I had the pleasure of working with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in the mid-1970s on two fumetti-style features in Punk magazine—“The Legend of Nick Detroit” in 1976, and “Mutant Monster Beach Party” in 1978. They were two full-length photo-cartoon issues of the magazine, written by me and starring Harry. She was one of the funniest and most professional stars I ever worked with. Stein, Harry’s songwriting partner and Blondie bandmate (as well as her boyfriend for 15 years or so), contributed his fantastic photos to the projects.

Harry and Stein were always open to wacky and original ideas, so I can only imagine the fun they had when they met H.R. Giger, the cult artist who created the mechanical lizard-monster in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. The release of H.R. Giger: Debbie Harry Metamorphosis: Creating the Visual Concept for KooKoo, Stein’s recently published coffee table tome that chronicles Harry’s collaboration with the late Swiss artist, reveals the world that the trio created around the singer’s 1981 solo album, KooKoo.

But it was Giger’s Alien monster that first captured the cultural imagination. I mean, what kind of mind could dream up huge, abandoned spaceships equipped with pulsating alien eggs, and creatures that pop out and wrap their tentacles around your neck, feeding off you, before exploding out of your chest? “That movie was a cultural phenomenon,” Stein tells me. “Alien was just what it fucking was, and everybody was crazy about it.”

“I knew about Giger from the ’60s,” recalls Stein. “Some of his artwork was in head shops then, and it was so cool and weird.” Giger’s was a burgeoning name in late ’60s counterculture, but he exploded onto the music scene when Keith Emerson—of the English progressive-rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer—dropped by Giger’s Zurich, Switzerland, home in the early ’70s.

“I remember it was a fairly modest bungalow from the outside, until you went in,” Emerson told Prog magazine in 2020. “The interior décor was overpowering, gothic to the extreme. From floor to ceiling his unique airbrush technique had transformed a simple room into a cathedral. Giger had gone three-dimensional—his toilet had arms coming out [of it], almost engulfing the sitter.”

Emerson was so impressed with Giger that he hired the artist to design the album cover for ELP’s 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery, an eerie extravaganza featuring a sarcophagus-like skull that morphs into a sexy woman’s mouth. “I was familiar with the album cover Giger designed for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, and another record cover he did for a heavy metal band,” Debbie Harry tells me. “Chris and I were both fans of monster movies, especially science fiction monsters. They’ve always been part of the Blondie catalog, not only in our music but in our personal lives.”

The punk scene that revolved around CBGB, the Bowery bar from which Blondie emerged in the ’70s, was home to a ragtag amalgamation of musicians influenced by ’60s garage rock, like the Electric Prunes and the Strangeloves, as well as comic books, TV reruns, and, of course, monster movies. Harry and Stein, along with the rest of their cohort, were diehard Giger fans.

“Shortly after Giger received his Oscar for Alien,” continues Harry, “Chris and I read that he was going to show his paintings and sculptures from the movie at the Hansen gallery at 41 East 57th Street, which was right around the corner from our apartment. So we decided to go. At the time, Giger wasn’t as well-known, so it was no big deal to anybody but us. Nowadays, it would’ve been heralded as one of the most important art shows of the decade, with lines around the block!”

By 1980, Blondie was one of the biggest acts in the business, having found multi-platinum success with their album Parallel Lines. It also didn’t hurt that the Giorgio Moroder-scored soundtrack for the 1980 film American Gigolo featured Blondie’s “Call Me” as its theme song. The song topped the charts for six consecutive weeks—the band’s biggest single and their second number-one hit in the United States.

Despite their own celebrity, the pair were starstruck at the chance to meet Giger. “I saw him as sort of grandfatherly, even though he was a ladies’ man,” recalls Harry. “It was hard to reconcile this sweet, charming man with the guy who created one of the most terrifying monsters of the 20th century.” Stein remembers it this way: “[Giger] was there [at the gallery] with his Oscar. He and his wife [Mia] knew who we were because by that time we were the number-one band in the world.

“So we invited them back to our apartment on 57th Street,” continues Harry. “We talked and had drinks and became friends.” Imagine Harry and Stein chatting for hours with Giger about things that slither in the unseen galactic night. It’s no wonder that a creative partnership was born. “It was Chris’s idea to get him to do the cover for my first solo album, KooKoo,” says Harry. Giger agreed and invited the pair to spend two weeks at his home in Zurich for the project.

When Harry and Stein holed up in the artist’s Swiss bungalow, the rumors they’d heard about him proved true. “I watched him work on a couple of his books—he would send the pictures back many times for color corrections if a shot was a little too brown, or a little too blue. He was a perfectionist and his own biggest critic,” recalls Stein. “He also had a fucking life-size Alien [in the studio]. He told us that he would come down to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and it would scare the shit out of him. He considered that a great success, to make something that he was actually afraid of!” For Harry, it was business as usual. “I think we went right to work the next day,” she writes in Stein’s book, “learning to live with the monster in the corner.”

The result of their collaboration was an album cover with an intergalactic-meets-ancient-Egyptian feel to it. Harry’s signature blonde hair was dyed black, and four needles pierced her face. KooKoo attained only moderate commercial success, reaching number 25 on the U.S. Billboard 200, and was not the breakout hit that its producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic hoped it would be. Still, it was a gas for Harry and Stein to dive deep into the world of one of their creative idols.

I asked Harry if it was difficult to make the transition from blonde bombshell to black-haired Wicked Witch of the West during her KooKoo era. “Debbie let the blonde thing go for a while when we were working on her solo stuff,” interjects Stein, “and it made the front page of the New York fucking Post. There was a picture of Debbie with dark hair, and the headline was, ‘Oh My God, What Did She Do to Her Head?’” Harry, for her part, agrees. “Oh Legs,” she sighs. “You know how the record companies are, and how the media wants you to stay exactly the same. They just wanted to hold onto the blonde thing.”

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For a trend that is about being hushed, there has been a lot of noise surrounding quiet luxury. 

You’ve heard about it driving the wardrobe choices on Succession, characterizing the looks of designers like the Row and Phoebe Philo, and even as the aesthetic driver of Sofia Richie’s viral summer wedding. At its core, quiet luxury—also known as “stealth wealth”—is a movement that emphasizes investment in high-quality materials, comfort, and craftsmanship over flash, bling, and logos. 

The phenomenon isn’t just isolated to fashion. Quiet luxury (which is less austere than minimalism but more polished than, say, normcore) has trickled into all aspects of culture, including cuisine, travel, interior design, and, now, art. The principles of quiet luxury—restraint, sustainability, rarity, and the kind of subtlety that suggests intimate knowledge of a subject—translate across the entire zeitgeist. 

“Showing off has become contrary to the cultural conversation,” says Noa Santos, founder of NAINOA, an international architecture and interior design firm based in New York and Los Angeles. 

Collectors used to project wealth and power by snapping up immediately recognizable work by brand-name artists (think: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool). In the quiet luxury paradigm, they are more interested in projecting sophistication and confidence in their own tastes by acquiring work by emerging and mid-career artists. 

The appeal is less about what the art says to others than how you feel looking at it. Take, for example, the work of American sculptor Roni Horn, the subject of a current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich. The artist’s solid cast glass volumes invite literal and figurative reflection, and her drawings suggest the kind of daily meditation practice often championed by high achievers. Then there is Scottish artist Callum Innes, who creates his ethereal paintings, recently on view at Frith Street Gallery in London, by building up layers of paint onto the canvas and then washing them off with turpentine. Or Canadian, New York-based artist Anna Weyant, whose soft, muted paintings filter Dutch Golden Age portraits and still lifes through a contemporary feminist lens.

“There is a sense of taste level that is about being the first or being early, and if you’re collecting a [Mark] Rothko, you’re buying something the world has already determined is important,” explains Santos. “People really love the act of discovery.” 

Consider the art chosen to adorn the sets of Billions and Succession. The offices of Axe Capital, the hedge fund founded by the ostentatious hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod on Billions, was jam-packed with work by blue-chip artists, including Wool and Basquiat. “People who want to project a certain image will always look out for something that screams who they are—or who they want others to think they are,” explains Fanny Pereire, a film and television fine arts consultant who worked on both Billions and Succession.

This is in direct opposition to the sterile white walls of Waystar Royco’s offices and even the art that bedecked the Roy’s cavernous Manhattan apartments in Succession, which include, in just the last and final season alone, a Golden Age Dutch landscape and works by Honoré Daumier—pieces not necessarily identifiable to anyone but those with a trained eye. 

Artwork that embodies the quiet luxury concept doesn’t need to be beige, boring, or bereft of pattern. “Unlike fashion, art can still ‘whisper’ even if the aesthetic of the work is bold, colorful, or ‘loud,’” says Laurence Milstein, cofounder of PRZM, a next-gen marketing consultancy. “Rather than following a specific trend, appreciating art often requires a more contextual understanding of both the artist and how the piece of work fits into their larger oeuvre and culture.”

Artists whose work references nature, meditation, and sustainability lend themselves particularly well to this cultural moment. The London-based, Bangladesh-born artist Rana Begum uses repetitive geometric forms that recall her childhood daily recitations of the Qur’an and creates ethereal cloud installations out of mesh that transform the light in a space.

The American artist Sarah Sze, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, creates intricate, thought-provoking pieces with a combination of organic and man-made recycled materials. Painter Andrea Marie Breiling, whose solo show is on view at Almine Rech in Brussels this summer, creates spray-painted canvases inspired by Swallowtail butterflies. 

In art, as in interior design and fashion, “people in general are caring a little less about their purchase as a statement, and less what other people think,” says Santos. Of course, now that subtlety is increasingly luxurious, it won’t be long before work by these artists become status symbols in and of themselves, if they haven’t already. And isn’t that the true meaning behind quiet luxury? It’s about not showing off… conspicuously.

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“SOS,” a recent single by the Seoul-based band Balming Tiger, is an erratic heartbeat of a song. It opens with an electric riff, softens into bass-heavy grooves, then quickens, the vocals oscillating between whispery declarations of love, husky rap verses, and moans of despair. It’s dizzying—and dizzyingly catchy.

In the accompanying video, five of the group’s 11-plus members wander through Hong Kong in a light-streaked dream reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. No two Balming Tiger songs are alike, and the combined effect renders their catalog startlingly distinct. “SOS” is palpably Balming Tiger: floating between languages, with each member given their chance to shine.

Already beloved names in Seoul’s art and independent music communities, the members of Balming Tiger—among them filmmakers, visual artists, writers, singers, and producers—cohered in 2018, finding cross-disciplinary synergy through music. The group recalls the moment they came together: “It was natural. It had to happen,” they tell me over email. “Making fun music while giggling, not worrying about what others think—that’s what Balming Tiger means to us.”

They’re a multilingual hip hop group, to be sure, but playful enough that their sound feels limitless. Between their individual and collective projects, the group’s members are wildly prolific, with each project united by a sense of ecstatic experimentation.

The same year they became a group, Balming Tiger established a technicolor cosmos of visual art, short films, and a broad discography: the Balming Tiger universe. Several singles feature a corresponding cartoon—in the comic for “Kolo Kolo,” two anthropomorphic felines neutralize a demonic clown with a bowl of malatang—and most album covers double as standalone artworks. “In some cases, the music actually begins with visuals. It’s never just about supplementing the music,” they say.

In 2021, the collective debuted “The G.O.A.T.,” a YouTube series of cartoon shorts highlighting the work of Asian artists, including filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, sculptor Lee Bul, novelist Qiu Miaojin, and architect Wang Shu. “We wanted to feature great artists across genres—although not well-known worldwide,” they say. (The group’s diasporic sensibility is reflected in its name, which is a play on Tiger Balm, the popular analgesic ointment originally developed in Burma.) Despite the buzz that surrounds them, Balming Tiger has yet to release a full-length studio album. Their first, a culmination of the EPs, films, and comics that they’ve created over the past six years, will be released later this year.

The members of Balming Tiger describe themselves as “an alternative K-pop group,” and the term is certainly fitting. Most listeners understand the world of K-pop as a subsection of pop music, with performers regarded as idols and a manufactured audio production process. But this definition belies the complex artistry of said icons, and the genre’s multidisciplinary depth.

K-pop, in reality, is a cinematic universe that encompasses creative design, film, and a wealth of musical styles. “Our work is a mix of many genres—but it’s always K-pop, even if it’s unfamiliar,” says Balming Tiger. The group has always released their music independently, but they were catapulted into a new echelon, sharing a spotlight with the biggest band in the world, after the release of “SEXY NUKIM,” their 2022 single featuring BTS’s Kim Nam-joon, aka RM. (The K-pop idol and art collector is also a longtime Balming Tiger fan.)

In interviews, the group laughs often. At their shows, crowds inevitably form mosh pits. They poke fun at themselves and each other with the sweet humor and buzzy joy that comes from finding your people. “We are very lucky to be at the center of the culture while Korean content is becoming a global cultural phenomenon,” says Balming Tiger.

“At the same time, this is something that we, as a country, already have. We’ve consistently presented stories that we’re good at—the most Korean, the most personal. The same is true of Balming Tiger. Rather than assessing what the global trend is, we try to express something personal and essential.”

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