetical to the kind of brashness that Brat possessed; unpalatable and uncatchy and everything many of her fans did not want. Charli’s turned her inner thoughts into big, earworm pop songs. On Perverts, Cain seems to be doing the opposite: doubling down on mystery, and harbouring a willingness to stay weird and misunderstood.
Perversion doesn’t have to be tied to sex – sometimes perversion is a mindset.
Miuccia Prada has long been a master of gorgeous perversity. Prada’s SS25 collection was replete with slightly sordid looks: a dress embellished with more girthy metal rings than a Hot Topic employee knows what to do with; a striped bathing suit styled beneath a knee-length peacoat (flasher!); and a crispy and crunchy cropped full-leather look, complete with a hood to cower beneath. Mrs Prada’s take on fashion worldbuilding, both elegant and strange, predates her work with the more traditional freak Raf Simons too. A decade-old Miu Miu campaign image of Mia Goth, back arched on a bare mattress in a mildew-coated room, has recently resurfaced on X. Funnily enough, some are saying it’s Ethel Cain coded – and of course, Cain has entered the Miu Miu universe herself on the show’s AW24 runway.
Perversion doesn’t have to be tied to sex – sometimes perversion is a mindset. It can summarise our intent to mute the parts of ourselves that tell us to say ‘no’, and make bad decisions. Not to sound all Kelly Clarkson mid-00s pop ballad about it, but Pervert Winter is the time to be proud of the parts of yourself some consider ugly or uncouth. Make a fool of yourself; be a beg. Worry less about how you are seen. Fester in your insecurities and wear them when you leave the house. Or, alternatively, don’t leave the house at all. Turn the lights off and live in it.