Month: October 2025

By Liv Thomas

17/07/2025 

Morning 

I was in the Tate Modern when I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

It was a grey day, blanketed by a sweltering heat, and I was alone in Paddington Station.  

No one around me knew that I’d started the day buzzing with that small, yet bright, excitement that comes from seeing someone you haven’t seen in half a year. 

They didn’t know that I was sitting on a bench in complete humiliation after receiving a response to my “here” text that read “I thought we were meeting tomorrow?”. 

I didn’t want to catch the next train home; I’d paid for this journey, after all. So I walked through, in my head, all the things I would want to do in London if I ever found myself alone there. Art galleries are a great place to explore if you want to blend in among a crowd of people who are perfectly content to be within their own company. I decided on the Tate Modern – and that’s where my day turned from strange to true.  

Midday 

The spatial layout of most art galleries carries the intention of leading you from one piece to another until you finish your journey with a new sense of meaning. The Tate Modern, on the other hand, makes you feel very, very small. 

Upon entering, the concrete walls and glass panels on either side of me stretched above to what I can only vaguely remember as a bright light. Facing the entrance, I turned left; if you were to see a map of the Turbine Hall, this would be in the direction of a tumorous-looking structure leeching onto an otherwise square building. 

This tumour is where I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

You enter this space and you’re presented with several openings, each leading to its own exhibition. You look down the corridor to one and see an alien standing at the end. Except it’s not an alien, it’s L’Homme au doigt. 

Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the statue as “always halfway between nothing and being,” and that’s exactly how I felt when I found myself in this liminal space between the rest of the Tate Modern, and the works of Alberto Giacometti.  

The exhibition was lit in a way that made the square-shaped corridor look like a tunnel, with the dark corners of each four-pointed frame bending over the sculptures, as a light pointed directly at them stretched their shadows against the wall.  

My first association was with Plato’s Cave. On the one hand, this matter of perspective accentuates Giacometti’s study of the human form and its relationship to the environment. On the other hand, these silhouettes and the figures that cast them represent the dual significations between alienation and endurance, fragility and resistance, and our anxieties and hopes.  

Notes on Giacometti 

Giacometti is often regarded as a late modernist who reaffirmed figuration after World War II.  Similar to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — only translated here through plaster, clay, and bronze — Giacometti’s sculptures capture the fading afterimage of a society laid bare by war, fixating on humanity seen through a lens of thin, metal limbs, as if the world itself had been whittled down to its trembling bones. 

Despite their proximity, the figures wander aimlessly, with neither direction nor acknowledgement – their identities blur, yet they are completely disconnected. 

Giacometti rejected the artistic notion of replicating reality; instead he sought to uncover the truth of life by reducing it to its barest principles. His art serves as an alternative to the superficiality of hyper-realism in sculpting.  

This specific figure is inspired by Egyptian artistic traditions. While the name of the piece suggests otherwise, the sculpture conveys no sense of movement and rather reflects a wider awareness of varying 20^th century stylisations.  

Final thoughts 

My thoughts at the Tate Modern gather to the present day.  

Plato’s Cave tells the story of prisoners trapped in a cave, and the shadows cast by a fire are mistaken for reality. Mimesis is an illusion that distracts us from the fragmented nature of human existence, and authenticity is needed now more than ever in a digital age that conglomerates everything fed into it.  

When you cast a shadow against Giacometti’s works, you don’t see reality –  you see a half-starved person, a physical manifestation of psychological confinement, a charred body… or maybe you would even see yourself.

Seeing this for myself in London, surrounded by strangers, and with a lost purpose for the day – left with the lingering feeling of reading whatever was in the news that morning – I couldn’t help but let Giacometti’s shadows speak to me. A lone person faces another human in the form of a sculpture; both carry multitudes. 

Featured Image: Liv Thomas

By David Bayne-Jardine

I lock eyes with Paul Mescal in the newsagents – a vision in short-shorts that stops me in my tracks. The Gen-Z heartthrob and award-winning ‘sad boy’ actor glares at me from the front page of the magazine. Decked out in a skin-tight cropped leather tank top and matching tiny shorts, his hips thrust provocatively into the centre of the photo, his arms stretched above him in a gesture at once powerful yet vulnerable. 

Over recent years, Mescal’s name has become synonymous with two things: tear-jerking portrayals of emotionally troubled men, and a worldwide obsession with short-shorts. Launched into fame in 2020 after playing Connell in the Normal People miniseries, his character’s humble and revealing Gaelic football shorts soon caught the attention of the fashion industry. Since then, as Mescal and other style icons have played with showing a bit more skin, retailers have reported skyrocketing sales in a sort of menswear very different from the norm. From Milanese catwalks to trendy cafes, from red carpet evenings to early morning park runs, men across the world have been sporting skirts, crop tops, painted nails and thigh-high shorts like never before.

In this photoshoot, his GQ cover story from November ‘24, Mescal exhibits this androgyny and playfulness that is taking over men’s fashion. After all, who better to represent male self-expression than the king of emotionally troubled men himself? In this post-COVID age of mental health awareness, as boys swap the late-night trauma dumps for self-care and therapy, their fashion is changing too. Brighter, bolder, tighter, smaller, scantier, hotter, gayer and girlier, it seems that as men loosen up and express themselves, so too do their clothes. 

It was not so long ago that glossy quarterlies like this one sold themselves by smothering their pages in a very different brand of masculinity. From the front cover, the likes of Cruise, DiCaprio and Brando defined male design as an affair of take-me-serious simplicity – expensive watches, white tees and razor-sharp tuxedos. If men were to be leaders and protectors, then their clothes needed to perpetuate that image – ordered, uncomplicated, unemotional. 

Now, I think as I absently flick through the magazine, things couldn’t be more different. Most of Gen-Z’s most successful heartthrobs are inclined, perhaps even expected, to rail against the boundaries of male clothing. Harry Styles made history in 2020 when he appeared on the front cover of Vogue in a blue Gucci ballgown. Bad Bunny’s Instagram is awash with dresses and skirts. Pedro Pascal rocked the Met Gala in 2023 with a flamboyant shorts and trench coat combo. Jacob Elordi, Milo Ventimiglia and Jonathan Bailey have all been papped showing off their quads in tiny shorts. 

But where did all this come from? What has prompted straight men in particular to start dressing more like the groups they once sought so hard to distinguish themselves from? As is often the case with mainstream culture, we are at least in part indebted to the Queer community for this sartorial about-turn. The sort of bold, playful and scanty clothing that A-listers are wearing nowadays was for years the dress code of LGBTQ+ subcultures, used to question gender binaries, promote self-expression and embody an ethos of sex positivity. 

As men are starting to open up, they look for inspiration in groups that have been expressing themselves for much longer – women and queer people. Of course, this is not the first time men have dressed like this (see John Travolta in Grease or Sean Connery as Bond), but it is certain that as previously marginalised narratives enter the mainstream, and as the playing field becomes more level, 2020s fashion is developing a distinctly gay and androgynous flavour.

Of course, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the deep irony that runs through this trend: when men dress scantily they’re hailed as transgressive; when women dress scantily they’re slut shamed or attacked. Feminine and queer fashion that was once dismissed as distasteful or offensive is now considered the epitome of good taste. 

As true as this is, it is refreshing to see men taking more risks when they dress themselves. In showing more skin, they make an attempt at vulnerability and have fun in doing so. As with all fashion, it is used to make a statement – ‘I am emotional, empathetic, a listener’ – that expresses allegiance to a new type of masculinity that tries to be less domineering and more empathetic. Of course, a pair of tight-fitting booty shorts, painted nails and a tank top won’t miraculously transform a misogynist into an ally (we’ve all seen the ‘performative male’ trend online), but it does signify an attempt by some to rebrand their masculinity into one with more tolerance. 

Naturally, this won’t be the only thing influencing menswear’s latest pivot. As summers get hotter clothes inevitably get lighter, and in our heavily pornographic society sex sells as much as ever before. After all, in an age where adult content is always a few taps away, when weight-loss drugs promise us almost any body we want, when daring sex stunts grab national headlines, is it not inevitable that we become more hooked on glimpsing our favourite celebs’ bodies?

In an era of momentary microtrends, the fact that the skimpy men’s clothing obsession is still going strong after half a decade signifies that something significant is shifting under the surface for men. Sure, it’ll all probably go out of fashion as quickly as it came in, but for now there’s nothing more stylish than a guy in unmanly clothes. So roll up that waistband and dust off mum’s skirts – showing some skin seems here to stay.

Featured Image: Paul Mescal / Vogue, 2024

By Robin Reinders

I don’t remember when I began to drink because I liked it. The first furtive sip of my mother’s vodka-cran, returned with a puckered mouth and distasteful shake of the head. Smirnoff Ice soaked in the saccharine aftertaste of a sticky American suburban desert summer. That cheeky ornamental sparkle in the family-fridge OJ; bubbles and Benedict before noon. I remember thinking adults must be something very far-fetched to have acquired not simply the taste but the temperament to tolerate something that looked like maturescence crystalised, and yet tasted of soap in the mouth. What we seem to forget when we’re piss-taking over pints and pre-rolls at the pub is that apprenticeship in alcohol comes about through mimicry.  

For most of us, this education begins in embarrassment.

Every culture of taste has its shibboleths – the books one must be versed in, the films one must feign to have seen, the discographies one must recite top to tail. To carouse, per contra, is to discover that your body will reject the canon, and that each bitter pill you swallow merits you that much closer to an earnest drinker. I don’t like dirty martinis. I tell you this as a truffle-foraging, cornichon-crunching creature of brine and salt and savour. I was cresting twenty when I asked my barman-retiree father to chill me a glass and uncork the Hendrick’s. I wanted to love it for its poise, its cosmopolitan severity. I didn’t laugh so much as bark, embarrassed by my own disappointment, balking at the opaque peridot of the frosted glass, like a birthstone that didn’t belong to me. I am not a dirty martini person. I accept this with a quiet, cognizant sort of amusement. There is a peculiar humility in discovering that you cannot love a drink you so chronically hope to love. It punctures the vanity of discernment. The drinks we abandon tell the truth of our appetites more eloquently than the ones we order ever could.

More and more I find it true that there is a certain choreography inherent to preference. Culture has always been coded in the minor details of consumption; cocktails simply render those codes portable and potable, able to be performed in the theatre of a hotel bar or an airport lounge or the local pub.  The process of taste-making – the literal kind, that is – is not unlike the making of a self. There are phases, fads, flirtations. A person’s drink becomes a form of shorthand. The girl watching her weight – Targaryen-blond and terribly boring – perching neatly on a barstool with her vodka-soda. The bubble-skirted, ballet-flatted Instagrammer bending over the counter for a birds-eye of her Aperol. The twenty-something berlioz bloke quoting Bukowski (incorrectly) while he swirls his single malt and checks his crypto portfolio when nobody’s listening.

We were all performing then: in the dewy-eyed dream of our parents’ kitchen, in bolshie adolescent company, in the sticky arena of a student bar. We still are. Drinking, not dissimilar from dressing, belongs to the theatre of self-definition. Every order at a bar is a small audition for the role of ourselves as imagined by others. The city itself colludes in the casting: cafés advertising ‘artisanal’ tonics, bars lit in imitation of some universal nostalgia, menus printed on textured paper that promise depth of field if not depth of flavour. Boozing has always had an anthropology attached to it. The tiki Mai Tais of the 1950s, a sweet postwar reprieve; the vodka revolution of the ’80s, a distilled form of corporate yuppie (in)efficiency; the craft-cocktail revival of the 2000s, a Buzzfeed-bloated mode of taxonomy. What your cocktail screams about you! To drink bitter is to be sage and perspicacious; to drink sweet, jejune. Even taste, it turns out, has a class system.

It’s no accident that bitterness has become the aesthetic of adulthood in our time – espresso, kale, dark chocolate. A comestible sort of cynicism that feels less cringe inside our mouths than it sounds projected out. Holistic, antithetical zoomer ‘wellness’ has a certain flavour, doesn’t it? I like a Negroni alright – what do you want me to tell you? A graduation from the half-hearted G&Ts of early adulthood. I don’t actually remember when or where we were introduced. I don’t remember the first whiff of pine and peel, the first wink of arterial red like the garnets in my jewellery. I didn’t like it, but I did. It’s not a drink that courts indulgence. Quite the opposite; it begs attention with a cruel rather than a kind hand. All this to say at some ill-defined, perfunctorily romanticised moment, I understood I was a bitter drinker. Fond of the acrid, the tannic, the aromatic. It’s a far cry from the pink cosmos and perfumed spritzes of my younger years, but when I order one I don’t do so with panache. I don’t fancy myself some maverick patron with a palate worth priding myself on. I order it because it’s my drink.

These days I keep little in the cabinet. A bottle of gin with a label I like. A bitter that stains the glass vermillion. A dry white I cook with as much as I sip. Maybe a cheeky Italian liqueur for some frivolous, far-future dinner function. I suppose when you finally start to drink like yourself, you have been, in consequence, every kind of drinker: the precocious, the posturing, the self-appointed pundit. And in that gradual ledger of sips, one discovers that taste is no static inheritance nor fixed, natural possession, but some fluid, fey thing. A patient, unhurried negotiation between what we think we ought to drink and what, inexplicably and inexorably, becomes the second-round staple.

Featured Image: Alain Delon / Getty Images

By Edward Clark

Wayzgoose’s Head of Reviews, Edward Clark, sits down with Laura Simpson and Lydia Jane Pugh – the writers of brand new musical Radio Silence.

This summer saw the world premiere of Radio Silence, a brand new musical about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War. Performed locally at the Princess Royal Centre for the Performing Arts in Guernsey, the show received glowing reviews from audiences and critics alike. Grappling with oppression, freedom, and resilience, the musical asks the same questions of its characters as it does its audience: “what would you risk to resist?”. After their first leg of performances, I sat down with writers Laura Simpson and Lydia Jane Pugh to discuss the musical, island identity, and its uncertain future against the backdrop of shrinking arts funding.

The narrative of Radio Silence follows the fictional Tabel family’s involvement with the Guernsey Underground News Service (GUNS), a secret movement during the island’s Second World War occupation which disseminated British news to islanders, banned from using radios by Nazi invaders. The detailed set of the Tabel family home offers a warm domestic sphere to juxtapose the unforgiving Nazi regime, as rules and taxes are imposed onto islanders. In response to this cold authority, the family begins to rebel. 

The book and music are written by local writer Laura Simpson and musician Lydia Jane Pugh. Blending modern lyricism and raw emotion with period-accurate detail, the musical shines as an exciting exploration of Guernsey’s unique history. In the musical’s first moments, the string section’s discordant tuning transforms into the sound of an air raid siren. The oppressive atmosphere of the bombing of the Guernsey harbour in 1940 smoothly shifts into the opening number ‘Days of June’, setting a precedent for the rest of the play. Lydia spoke about her aim to embed the events and style of the period within the music itself: ‘the song ‘Spin That Dial’ is very much based on the Andrews Sisters, because we wanted that 1940s sound’. All six actors offer outstanding performances, imbuing Laura’s fictional characters with believable and gritty emotion – a believability necessary to match the detailed, period-accurate set. Many set elements were sourced from the Guernsey Rifle and Heritage Society, with genuine WWII identity cards, ration books, kitchen equipment and other elements utilised onstage. Props and costumes were recreated from original occupation artefacts. The generosity of locals speaks to the importance of art like Radio Silence. As Laura tells me, ‘we’re now at a stage where it’s coming out of living memory for the vast majority, and although it’s something that is an extremely traumatic period of our history, I think that because there’s that bit more space now, we can tell a more balanced, more human story’. 

Fundamentally, the musical brings a story to life in a way that actually honours our local community. As Laura tells me, ‘we’ve seen other media interpretations of what Guernsey was like during the war, and they’re all often very inaccurate. And it was just that kind of feeling: why are other people telling our stories when we’ve got fantastic creatives. Our island produces a phenomenal range of really hardworking creatives. Why are we not telling these stories?’. Accordingly, there is a notable effort amongst the team to celebrate the island’s history. ‘I did manage to get a little bit of Sarnia Cherie [our unofficial “national” anthem] into one of the songs, which was so subtle that the violinist didn’t even notice’. An effort to celebrate island identity is reflected in the team’s detailed research, especially concerning accurate names and locations. Laura tells me: ‘that’s the thing that often, other representations have just got so wrong. I took it to the extreme because I’m a nerd, but you know, if I wanted to write a story set in Gibraltar, how would I find out what the local names were? I’d spend half an hour researching it.’

These references are not intended to ostracise non-islanders, but to celebrate Guernsey’s own community. When asking Lydia about the importance of a narrative faithful to our identity and history, she told me: ‘with a lot of those kind of subtleties throughout, in the lyric and the script as well, we wanted this to be accessible to any audience. But there will be audience members who are really listening, that will clock all those easter eggs. And that level of detail that we kind of layered on over time was really important to making it feel authentic’. That authenticity clearly resonated with the audience when I watched the sold-out second night: as a recording of Sarnia Cherie was played towards the end of the musical, older members began singing along amongst the crowd. The team were amazed by local support: ‘The response has just been obviously overwhelming’. ‘I mean I guess the thing that we are continually being asked is ‘when can we see it again?’. Evidently new art such as Radio Silence plays a key role in uniting local communities.

Looking forwards, Pugh and Simpson are hopeful about the future of the show. Laura comments that ‘I don’t feel like we’re done telling this story. Locally, we know that this is an audience for anything ‘occupation’. But when people who aren’t even necessarily die hard theatre fans are telling you it was extraordinary, you’ve got to take this further’. The team believe that Radio Silence’s characters and story are universal. ‘I mean, I keep going back to the quote from the line in the first song. “We should have seen it coming / We should have seen the signs / but our heads were planted deeply in the ever shifting sands.” I don’t think that line will ever not be relevant’. However, the team are unable to share the story of the Tabel family with new audiences without support. ‘In terms of taking this further, and as with all arts projects, it ultimately comes down to investment, and whether there are individuals, companies, organisations that want to get behind this project and help to take that piece of our history to a wider audience. Because ultimately, theatre is not a cheap sport. But we are both very passionate about it, and we do an awful lot just because we love it. You know, we cannot be asking people to work for free because that is not appropriate. It’s show business, and the emphasis on business is getting more and more significant’. To continue to share stories which connect with audiences on an emotional level, the team needs financial support – an ever-prevalent barrier to entry for emerging artists.

You can find updates about the future of Radio Silence on Instagram: @radiosilencethemusical

Featured Image: Radio Silence. Pictured (left to right), Michael Sullivan-Pugh, Lottie Ewin, Eve Le Sauvage, and Laura Simpson.