Erin Wasson
On what makes a woman beautiful:
“I think that it’s our approach to how we connect with our spirit and our soul and how we intellectualise the magnitude of what beauty is. How many experiences we can form into this incredible dynamic story of who a woman is and the places that she’s walked down and the way that she treats people and the way that she is a friend and the way that she is a sister and the way that she is a daughter. All of those things amalgamate into a woman being simply undeniably beautiful. It’s a depth. It’s cerebral, really.”
On her SPF of choice:
“I like Chanel’s SPF in particular, it has this reflectiveness in it. I don’t want to call it phosphorescence-y but … It’s a way to put an SPF on and feel like you’ve got a little bit of coverage. It diffuses light really well. It’s really nice on the skin.”
On defining beauty;
“I think that beauty is actually very esoteric at the end of the day because you can’t really put your finger on it. It’s just something that exudes inside of someone and, often times I think that why a woman is beautiful is quite mysterious because it’s something that’s not maybe as obvious as we want to believe beauty to be, especially in the media.”
On facials:
“I’ve discovered this amazing line called Tammy Fender who’s a holistic facialist down in Palm Beach. Her products are just gorgeous. They contain botanicals and active ingredients. I’m all about an epi-peel that uses fruit enzymes to exfoliate.”
On her make-up routine:
“I love the Ellis Faas foundation, which I get from Australia. You can’t find it here. It’s really beautiful. I mix that with a little bit of moisturiser and it becomes more of a tinted cream. I love the texture of that because you can build on it if you want more coverage. I also like Charlotte Tilbury‘s products. I think that she does a really nice concealer stick. And then I use a lot of RMS.”
On skin:
“I think that the more aggressive you are with your skin, the more it’s going to come back with a vengeance. Women can go too hard with microdermabrasion and lasers and all of this stuff, at some point your skin’s going to go, ‘Hey, we’ve been protecting you since the beginning of time. We know how to heal ourselves.’ It’s an organ. You wouldn’t go scraping around on your kidneys and your liver.”
“I look at someone like Lauren Hutton and I know that she’s obviously the pinnacle of this sort of proclamation but you look at her and it’s just like, fuck she’s lived a beautiful life. You know what I mean? Here’s a woman who like took off on a motorcycle through Africa and broke her neck and was nearly paralysed and has kind of done it all and you can see the joy and the beauty and the experience of her life on her face.”
On her version of feminism:
“It’s not about overcompensating and trying to be the tough cookie. I always have this talk with men and I say, ‘I’m very compassionate to men in the modern time because, back in the day, when we had our women’s movement and we were burning our bras, it was as if we were taking away all the glory of what a man can be to us.’ Those women that … at a certain age, they’re like, ‘Don’t open that door, I can do it myself!’ It’s like this chivalry that I think men have recoiled simply because we went so far in one direction to fight simply for the right to work and to vote and for all of these things that are absolute necessities. I think that we were fighting for equality but I think that what we did was alienate the man to allow us to rise.”
“Strength and grace can come hand in hand. Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean that you can’t be graceful. Just because you’re wearing the pants sometimes doesn’t mean that you can’t be tender and soft. It’s this duality that I think is so interesting; to be able to be many things at once and not just decide to be this one thing, this strong independent woman that tells her man that she doesn’t need him.”
On what’s more important than taking extreme anti-ageing measures:
“You have to think, how much work, like the real work, needs to be done. Go see a healer. Go see a naturopath. Why don’t you find out information of what’s going on inside of your body to then help … switch your mindset.”
“My mother showed me what strength and grace looked like. She was a constant reflection of that mentality, she was a strong, independent woman. She’s always worked and she raised two beautiful daughters that are completely dynamically different. My sister and I are very different types of women but with very similar morals and ethics. It’s like I was showed on a daily basis what strength and grace can look like combined.”
On her piercings:
“I’ve had many holes in my ears for a long time and I like to shove two earrings in each hole and kind of see how much I can fit in there. I think more and more women are having a really fun time of wearing many different earrings in one ear and, again, telling a little story. If you look close enough there’s a lot of information.”
On her diet:
“I’m very lucky to live in a place where there’s a Farmers Market pretty much every day and most of the restaurants in my neighbourhood are very health conscious. I have a gorgeous health food store not even a five minute walk from my house. But, you know I’m going to eat a fucking hamburger every once in a while, too. I’m not going to be a die hard allegiant to something because I think that, especially when you start to travel and you get on an airplane and all of a sudden you’re not experiencing the joys of culture that you’re there because you’re living within a confine of your diet and then you’re like that lunatic that’s going around asking everyone if they have a gluten fee option. It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re in a Third World country.'”
On the one record she keeps going back to:
“Oh my gosh, it’s such an interesting thing. There’s a Fleetwood Mac album called Then Play On, and it’s an interesting album because it’s very rare and I remember meeting Mick Fleetwood, and I said to him, ‘I fucking love that album, Then Play On.’ And he’s like, “How the hell do you know about that album. Nobody knows about that album.”
“It’s very acoustic. Stevie is only on one track. It’s really just like a time that the boys got in the studio and just jammed and played music and it wasn’t lyrically driven but it was attitude and feeling driven and it’s very bluesy and very soulful, and when I play it for people and tell them that it’s Fleetwood Mac they go, ‘This is fucking Fleetwood Mac?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, check out the record cover.'”
On exercise:
“Everyone knows that you can work out and often times it’s not about working out for the sense of vanity but just for how it makes you feel. Just going to the gym is going to give you dopamine and endorphins and you’re going to walk differently throughout the day because you’re proud of yourself for doing that. It’s not about going to the gym to get a slamming bikini body. It’s about a mindset of power and integrity for this vessel that we’re walking around in for but a short time at the end of the day.”
On the Tom Ford Contouring Palette;
“I love a bronzer that doesn’t have any of that weird sparkly shit in it. I can open up that thing and I’ve got my little highlighter and I’ve got my little bronzer all in one. I like a creamy texture. I don’t like powders, they sit in your skin and they make your skin look dry. For me, if I can throw it in my bag and one product can do two things … Between a little bit of foundation and a little bit of that, it’s at most what I’m wearing on a daily basis. I don’t even wear mascara unless I’m maybe going out, maybe, maybe.”
On strength:
“I’m always saying to myself, ‘Erin, put your sword down’ because the strongest warriors in the world knew they never had to fight with weapons. It was all about the mind and the changing of someone’s perspective and to be able to talk someone into a new idealism without force. That’s really what it’s all about.”
On ageing:
“I understand that women enjoy doing little tweaks just to sort of soften things and to make things a little bit less so. Which is fine but, as I said, I’m definitely of the latter where it’s going to happen no matter what and I think that the more you manipulate the more you’re just going to look ridiculous. I’ve seen it time and time again. You’re putting unnatural things into your face. It’s really frightening.”
On style:
“I’ve definitely moved towards wanting to wear more masculine pieces and I love wearing suits and I love wearing just really simple, timeless things. And then vintage because you know if you’re wearing vintage than that’s obviously going to be something that no one else has. It’s something you’ve discovered, something that bears history, something that tells a story and you kind of get to let that piece live on through you and it feels special.”
On trends:
“When you’re abiding by trends then the clothes are wearing you. You have to ask yourself, just because this is on trend is it something that is truly me? The older I get — and that’s the beauty of getting older — is understanding yourself more. I certainly feel that I’ve become a lot more utilitarian as I’ve gotten older and, again, it’s about approaching things that are going to have more permanence in your closet and not just going there and picking up something that you’re going to wear for one season, because it’s sort of the ‘it’ thing for the moment.”
On what influences a woman’s personal style:
“It’s interesting, I always talk about the fact I think women dress for women and I don’t think that women dress for men. If you ask a man how they find their woman to be sexiest it’s like, ‘When they wake up in the morning without makeup on wearing a white t-shirt’; kind of a little disheveled and puffy and ourselves, a vulnerable form. And I think that women have decided that they want to dress for women. They’re dressing for the cameras. They’re dressing for the blogs. They’re dressing for the style photographers. They’re dressing for everyone else but themselves, somehow.”
On her jewellery line, Wasson Fine:
“Well, I did it because I did nearly ten years of Low Luv, which is a costume line [that] is all about accessibility, [and] I felt the design integrity was always there but, unfortunately, it was a forty-five dollar ring, dipped in silver or gold. I just got really disenchanted with the idea of selling something that I knew was not going to last forever.
When I stopped doing Low Luv, I took about a year and a half break. Jewellery has always been such an important entity of my life. Alchemy is the first form of spirituality and the way they manipulated metal back in the day was so profound.”
On why she started Wasson Fine:
“When I created Wasson Fine it was about going back to using real stones and real metals. I think there’s a romance attached to the idea of permanence, we’re not living in a world where many things are permanent, and when you’re making something out of solid fourteen carat gold and real stones that hold real properties, that’s forever. I tell the story all the time where it’s like the idea that you can throw jewellery into the bottom of the ocean and go and find it hundred of years later. There’s so few things in this life that you can do that with.
From a design perspective, it’s interesting because it’s very metal heavy. I always start from the very metal-smith perspective where, here’s a ring and there might be two tiny raw diamonds that are very subliminally set that are sort of smooshed into the piece and it’s not something that the world see but you kind of know it’s there. That’s kind of my approach to it. How can I make something feel special but also not be too literal.”
On skin cell turnover:
“I think that every single product and lotion should have something enzymatic, whether it’s papaya or any kind of fruit enzyme which is a natural exfoliant. I think it’s the least abrasive and it’s the most natural thing that you can do to affect cell turnover, you know, sloughing off all that dead shit.”
On Wasson Fine:
“I think a lot of women, certainly with my price point, they go, ‘It’s two thousand dollars and I could go and buy something that’s two thousand dollars that’s really shiny.’ And the world would say, ‘Oh, that’s a really shiny diamond,’ and ‘Wow, that’s so fancy.’ That’s some sort of status symbol but, for me, I’m trying to sort of re-educate the buyer in how gold has this headiness and the weight of gold is far more interesting than just being covered in shiny diamonds.”
“It’s about knowing your body. It’s knowing when it’s time to juice for a couple of days … I have a woman who does colonics in Agoura Hills named Louise. It’s interesting because she’s more of a healer. She can actually push around in your gut and tell you the things that are going on emotionally with you and she’s always spot on. We can sit there and think that it’s about something else but all of our answers are inside of us.”
“It’s interesting, because I refuse to do what’s necessary to propagate the grotesqueness of feeding the machine. It’s like, you’re not going to see a picture of my fucking ass on Instagram, you know?”
On style icons:
“Style is just one of those things, it’s really just about attitude. I always use the reference of someone like James Dean… Why was he so cool? He wore a white t-shirt and jeans in every iconic image that we’ve ever seen of him. Well, it was because of the way he fucking wore it. It was that he made that white t-shirt and that pair of jeans look unaccessible, like it was never going to look that good on anyone else.”
On style:
“It goes back to attitude and spirit. It’s just one of those things where I think that it’s really simple to be sucked into this world where we think that coveting things is going to bring us closer to fulfilment but the more that you feel you need to have, the more you feel you need to get and then you’re living in a perpetual world of suffering, and clothing should be fun.”
“Authenticity is the only currency of life that is truly left in this lifetime, it’s not about dollar bills anymore, it’s not about the exchange of anything else, but in authenticity, if that makes you so that you’re just kind of out of this cool spool, then so be it. It’s like, I know who I am, I know what I’ve done. Most of the most enigmatic moments in my life were pre-Instagram, so they’re nearly forgotten because they weren’t really documented when it was happening.”
On what matters:
“If you meet a happy person then all of a sudden you wouldn’t even think of that kind of stuff… You wouldn’t think, ‘Oh gosh, did you see her? She’s aged a bit.’ It’s like, ‘Did you see her? She seemed so fulfilled and happy.'”
On health:
“I’ve got my healer Angelica who’s amazing. She does a lot of energy clearing which helps you let go of a lot of stuff that you don’t even realise that you’re holding on to. I see Dr. Stacey Kupperman a naturopath doctor in Los Angeles who does a lot of blood work. We do a lot of lab work to kind of understand what’s going on inside of me, things I should look out for in the future. I’ve done everything. I’ve tested my heart and my organs. I’ve done unglamorous stuff to understand what’s going on inside of my gut.”
On ageing:
“We have to trust in our skin to know how it can evolve with us. I’ve got a lot of girlfriends, especially living out in LA that really fight with this obsession of youth in Los Angeles. It’s really in your face all the time and I have a lot of friends who are younger than me, who are like twenty, twenty-nine, and thirty years old, and they’re already starting to get all these fillers and botox-y things.”
On Rose-Marie Swift’s skincare line, RMS:
“The RMS “un” cover up is a dream come true with the coconut oil, and all of her lip and cheek pens, her skin oil, her coconut skin oil. What’s so cool about her is that I’ve known her for ages and I just simply adore her. Anytime she’s ever done my makeup … she’s an astrologer, so she’s doing your makeup and she’s telling you all about your star signs”.
On her hair:
“I love Phyto 7 for my hair. It’s a hair cream. My hair is crazy and dry and wild and I spend a lot of time in the ocean, so it’s really moisturizing”.
On her favourite tattoo:
“That’s the thing, I would find it incredibly difficult to say that one is more important than the other because they’re all at pinnacles of life. They all capture and encapsulate and envelope feelings that were going on in your life and moments of enigmatic emotions. I think it goes back to the idea of permanence and creating a permanent narrative, through jewellery, through tattoos. It’s your forever and so everything that I’ve chosen to put on my body symbolises truly something that I wanted to remember forever. They’re all very, very precious.”
Stereotypes can be a dangerous thing. They can put people in a box. We look at the images, we see job titles – we make assumptions. Politician? Liar. Banker? Corrupt. Model? Vacuous. But when it comes to Erin Wasson, the latter couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a woman on a mission to live responsibly, to create something in this life that has real meaning, to leave an imprint behind that isn’t just about how many followers she has.
In fact saying Erin Wasson is a model is like saying a swiss army knife is a can opener. It sells her short. It narrows your focus. It betrays just how multifaceted she truly is. The more time we spent with her in her NYC loft, the more it dawns on us she’s like some sort of goddam creative polymath. Part time actress, stylist, designer, warrior, businesswoman, philanthropist and Full Time SoCal via SoHo Goddess.
Gliding through her home you quickly get the idea she’s a woman who not only has a unique sense of style, but a great sense of herself. Wasson is not a follower and never has been. In many ways, she’s the girl off the grid, not subscribing to what society or this digital era expects of a woman in her so-called profession. Her place is full of little insights into the way she sees the world. From the eclectic mix of artwork and frames, to the meaningful vintage treasures, to the Fleetwood Mac album she adores that we’ve never heard of (“It’s like they went, ‘man, let’s go back in the studio and do what we love, which is just fucking play music and you can feel it”), Wasson truly walks her own walk. And we love it.
In a world where it feels like everyone is trying to be like everyone else, where we replicate our outfits off Instagram and decorate our homes by way of Pinterest, Erin is distinctively, unapologetically herself. Like all of us, she’s not perfect, but she lives her life not trying to be anything to anyone. And that, that in itself is powerful.
Sometimes on a site that is all about beauty, it’s easy to get caught up in the products and the make up and style. But meeting a woman like Wasson is a reminder that real beauty is not how you wear your hair or what you put on your face, It’s about knowing what you are and owning it. And fuck, with the daily onslaught of voices telling us otherwise, that can be more challenging than it sounds. But as women, if we can remind each other enough, we just might start to believe it again. Thanks Erin.
Pictures, Soraya Zaman. Words, Carlie Fowler.
