You can count on Christen Mooney to always be turning a look. Take a quick scroll through the multi-hyphenate’s Instagram and you’ll see the 29-year-old sporting everything from thigh-high Telfar x Ugg boots and frilly thongs in sugary pink to nipple-flashing LBDs, arse-baring school skirts and leopard-print catsuits à la Scary Spice.
“Fashion pays the bills,” says Christen Mooney, calling me from his apartment in New York. He’s dressed in an Adidas x Lotta Volkova zip-up in citrussy green and yellow, his braids pulled back away from his face. The pandemic has been good to Mooney, who says he “kind of social- distanced two years before the world did,” decamping from the Big Apple to live with his mother in Virginia in 2018. “I had super-bad anxiety prior to moving back, I just couldn’t get it together. I needed to take a sabbatical and see what was going on with my body and spirit.”
Leaving the city granted Mooney, then known as a stylist and muse to the cult New York label Hood By Air, the space and serenity to indulge in the art of tapestry-making. Having experimented with editorial work as well as multimedia collages prior, it wasn’t until he began working with textiles that he began seeing his art as a viable career path. “When dealing with my anxiety, I went towards a very healing place and in that place I found myself having really vivid memories – where did I first see myself? What did it look like? How did that feel?” he says. Mooney found that the first time he saw himself reflected as a queer Black man in the media was within pornography. “That’s such a conundrum to even say out loud.”
bra by NIHL, jacket by BALENCIAGA, shoes by PLEASER
Taking to Tumblr to engulf himself in a wealth of Black gay erotica, he was struck by a series of photographs by Bob Mizer, founder of Physique Pictorial, the first all-male photography magazine in the US, taken in the 1970s which depicted a group of naked Black men chained “like slaves”. In doing his research, it was clear which images had been captured by Black photographers and which were taken by white people, with the likes of Mizer and Robert Mapplethorpe – despite being regarded as pioneers of gay erotica – playing a crucial role in perpetrating the fetishisation of the Black male physique. Objectifications that are very much still rife today.
Mooney began weaving Mizer’s images into textile form, reclaiming these narratives as his own. Double-exposing his subjects against pale pink skies, he created works that translate as insignias of being a Black gay man living in contemporary America. The tapestries exist in digitally rendered formations on ThugPop.Farm, a URL platform where Mooney houses a wealth of creative work. Serving as a metaverse to rival that of Mark Zuckerberg’s, its self-styled fashion editorials replicate 2000s gossip mags, which sit alongside glitter-laden collages and trippy artworks made in collaboration with Frank Dorrey.
Growing up in a strict Navy household where he was scolded by his parents for his fashion choices, Mooney found that scrolling through Tumblr and Myspace offered an escapist route into a world far glossier than his own. The idea for ThugPop began as a concept for a fashion magazine in his college years – “I used to want to be Katie Grand” – before morphing into his online alias in 2014, shortly after he moved to New York at the age of 18.
coat and boots by GMBH
Securing an internship at Carol Lim and Humberto Leon’s retailer Opening Ceremony, Mooney soon became affiliated with Hood By Air’s Shayne Oliver and Raul Lopez, becoming their fit model around the time A$AP Rocky morphed into the brand’s poster boy. Today, he calls Oliver “family” and last year he styled, photographed and cast an editorial as part of the brand’s comeback after a three-year hiatus. (Oliver, in that time, became the first designer-in-residence at Helmut Lang. Lopez left the brand in 2016 to create his own buzzy label, Luar.)
Ever hungry to break into the industry, Mooney spent his early years in New York trawling back-to-back model castings while working as a showroom assistant for the likes of Telfar, Martine Rose and Wales Bonner before they went on to enjoy global success. And then things came to a standstill. “Nobody would hire me, no modelling agency would sign me,” he says. “But all the rejections moulded me to make ThugPop, to make something of my own.” Living in Virginia gave Mooney time to re-evaluate the direction of his career. “I love fashion. But the industry is weird.”
Now back in New York, Mooney says his anxiety is more manageable. He’s sober, has “all the right people” around him and is generally more confident. Plus, there’s more work coming in than ever before. “I feel super-optimistic,” he says. “Everything is coming together.”
top and shorts by LOEWE, corset by AGENT PROVOCATEUR
Since launching his digital platform, Mooney says the ThugPop identity has evolved beyond the computer screen. “It has become this other part of me that’s like an alter ego,” he says. “A warrior, princess, digital bitch or some shit.” I wonder, as a child of the internet coming up in an industry that is increasingly digitalised, does Mooney feel the pressure to be constantly online? “I’m not, like, addicted to it.” But, with his profile growing, does he feel like he ever needs to self-censor? “I post whatever the fuck I want.”
At the moment, Mooney is busying himself by building an expansive studio practice which involves sculpture work as well as sound production, and using his debut mixtape, Nymph, to mediate his feelings on Black queerness – all while trying to navigate TikTok. (“I’m so bad at it – bring back Tumblr!”) But ThugPop is no longer just an Insta username. It’s his business. “I want ThugPop to make a million dollars in 2022,” he says. As for Mooney? “I want to stay happy.”
Top image: custom hat by POPPADOLL, earrings by HOMER, jacket by BALMAIN, leotard by GOGO GRAHAM. Taken from Issue 55 of 10 Men – FUTURE, BALANCE, HEALING – out NOW. Order your copy here.
Photographer RASAAN WYZARD
Fashion Editor IAN BRADLEY
Text PAUL TONER
Talent CHRISTEN MOONEY AKA THUGPOP
Hair KAZU KATAHIRA using Hydro Hair
Make-up SINN APSARA at The Angelito Collective using Pat McGrath Labs
Shot at Feather Nest Inn US
top by LUDOVIC DE SAINT SERNIN
jewellery by HOMER, corset by LEAK YOUR SEX TAPE, belt and boots by LOUIS VUITTON, vintage skirt by PRADA
jacket and leotard by RICK OWENS, shoes by PLEASER
jewellery by BERNARD JAMES, top by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
