In Italy they love to do things in a way that is ridiculously dramatic, so at eleven o’clock one evening in March 2011, at the height of Carnevale season, I rode into Teatro La Fenice in Venice on a white stallion in full Carnevale dress, designed by my great friend Liborio Capizzi. It was a nod to that iconic 1977 photograph of Bianca Jagger sitting on a white horse in New York’s Studio 54 nightclub. Wearing a black corseted Marie Antoinette-style dress and mask, I sat on this really tall, slightly edgy horse and slowly made my way through the stalls to the stage. It was a moment that, even for me, was fantastically off the scale.
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The first thing to change was my sense of style. I was raised a Christian, with a dress code that was smart, conservative and old fashioned – dresses that went all the way up to the neck, down to the wrists, and fell below the knee, topped with no make-up and a wet-look curly perm or straightened hair. It was important to look like a modest, perfectly behaved girl, which I was. We all bought our frilly church-friendly crêpe dresses from a shop in Brixton at the end of Railton Road. The dresses had pleats – the tinier the better. I had a white one that I wore to church and I hated it. Those tiny pleats were hell to iron. You had to try and line four of them up at once then make sure the iron was exactly the right temperature, but once you sat down they would crease and never fall the right way again. I hated that shop because the clothes made us all look the same. By this time, The Kids from Fame were on TV, and we were obsessed. We all wanted to be those leg-warmer-wearing, somersaulting dancers in the show. We also had our minds blown when Jerey Daniel of Shalamar body-popped on Top of the Pops. That was a revelation to us – a completely new style of music, fashion and dancing. The next day we were all trying to ‘pop’. Watching this, we knew our Stepford Wives-style God dresses had to go!
As we got bigger, so my interest in fashion grew, and I started to see the art in fashion instead of just clothes that cover my back. Style and music are interlinked, feeding off each other. I was becoming aware of how I could use fashion as a tool to enhance my stage show and my personal self-worth. Clothes directly influence my mood – if I get it right my confidence is boosted and I feel high on life with the audience in the palm of my hand. Get it wrong and I feel like a scruy mouse that needs to crawl back into its tiny hole. I have to feel comfortable in my own skin, so what I wear has to be functional and suit my shape.
The year 2008 was pivotal, not just for Skunk Anansie but also for me personally. It was the year I met my partner Lady – known as Ladyfag – at a Fashion Week party in New York for the designers Dsquared2. I was hanging out with my ‘Italian ’usband’, the designer Liborio Capizzi. I remember getting out of a lift on the rooftop, scanning the scene, and I saw her, bang in the centre of the dancefloor. Who is that? I thought. She’s drop-dead gorgeous and chic as hell! She wore a dazzling outfit and had beautiful dark hair. Up to that point, I’d rarely chatted anyone up. I was scared of being rejected, so I always let people approach me. But on this occasion, I worked my way round the room to where she was standing.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink? Would you like some champagne?’
‘It’s all free here, let me get you one,’ Lady replied.
We got chatting and she invited me to her birthday party the next day, which was taking place in an infamous gay nightclub called Mr Black. Many years later she told me that when I curled my fingers around the champagne glass and smiled at her, she thought, I think I’m going to be serving this woman champagne for very a long time.
My co-founder, Ali Schultz, taught me the wisdom of horses. Horses, with their supernatural ability to use their limbic nervous systems to discern truth and congruency, do not base their choice of the leader of their herd on strength or intellectual wisdom. Nor is their choice based on which member might keep the herd safe from a predator wolf. They choose the one who feels the group best and who cares the most. They choose the horse— usually a mare—who is most capable of holding that care in a way that calms the whole group. They’re marked by the attunement to the inner and outer needs of those they have the honor to serve and lead.
The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road boys.
They weren’t thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert’s horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.