RISING ACTION

Angel Harvey-Ideozu: Apparently you were a club kid!

Isabella Burley: I feel like I’ve been pigeonholed as that when I’m literally the least likely person to have been a club kid. Boombox was one of the only things I actually went to, and that was probably for just a few years when I was 16 and working at American Apparel. But I love that apparently I was a club kid.

Were you on Tumblr?

Yes, but not in a big way. But it was so iconic back in the day.

I think about American Apparel in tandem with Tumblr. There’s this idea of American Apparel kids as major cultural surveyors and practitioners. There’s a brilliant fashion writer and theorist called Rian Phin on YouTube and TikTok. She used to work at American Apparel.

Did she? I didn’t know that.

She has such a grasp on culture, and I feel like her working there is somehow connected.

The Netflix documentary [Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel] is mostly about all of the really fucked up shit that happened there, that is totally inexcusable, but it did remind me of the image-making that also happened there and the cultishness of it. That was so revolutionary at the time. It did just feel like all of these young people working at a brand that felt really different and anti-establishment in many ways.

Who’s your favorite image-maker?

That’s honestly like asking to pick a favorite child.

Give me your top three.

Hiromix. I think her early work was really revolutionary. Martine Syms, because I think she’s just brilliant and I feel lucky to have worked on a book with her. And Talia Chetrit.

What draws you to Hiromix?

Japanese photography is a very male-dominated landscape, with people like [Nobuyoshi] Araki and Daidō Moriyama. But there were a lot of amazing female Japanese photographers that never really got the spotlight or recognition that they deserved. Hiromix isn’t really well-known — I hadn’t heard of her until maybe three years ago. But she spearheaded this girly focal culture in Japan in the late 90s, which has been so influential on people that are so well known in the West, like Sofia Coppola. Her work really encapsulated a scene and this girlhood culture that I find really interesting, which connects a lot to the selection of books that we have at Climax.

I really like Hiromix’s inclusion within the stock at Climax because a lot of the girlhood conversations feel very white and Western-focused.

100 percent. We also stock Brazilian Street Girls by Leticia Valverdes, who is another photographer whose work I didn’t hear of for so long. Because the book is about these street girls who would transform themselves to avoid the attention of predatory men, it has this documentary-like approach mixed with this sense of girlhood and identity politics. The fashion and style is also great in those images. It’s this intersection of things that makes it feel really layered.

How do you approach buying for Climax? Is it instinct or is there a checklist?

It’s a mix. If someone goes to a Climax store, they want to see Hiromix, Martine Syms, Sofia Coppola, Kathy Acker — the classic authors or image-makers that we are known to carry — so we always try to have them on the shelves. And then it’s about finding weird, niche subcultures, whether it’s one vintage magazine or one photographer’s work. It’s also just a reality that it’s really hard to find rare things now. Even Brazilian Street Girls. We just got a copy after looking for a year, and it sold out in one day. So it’s also about what we can find at that time.

My first book from Climax was Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s Happy Victims. Incredible thing. It’s also really rare. A reissue of it, which you wrote the foreword for, came out recently, but if that hadn’t, that book would be practically inaccessible. Do you think there’s a responsibility to make these rare books and ephemera accessible?

I do, and we approach it in two ways. Even if a book sells out, it stays on the website so someone that missed out on it or just can’t afford it — because a lot of those rarer books are annoyingly expensive now — can go on online and see a lot of the spreads. When we post on Instagram, we also do a big carousel so people have access to the content. Then, in person, it’s really important to me that our stores are environments where people feel comfortable to hang out and research and see what a book is like in person. A lot of our audience is really young, and not everyone is coming to buy. In both stores, we have latex seating areas where someone can come and spend two hours looking through books without being made to feel like shit for not purchasing something. A lot of independent bookstores don’t feel like that, so that’s the kind of culture we’re trying to create.

You’ve talked about the importance of feeling a book — feeling the paper. What book has the best paper you've ever felt?

Oh, that’s a really good question. I’m really interested in context. So say with Hiromix’s first book, girls blue. It’s printed on a kind of glossy paper stock, which really makes sense for the images, because it all feels nostalgic and glam, in a way. For me, it’s more the decision-making that happens around producing a physical object: the typeface, the paper stock, the binding. Is it hardback? Softback? All of that adds a context through which you experience the work, which is why it’s almost always so much nicer to physically experience these things.

The erotic comes up a lot in your work. A lot of the images and campaigns you produced for both Helmut Lang and Acne Studios have that quality, you guest-edited the first issue of Baroness, and Climax is called Climax.

I think it’s just a fun tool to play with. And again, it’s about context and how much you lean into it. For me, it’s more interesting when you play with eroticism in a non-obvious or non-confrontational way. For example, with Climax, it’s such a loaded name, but then we intentionally made sure all of the art direction felt really chic, like an art gallery, but still with this sort of wink. Or even the way that we use latex in the store or for our shopping bags. Latex is historically a fetish wear material, but then the Latex Bag is really generic in the sense that it’s the same type of bag you’d get from a bodega in New York. So it’s about changing the context of something that could be really loaded, into something else.

Let’s talk about that idea of recontextualizing. Climax’s entire “shop girl” bit, with Mia Khalifa manning the till and the Shop Girls Tee, is so good. One of my first references when thinking about shop girls is the 60s youthquake revolution, with stores like Mary Quant’s Bazaar or Biba. That conversation or trope doesn’t really exist in the same way now. What triggered that use of language for you?

It just happened in this organic way, where when I opened the New York store, friends would say, “Oh, I want to come and play shop girl,” as this fun thing. One day, Sarah [aka Mia Khalifa], who had bought a lot from us online, came in and saw me and my friend Ava [Nirui], who runs Heaven by Marc Jacobs, playing shop girl when the store manager was off. She asked to do a shift the next day, and it’s just been this thing since. We made the T-shirt with the joke, “I only go to Climax for the shop girls,” as just a cute lols thing. As a term it feels so archaic, so it’s kind of funny to use it.

The New York store was designed by Kat Milne, right? How did that relationship come about?

Yeah, Kat worked on it. She actually came through Ava, who she works with at Marc Jacobs. She just really understood Climax, the references, and that fine line we wanted to draw between something that felt really elevated and conceptual but also made people feel welcome and intrigued — a bit sexy, but not too sexy. So it was about getting that right balance. I opened a proper storefront in London this fall, and Kat designed that as well. Before, the London space was kind of like our office, but having something designed with the same intention as New York, where it really feels like a proper shop, is nice. There’s going to be so many fab London shop girls.

You have the wearables for Climax, the graphics, bags, stickers — again, you’re building this entire world. But you’re also living in it. I can definitely see the similarities between the Climax store and your house, which you sometimes post on Instagram.

I know! Everyone is like, “Wait, is it your house or the store?” And I’m like, they are different things. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] But what’s that similarity about? Of course on one level it’s just a natural expression of your taste and style, but you are living in one big Climax world, essentially.

I don’t know. I think they are almost different worlds. In a way my home is more stripped back than Climax. Also, I don’t have any books out at home. They’re literally in my kitchen cupboard right now because I don’t have proper storage for them yet. But I’ve always been drawn to certain materials like stainless steel, mirror, and latex, which I have at home and also at Climax.

It is a lot of stainless steel and white walls. Who’s your favorite architect?

I've always really liked Sophie Hicks’s work. Her spaces are beautiful. I don’t know that many architects but I love that Clerkenwell/Old Street area. There’s a lot of these early 2000s showroom spaces that have lots of glass, a little bit of concrete, a bit of stainless steel. The new Climax space in London is like that. The frontage is very early 2000s with frosted glass, and it feels very Old Street, even though it’s in Clerkenwell. Let me show you.

You kept the frosted glass.

Yeah. We did a pink vinyl like we have in New York, but then kept the frosting. It’s really fun.

Like the New York store, it beams this pink light. But also makes this play with transparency and makes the space feel kind of taboo, if that’s the right word.

Exactly. Where people are like, is this a gallery? Is it sex shop? Am I allowed in or not? That’s the thing that I like playing with: when people wonder, “What is Climax?” It’s kind of hard to explain because it’s a bookstore, but it’s not really just a bookstore. It’s a brand, but it’s kind of not a brand. It’s erotic, but it’s not obviously erotic. It's always a bit in between.

Is there a world where Climax pops up in different cities?

That really is the dream. I would need to take on investment to do it, but my dream with Climax would be to have concept stores in different cities around the world, from Paris to L.A. to Seoul. And they’d all respond to the architecture of the city. New York is the flagship and the first design space, and then London is this frosted, showroom-like office space, but in Clerkenwell, which is the historic print district of London. Maybe L.A. would be in an old movie theater or Paris would be in an old bakery. If everything goes well with London, I really want to do a red rubber floor and play with certain things that maybe wouldn’t make sense in other cities.

A red rubber floor sounds incredible.

I know! It would be so good.