Waffles Girls Don’t Die
Nobody could coherently explain what Waffles and Falafels actually was. The name alone—two foods with no obvious relationship to each other or to fashion—seemed designed to discourage easy categorization. Street gang? T-shirt operation? Modeling collective? All three, roughly, since 2005. I sat down with three of them—Bonez the Conqueror, Cassie F Baby, and Lovisa the Intern—and left somehow more confused and considerably more entertained than when I arrived.
The stated goal was world domination. All three said it, independently, without irony. Cassie went further and invoked Captain Planet: a converging-of-powers scenario that would freeze the sands of time and bring peace to the galaxy. Lovisa looked at her and said, What the fuck are you talking about?
Cassie said: World domination.
That’s more or less how the whole conversation went.
What binds them, beyond the chaos, is an instinct for style that refuses to be respectable. Bonez lives in Lake Hughes, California—which is genuinely shit
—writes for Shut Up! Magazine, and models between the two. Her soundtrack is metal: Gojira, Dethklok, Metallica, Pantera. She also professed love for Miley Cyrus’s clothing line, available at every Walmart in your vicinity, and then immediately asked us not to print it. Cassie, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, raises what she described as a baby dinosaur, watches foreign films, drinks Hennessey, and considers Lil Wayne a literary genius.
Beyoncé she screens before going out dancing, to get in the right headspace. Lovisa is in Vancouver, equally at home at an all-you-can-eat buffet and on a dancefloor, preferably simultaneously. Her inspirations are Courtney Love, the Muppets, and Coeur de Pirate—the Québécois singer-songwriter who had by this point also become a Waffles Girl herself.
To qualify for membership, according to them: charisma, being genuinely yourself, and—per Cassie—balls. The aesthetic lands somewhere between sexy and androgynous, all black leggings and serious boots, silver and pastel hair, with the caveat that you can push the androgyny too far and end up somewhere nobody wants to be. The reading stack runs i-D, Dazed and Confused, Fruits, Revolver, High Times. Jersey Shore physically hurt Cassie’s brain. Lost she called satisfying.
The person they were clearly most excited to talk about was Sky Ferreira—seventeen at the time, already a Waffles affiliate, with an album supposedly dropping that summer. She has the voice of a gospel-princess-angel-fuck,
Bonez said, which is one of the stranger compliments in the English language but somehow entirely accurate. Lovisa’s read was more direct: She just kept pushing her talent in everyone’s face until they couldn’t ignore it anymore. Brave little shit.
The album didn’t actually materialize that summer—it took a few more years and several detours to arrive—but the underlying claim about Sky Ferreira turned out to be completely right.
Future plans: Bonez wanted to write about metal for Metal Hammer in London, with pin-up modeling as the fallback. Cassie planned to marry and subsequently divorce Lil Wayne, with a lottery win worked in if time permitted. Lovisa said: Sushi.
Then Cassie added the line that probably should have been their motto from the start. Waffles Girls Don’t Die.
I believe her.