Maximum Cartoon Couture

Namalee Bolle is one of those people who seems to exist at a slightly higher resolution than everyone else. London-based, she cycled through model, author, and musician without appearing to commit to any one of them as her actual identity—which probably means all of them were. She was the force behind SuperSuper, a magazine that sat at the intersection of rave culture and art-school provocation, and her visual aesthetic, which she described as maxi-maximal Cartoon Couture, ran entirely on neons and the kind of accessories that could survive a nuclear blast by sheer brightness.

Her music was up on MySpace at the time, on a page so aggressively colored it risked actual retinal damage just finding the play button. I respected that. If you’re going to do maximalism, do it all the way. There’s something genuinely committed about building an identity around the idea that more is never enough—more color, more noise, more everything—and wearing it without a trace of irony.

Nu-rave had a short window, roughly 2006 to 2008, before it collapsed under the weight of its own fluorescence. Namalee was one of its more interesting figures precisely because she was never just a scenester. The writing and the magazine work suggested someone actually thinking about culture rather than just performing inside it. At this particular moment, early 2009, she was one of the most visually distinctive people operating in any scene I was paying attention to.