The Girl Who Never Got to Morocco

Iris is twenty-five, from Hamburg, and she was supposed to go to Morocco. That was three years ago. What happened instead: she got stuck in Paris, started a band called Super Secret Lovers with her boyfriend Arthur Moulton, and the two of them spent enough time making out topless on their garden sofa that their Muslim neighbors nearly rioted. Which tells you most of what you need to know about how Iris moves through the world.

Before Paris there was art school in London, then a stint at VICE in Berlin—the kind of CV that sounds like something you’d invent but mostly just reflects someone who keeps saying yes and deals with the consequences later. She writes, sings, and performs her lyrics live, which is the kind of commitment to your own words that either comes off as precious or genuinely raw. From what I can tell, it’s the latter. When she needs money she does graphic design for L’Officiel, one of those fashion magazines elegant enough that working for it doesn’t feel like a compromise. The rest of the time she’s somewhere else entirely.

Some people accumulate cities the way others accumulate things—carrying very little, leaving something behind everywhere they go. Iris seems to be one of them. Hamburg to London to Berlin to Paris, by way of a Moroccan detour that never happened and probably still won’t. Morocco still waiting somewhere on a list she’s almost certainly lost.