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In her new single, Cortisa Star raps, “Face card don’t decline/ I ain’t playing, even Prada want me.” The track, “PARIS,” comes from a true experience. Just this past week, fresh off an interview with PAPER, the 19-year-old viral sensation made her runway debut when she walked Miu Miu at Paris Fashion Week.

“It was crazy,” Star says. “This was my first time out of the country.” Since first breaking through with “FUN,” the Delaware-bred rapper has built a career off making people stop, stare and wonder, Who is this? Star’s signature mix of high-energy flexes, unpredictable production and unserious one-liners has made her an instant favorite online, racking up millions of streams and catching the attention of Charli xcx. Just last month, she doubled down with “Misidentify,” an umru-produced sonic sledgehammer that took aim at online haters, making it clear that no amount of viral fame — or criticism — was about to slow her down.

And now, just like that, she’s on a runway in Paris. Miu Miu feels like an unexpectedly perfect fit for Star. On stage, she’s rowdy, brash and unpredictable. But offstage, she’s reflective, even thoughtful — something that came through in how she prepared for her runway debut. “I journaled,” she says. “I just wrote about how excited I was, what I might get to wear, how they would do my makeup.”

Still, it was a surreal experience to find herself in the middle of it all. “Everyone was so nice and kind,” she says of the cast, which included Sarah Paulson, Gigi Hadid, and other major industry figures. For Star, this moment is just another sign of what’s to come. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says. “Actually, I’m going everywhere.”

PAPER caught up with Cortisa to talk all things Paris Fashion Week and making her runway debut.

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This was your first time walking in a fashion show — how did it all come about?

I went to the casting with Ashley Brokaw, and then I got confirmed for the show. After that, it was just a waiting game. I was so nervous until it actually happened, but once I was there, it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as I thought. It was way more exciting than scary.

Was this your first time walking a major show?

This was my first time walking any show, period. This was my first time out of the country. It was crazy.

You were walking alongside big names like Sarah Paulson — what was it like being in that world for the first time?

It was insane, but everyone was so nice and kind. That made it feel less intimidating.

Did you do anything special to prepare for the show?

I journaled. My grandma gave me a little journal, and I wrote about how excited I was for the show, what I was looking forward to wearing, and how they would do my makeup. I had these big lashes on my face.

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Was there a look from the show that stood out to you besides your own?

Yes! There was this model Ivy wearing this silk top and skirt, and it was the cutest outfit I’ve ever seen in my life.

How would you define your personal style, and do you see any crossover with Miu Miu?

My style is pretty youthful, and I like to express different moments or moods through my outfits. Miu Miu feels personal in that way too — like, there’s a real attitude behind the clothes.

Who are your biggest style inspirations?

Honestly, my friends. The people I surround myself with inspire me the most.

What do you hope people take away from seeing you on the Miu Miu runway?

That I’m not going anywhere, I’m actually going everywhere.

Photos via Getty

On Michelle Zauner’s advice, I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain on the six-hour flight from New York to LA. During our Zoom interview, we discussed the book’s cult appeal and why Japanese Breakfast took a hiatus after the massive success of Jubilee and her hit memoir Crying in H Mart. The two projects balanced one another out: a boisterous yellow-tinged album, and a personal tale of food and grief. The singer-songwriter’s third record, For Melancholy Brunettes & sad women, is a sobering follow-up to her 2021 output.

By the time I reached LA, I had fully sunk deep into the labyrinthian world of Mann’s magnum opus. It’s also — for better or worse — a novel about depression and seeing the beauty of the world in short flashes rather than as the status quo. Walking around Silverlake, I found the bright cheery light oppressive rather than hopeful, not unlike Japanese Breakfast’s new song, “Winter in LA.” I tell Zauner it’s my favorite song on her new record.

“I really love that song. Songs that I like are not always popular with other people, so I’m glad you like it,” Zauner says. “It was the last song I wrote for the album. I was recording the record in LA in December and watching people eat Thanksgiving dinner outside, which was so surreal. I have a really bad relationship with the city. I get severely depressed.”

The album process sprawled across 2023, just as Jubilee was starting to wind down and right before Zauner ended up going to South Korea to spend a year taking Korean lessons. The Philly-based superstar hates having off-time. “I was reflecting on that song… I came up with that line: ‘‘I wish you had a happier woman/ One that could leave the house,’ because my husband was constantly telling me to take a walk while I was working on the record. I feel this need to suffer in order to feel enjoyment.”

Balance isn’t easy for Zauner. After the skyrocketing success of her memoir, she decided she needed to try and figure out how to manage her personal life. Intense stage fright dogged her years touring her 2021 record even while singing boisterous songs about glee and seizing the moment. “I felt bad for my husband because he never gets a happier version of me. I just want to stay at home all the time. I feel bad because all of these artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan have all these deeply fruitful years in LA, and it’s really unfair of me to be a miserable poet.” She laughs. Moments like these made her realize she had other things to tend to.

In response to the “bright palette” of Jubilee, Zauner skewed towards telling a different story. “I just wanted to do the opposite of that. With Jubilee I got to be this high-femme representation of myself and I was longing to dress more androgynously in darker clothing. I wanted to give the new record a darker sonic palette. I really missed playing guitar. I felt quite uncomfortable in that role of constantly being a singer all of a sudden, which was never something I was interested in or really identified as.” For Melancholy Brunettes & sad women is a more “insular and story-based record.” Many of the narrators are men. Zauner sings about mega circuits, ATVs and cars just as much as lost love. “It’s sort of a celebration of boyhood and wondering what makes this kind of innocent activity turn towards violence.”

Zauner’s seen the speculation that Melancholy Brunettes is her incel album based on the single “Mega Circuit,” but she points out it’s deeper than that. In many ways, the record’s exploration of boyhood and androgyny is about trying to understand a phenomenon rather than diagnose it. “From a young age I’ve always written from the perspective of boys. On Jubilee it was quite wholesome, it was a young boy who lives in Kokomo, Indiana saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart. I wrote ‘Lindsey’ with Big Little League as a way to understand this possessive man who wants to buy the affection of the woman he’s seeing. I wanted to embody that person to shine a light on that perspective.”

In 2023, she started reading the incel canon — including Infinite Jest — trying to understand the aesthetics of something she felt to be dangerous. “I was thinking a lot about this generation of young men responding to the way the world is changing and this lack of positive representation for masculinity. We’ve clearly politically isolated this group of people who are desiring comfort to be accepted. How do we figure a way out? I mean clearly the votes show there are lots of young men and young men who feel this way and are not talking about it.” How do we not push them away? “The album’s not a moral tale, but an observation about this type of person — where those feelings are coming from.”

Zauner points out that, even in incel literature, there’s complexity, sharing that both Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis are openly gay men. Of course, their politics are hardly pro-queer liberation. “I love these books and I think this was my way of trying to understand what these groups are connecting to.” Literary references abound across the new record. John Cheever, both Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Sally Potter’s film adaptation, and of course, The Magic Mountain. “It’s my husband’s favorite book,” she says. “I’d been meaning to read it for a long time. We went to Switzerland and I decided to take it up. I loved it so much.”

The final song on the new record is a musical adaptation of the door stopper of a book. “Hans Castorp is maybe one of my favorite literary characters of all time. He’s very, very impressionable, very foolish, very fanciful. He only smokes Maria Mancini cigars and he takes his breakfast on the balcony with his camel hair blanket. He’s such a fancy little boy. I love him. Thomas Mann writes about him in a tone that’s so cynical and cruel but also loving. I think I wrote my impression of it on the song ‘Magic Mountain.’ That’s where ‘Orlando in Love’ was born from too, this character in my mind. Orlando became this avatar on the record of this foolish, whimsical man who lives at sea and answers the siren’s call to be killed.”

This baroque tone carries out in the “Orlando in Love” music video, also heavily inspired by Sally Potter’s take on Woolf’s fanciful novel. Gothic fiction, Greek myth,and epic poems like Orlando Furioso inspired a “creepier” album, Zauner says. “Leda” is a take on the cruelty of the gods; her Jeff Bridges duet “Men in Bars” tells another tale of fatal love. Gone are the elaborate arrangements of Jubilee, replaced by plucked guitars and breathy vocals produced by Blake Mills. (The California-based producer is known for his folksy, jangly work with Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius and Feist.) The stories are front and center, accentuated by minimal strings and percussion.

After recording the album, Zauner moved to South Korea and focused on mastering the language. “It’s everyone’s fantasy to go back to school, and redo and experiment.” The pressures of touring and making money faded away as she was able to spend time doing just one thing as opposed to having other people’s livelihoods in her hands. She exchanged mix notes over the internet throughout 2024 while exploring Seoul. I ask if she had any favorite food discoveries. “I ate a lot of my favorite things, for some reason, which Korean people probably found weird. It’s like a rice cake called garaetteok. It’s like a thick cylinder,” Zauner tells me. “If you’ve ever had tteokbokki, it’s a big fat version of that rice cake. I would just put it in my air fryer and grill it so it would be really crispy and brown on the outside and a really interesting gooey texture on the inside. Then I would dip it into sesame oil and salt, and I ate that probably three times a week. It’s just a weird texture and really simple. And I ate that for breakfast all the time. I have a very vivid memory of that.”

Now that Zauner’s year away is over, she’s back to touring and playing shows. I ask her what it was like to play on Jimmy Fallon again. “It was really special actually. When we did Fallon the first time, it had to be something we recorded ourselves so we didn’t actually get to go into the studio. A lot of the stage fright I had during the Jubilee cycle stemmed from playing on television which is so, so scary. I had so much anxiety during that time, I was worried that when I returned to music again that fear would carry with me. It was such a relief to play Fallon again and let that go,” Zauner says. “I had normal nerves but I felt like, I’ve done this before. I feel very comfortable this year. We’re not doing that again. We’re not letting our mind self-sabotage. It was really healing to be honest to play Fallon and not have to starve myself for three days because I’m afraid I’m gonna have a stomach ache or something.”

Instead, playing “Orlando in Love” live was like a homecoming. She smiles with her eyes closed in a silky white bonnet as she starts singing the opening lines.

“Maybe that was an ugly way to tell that story,” she jokes. “No,” I say. “Not at all.”

Photography: Pak Bae

Few would probably think The Age of Surveillance Capitalism could work as the basis of a techno record. Those people don’t know Marie Davidson.

The Québécois musician’s latest album, City of Clowns, is a dance floor-ready exposé of our big tech reality inspired by scholar Shoshanna Zuboff’s epic unpacking of how social platforms commodify our data and digital labor. Utilizing her signature deadpan approach to social critique (made most famous by her class-conscious hit, “Work It”), Davidson skewers digital culture and provides some needed laughs at this time of grim uncertainty.

While the album’s themes are serious, Davidson has an uncanny ability to package them as uproarious satire. On “Fun Times” she winks at time-sucking social media platforms (“Tic, tac, tic, tac/ Time is never coming back”) and on “Sexy Clown,” she takes on the twisted sweetness of lifestyle influencers, whispering “If I really have to choose/ I’d rather be me than be you/ Can you feel the cutting edge/ Of my dying tenderness?” Oftentimes, she lets the music do the talking like on “Contrarian,” a nearly lyric-less acid-soaked slice of hard techno that evokes the chaos of living within the contradictions.

Humor or the titular “clownery” here is not just some sugar to make Davidson’s bitter critique go down. She thinks of the figure of “the clown” as akin to “a joker in a deck of cards, [which] has special abilities [that] can [help the player] step up from the losing position to the winning position,” Davidson shares. This form of “disruptive” clown is able to shift society’s game through critique and questioning — the kind of act the tech platforms discourage. “[The big tech platforms] want you to become a salesperson,” Davidson tells PAPER. “Everything you do should be optimized and properly lit and should be optimized for attention spans, which is very reductive. It’s damaging our capacities to come up with our own ideas.”

And where better to question our daily, tedious reality than on the dance floor? In the sweaty, dark space of a club, the outside world and its ridiculous rituals can fade away. There, the dancer is able to see the outside world anew. Too often, though, dance music’s promise of escapism can morph into something akin to pure retreat (“There is much pain in this world, but not in this room,” as the infamous clip goes). There’s value in that, but also a danger; when does escape merge into hidden defeatism? Davidson’s critically-minded techno — overtly political, but never didactic — in an invitation to bring that pain inside the club’s misty interior, and to alchemize it into action.

PAPER chatted with Davidson, on the heels of her new album’s release, about her relationship to technology, “good clowns,” and being a Canadian artist in the Trump era.

Hi! It’s so great to talk to you. Has anything surprised you about how the record has been received, and how people are taking these ideas of yours?

Well, I’m happily surprised by how much of its political aspect has resonated with people. It was my aspiration, but I thought that maybe people wouldn’t pick up on it. You never know, especially in electronic music. When you write songs some people will pay attention to the lyrics. Some people won’t. And that’s okay. In the end, it’s music. People are allowed to interact with it as they wish, but to know that the themes resonate with a lot of people is really nice.

What was your relationship to technology and social media before you embarked on this artistic journey?

It was always complicated. I’m not the most tech savvy person in general. I got a laptop really late, in 2016, and I was also late to social media. It took me a while to really engage.

The platform I started engaging with the most was, and still is, Instagram. At first I liked it. I got on Instagram in late 2016, when I started touring a lot, and it was still the older algorithm. It was very much based around image. It was pictures of sunsets or what people ate today, which was random, but a bit more spontaneous. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, I think people, and especially artists, began to really rely on these platforms and I saw the drastic change in the way the platform functioned.

I don’t know what your Instagram looks like, but mine has already changed so much since the beginning of the year. My Instagram is now a reality TV show. I have to actively look up people I’m interested in like my friends or colleagues. The algorithm only feeds me shit that it thinks I want, so for me it’s makeup and stuff around the Grammys or the Oscars. I don’t even watch these shows, but because I’m an artist and a woman of a certain age, it shows me that.

I’ve experienced this shift from the algorithm being based on who you follow to recommendations. It’s been really disorientating.

There’s no way out. It’s the way it’s programmed. So you have to fight with the algorithm, but it’s supposed to be curated to your taste, which is a mind fuck. But then everyone’s feeds are the same. People change the way they present themselves. Meta thinks I’m like a business, and they keep sending me these notes, “You’re doing well, but you could do better if you follow these guidelines.” I don’t want to, but sometimes I check what they say, and it’s very infantilizing. They want you to become a salesperson. Everything you do should be optimized and properly lit, and should optimized for attention spans, which is very reductive. It’s damaging our capacities to come up with our own ideas.

I know that The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff was a guiding text for you on this album. What about that book sparked these ideas for you?

Pre-pandemic, I was feeling uneasy [about technology], but I was clueless. I was looking at some of my colleagues online and I was like, “People seem to be getting along well [with these platforms]. Maybe I’m extra sensitive. Maybe it’s me. I’m a bit old school.” But then I started talking with colleagues and friends, and everyone’s like. “No, no, I’m depressed. I’m anxious. We all feel meaningless. This platform makes you feel meaningless.”

In 2022, I randomly picked up Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, not really knowing what it was about, but the title intrigued me. I thought I’d read a part of it. It’s a very thick book. And then I was like, Oh, no, this is exactly what I need to be reading. It put words and provided the science behind these very uneasy feelings I was having regarding social media. The book gave me the will and the inspiration to make a new album, and then it really informed all the songs and the words I decided to use in them. Most of the songs were, in one way or another, influenced by the book.

Music is a really hard medium to talk about ideas, because it’s often more interpretive. How did you begin to approach expressing these big political ideas musically?

The first draft of the album was similar, but a bit too serious. I realized I had to integrate more humor to get my message through. We live in such a dark and stressful era. It’s hard for people to grasp that if you just present your work so heavily. Some people do it well, but that is not the path I wanted to go down. I wanted to do something informative and I wanted to question the status quo and cultivate critical thinking. But I wanted the record to be fun and pleasant to listen to. I didn’t want it to be a bad trip.

I mean it’s called the City of Clowns, so humor is very much here.

“Sexy Clown” was not on the first draft. There was another song that was more heavy and serious, and I swapped it off. And then I was like, “Okay, great [let’s call it] City of Clowns, because we live in a world of clowns. And it’s with this extra touch of humor that it all came together.

Who are the clowns in this world?

I like to say, there are many clowns. There’s the bad clowns and the disruptive clowns. The bad clowns are, of course, all the rotten politicians and their friends. We have a lot of them right now. And it’s all the people who own the power and want to keep the knowledge for themselves: so all the tech bros. To me those are the bad clowns, and then there’s other clowns that I wouldn’t say are good, because I don’t want to be binary, but their archetype is like the movie Joker, a misfit who cannot find their place in society and out of despair flips the table and and makes a mess. I’m not saying I want to encourage violence, but we live in a violent society. Violence is coming from every angle, so it pushes people to be violent. I understand this position of feeling like a leftover in society, a misfit, someone who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t check a box. A joker in a deck of cards has special abilities and can step up from the losing position to the winning position. So my interpretation of [this kind of] clown is someone who questions the status quo.

Something else I found really funny in the record is how you position the relationship between humans and technology as almost this sexual, domme-sub-dynamic. How did that come about for you?

I believe in technology, right? I use it. And I also believe in science and progress. But I hate all this numbness that comes with a lot of our digital interactions. In the song “Push Me Fuckhead,” I made a collection of all my deceitful experiences with digitized services. The ultimate one is the one where you have to identify yourself and prove that you’re not a robot to a robot, which is completely absurd. I recently failed that [CAPTCHA] test for the first time because the image was so blurry and I was like, “This is Push Me Fuckhead.” My life is my music. All these automated digital services are failing us in so many ways.

I realize you’re the first Canadian artist I’ve talked to since the election, and this crazy, random beef between America and Canada. I’m curious as a Canadian who tours a lot in America, and has an American audience, what your experience has been like touring this album so far, and how you’re thinking about sharing these ideas in America?

It feels good. These ideas speak to my audience and they feel included. For instance, a song like “Work It” has this famous breakdown when I say “When I say work I mean you’ve got to work for yourself/ Love yourself, feed yourself, so you can be a winner.”

My live version of it is longer and I always take time to talk to people, considering who they are and where we are in the world. I’ve noticed that when I do it in the States, it speaks to people. My audience is very diverse and they feel included and seen. I was just opening for Justice, which was interesting because I was playing for a more mainstream audience. But the message came through. It felt right on another level. It was more alien for them, but some people were really reactive. A lot of people feel like the system is failing them. They just want to be seen. And that’s what I try to do with my music: connect.

Photography: Aytekin Yalcin
Creative direction: Gabriele Papi
Hair Stylist: Pier Paolo Lai
MUA: Simone Piacenti

Rio Romeo‘s new track “JOHNNYSCOTT” was “inspired by a local creepy groomer guy, and how he finally got what was coming to him.” In the song, the protagonist seeks vengeance and Johnny comes to an untimely end.

The LA-based artist dabbles in cabaret and punk on the song, melding them together for an alternative indie-pop anthem. It’s a vibe fans have been resonating with, selling out Romeo’s shows and pushing their TikTok vids to virality. “The song is silly and fun while being about something real and true,” they tell PAPER. “I was hoping to capture the cheekiness behind the duality.”

– YouTube

In the music video, Romeo rides a bike around their hometown, in the same spots they used to smoke cigarettes and waste time in. “This music video was an extremely fun and new sort of feat for me,” they say. “Since my skateboarding accident in 2020 that landed me with a brain injury and chronic hip problems, there are not many opportunities that I’ve had to be able to express myself in a robust physical manner.”

Romeo continues, “These days I have the privilege of some better mobility, and took full advantage of it during the filming of this music video. Riding my bike around with my friend Meadow to all of our favorite spots around Pomona and Claremont, California — where I grew up and still live — was such a joy and a pleasure. The feeling of relaxed joy and pleasure shown in the video is very real. We were having a great time.”

With sold-out stops coming up in Chicago, LA and NYC, and “more music to come,” Romeo is enjoying the growing connection with their fans and hopes everyone feels “heard, validated and happy” when they hear this new music live.

Photography: Meadow Cloud

Last weekend, Moncler Grenoble held its Fall 2025 runway at the snow-covered Courchevel Altiport in the French Alps. The 140-look collection, which combined technical winter apparel with high fashion, drew inspiration from a self-expression in a city-to-mountain lifestyle.

Among the VIP friends of the brand in attendance was TINI, the Argentinian multi-platinum musician and actress. From Disney Channel America star to Argentina it-girl as the most streamed female artist on Spotify from the country, TINI is one to watch. Last year, she performed with Coldplay in their three-stop run at Saturday Night Live, Rockefeller Plaza and a sold-out stadium in Dublin. She recently released her latest single “El Cielo” and made front-row debuts this season at Paris Fashion Week at Balmain and Ludovic de Saint Sernin.

Below, TINI documented her experience on the slopes at the Moncler Grenoble Fall 2025 show in an exclusive photo diary.

First time at the Moncler Fall 2025 show here in Courchevel. Can’t wait.

The fit is with the glasses.

Official invite — feeling so excited.

Selfie with the genius behind the magic, Zacarias, as we add the final touches to my hair.

The behind-the-scenes secrets that make the hair look on point. We create it strand by strand to keep it natural and add that extra bounce.

A little commotion for the back, hair ready.

Quick hair check.

A little mini photoshoot session before heading to the show.

Serving looks on the way to the venue.

Mission Moncler Fall 2025 ready.

Arriving at the show.

So happy to be here, snowstorm and all.

I’ve always loved the snow, and it shows.

These fur boots are everything.

A quick outfit change and a selfie before the after party.

Photos courtesy of TINI