Actress and perpetual It Girl Julia Fox is opening up about her whirlwind romance with Kanye West and how their relationship inspired her to seize control of her image.
In a new interview on the New York Times’ podcast Popcast, host Jon Caramanica brought up Fox’s infamous Interview magazine essay in which she described her courtship with West as it was still unfolding back in 2022, just after the rapper’s split from Kim Kardashian. In her recent memoir, Down the Drain, Fox recounted how West was displeased with her first draft of the essay and had one of his associates rewrite her account. Dissatisfied with the results, she pushed back against the edits.
“I think at a certain point, it’s like, ‘I’m not gonna let you make me sound stupid,’” Fox elaborated on Popcast. “I’ll walk away right now. I’m not publishing that with my name on it. Just no. I can draw the line somewhere.”
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“When do you feel like you fully wrestled back total control of your image? Was it after that paparazzi relationship [with West]?” Popcast co-host Joe Coscarelli asked.
“Definitely,” Fox said. “You know, it was actually a blessing that he came into my life, because he kind of shook up my team in a way where a lot of the creative control was then given back to me. Whereas I feel like for a couple of years there…I would still feel this pressure to pretend to be this Hollywood starlet that I like, wasn’t.”
“I’d get into fights about it and be really upset about it, but then ultimately always concede and just do what they wanted me to do because it was easier than arguing. So then after that, he came in and was like, ‘Wait a minute, no, fuck that, I’m gonna do what I wanna do,’” Fox said, referring to West. “But then when he left it was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna do what I wanna do,’ you know?”
Fox said she ultimately felt more empowered after her month-long relationship with West came to an end. “I kind of felt like, ‘Oh my god, the world is my oyster,’” she said. “I’m my own muse.”
“It was like the doors had unlocked, and I just had so many more resources at my fingers,” she went on. “More people wanting to work with me, more designers willing to lend me clothes, and it became really fun.”
But that increased attention and creative control also prompted some backlash, particularly from those who gave West all the credit for Fox’s media and style savviness.
“And then I started to hear this whole thing,” Fox said. “‘She’s only killing it in fashion because it’s Kanye, it’s Kanye.’ And I was like, ‘No, these are my looks and I’m putting them together.’ So I felt like that was what I needed to push against, and prove that I’m doing this, and I wasn’t doing it before because my team just wanted me to look basic.”
Since then, Fox has certainly succeeded in making an international name for herself as a fashion trendsetter, and her new reality competition show, OMG Fashun, debuted on E! In May.
