FUCKING NEW YORK: how my art series became a fashion editorial for Beautiful Savage magazine

fashioneditorial

Jan 11

Chad Saville, founder of Beautiful Savage, approached me with the idea of adapting my ongoing FUCKING NEW YORK art series into a fashion editorial. He didn’t want a softer take — he wanted to keep the edge sharp, the energy intact. Same city, same electricity, translated into fashion without compromise.

We shot it in the kind of New York that never appears in travel guides: hard light, concrete backdrops, duct tape, heat. The sex appeal isn’t styled in — it’s sweated out. And what started as an art series about the city’s brutal charm found a new rhythm in fashion form.

The finished story leans into attitude, architecture, and athleticism. These aren’t passive poses or decorative nudity, they’re confrontational and sculptural. It’s elbows and knees, movement and tension, all geometry and heat against city steel and shadow. The styling by Rowshana Jackson plays into that friction: sheer, metallic, strategic.

India Charmain was all in from the first frame: elegant, raw, fearless. A Black woman bringing that kind of presence to a fashion story in 2015 still isn’t as common as it should be. She didn’t just rise to the occasion — she shaped it. Her body cuts hard against the city grid: bent knees, squared shoulders, hair like a weapon. Even her laughter has force — not just joy, but assertion.

The full story is print in Beautiful Savage. You’ll find it on a smart newsstand, or on the shelf of someone who never throws the good ones out.