Rather appropriately, theCreatures of the Windshow this season was opened a girl who was just that: an otherworldly creature. Black-bobbed and statuesque,Athena Wilsonheralds a new era of bare-facedandrogynousbeauty. Based in New York, Athena also walked forMarc Jacobs,Fendi,VersusandChristopher Kane' SS13 shows. Now see her in the editorial 'Crystal Blue Persuasion'shot byCollier Schorrand styled byRobbie Spencerfor Dazed's January issue the, including three images exclusivley for Dazed Digital.

How did you find working on the shoot for this issue?

This was the most fun I've had on a shoot so far, everyone got on really well. For one shot, Yuri[Pleskun, male model]had to take an ice-cold shower because there was no warm water in the studio. He wasn’t expecting that!

How would you describe your style?

I just wear what I like on any given day. Usually there's a denim jacket and men's shoes involved. I rarely wear things without pockets.

What have been your career highlights so far?

Walking for Marc Jacobs in New York, Chris Kane in London, Fendi in Milan and Rick Owens in Paris this season. I’d never even been to Europe before and it didn’t hit me that I’d been in so many great shows until I got back home.

What are your ambitions for the future?

They’re simple: continuing to meet and collaborate with talented and creative people, in fashion and beyond.

Hair Holli Smith at Total Management, using Oribe Haircare
Make-upMaki Ryoke at Tim Howard Management using MAC cosmetics
Models Athena Wilson at Ford, Yuri Pleskun at Quest
Photographic assistant Emily Hope
Styling assistant Jonathan Hmilt
Digital operator Benedict Brink

Initiated by theLouis Vuitton Young Arts Project,Culture Shop: January Saleis a south London art group's calledArt Assassins’ most recent venture - an off-site live exhibition by bunch of 14-20-year-olds offering responses to the idea that ‘culture makes you who you are.’Installed – aptly – in a disused Poundland unit inElephant and Castle Shopping Centrethis space s far from your stereotypical white cube. Exchange is rife in the middle of the place once voted London's ugliest structure, but not of the materialist kind, as a plethora of audio and video works confront conventional cultural perceptions of profession, class, nationality and race.

True to their name, the Art Assassins are not taking the war on youth lying down. Back in Autumn 2011 they created a stimulating youth led publication in collaboration withHato Pressin response to the London riots -Voice of the Voicelessproving engagement and openness vital to the Art Assassins’ philosophy. Working with high profile collaborators no doubt enhances their message’s impact, the Young Art’s Project’s Summer Academy engaging in a public sculpture workshop with the well known Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset last August. As a three year partnership between five of London’s leading art institutions – Hayward Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, South London Gallery, Tate Britain and the Whitechapel – the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project exposes the Art Assassins to an snazzy series of cultural programmes – keeping them busy alongside their regular SLG Thursday evening meetings, college and school commitments.

Ryan Valentine’s videoGamerand George Flanagan’sWe Don’t Get Lawyers ‘Round Here, are two of many works that illustrate the assassination of the commercialist dictum ‘nothing in this world is free’ through their poignantly open creative exchange. Voicing his cultural curiosities, 13-year old South London Gallery forum member George talks to Rose Commander -a paralegal at Goldman and Bailey Solicitors- about how ‘people from where I live aren’t lawyers’. Gemma Andrews’s live experimentElephant Toothpastedemonstrates how her cultural diversity is bubbling over (literally) in a confluence of art and science. Turkish Art Assassin Mehmet Ccel performs his passionate intro to professional wrestling inFront Bump/Back Bump,where in-between body crunching moves he demonstrates the importance of ‘bumping’ -the safety measure used in professional wrestling that determines learning how to fall without causing injury to yourself or others.

Taken from the February Issue of Dazed & Confused:

“Doona is an angel. She creates art without artifice; often it feels like there is nothing between the lens and her pure, vulnerable emotion. She is also as lovely and kind as you might imagine her to be.” - Lana Wachowski

She might be an unfamiliar face to western audiences, but in Korea Doona Bae is a household name. Highly regarded for roles in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and the Japanese film Air Doll (2009), she is able to cherry-pick parts from some of the world’s most acclaimed directors. So her audition for the German $100-million adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas was her first audition in 13 years – but one she was happy to undertake. “I really wanted to work with the Wachowskis and I don’t like big main roles,” Bae says. “If my favourite director gives me a role that is very...” – she pauses to find the right word – “sparkly? A very brilliant character? I’ll do it.”

In her role as clone Sonmi-451 in the dystopian country of Nea So Copros, Bae delivers a poignant performance that required serious prep. She had to learn English from scratch and play three characters, all of different ages and ethnicities. “I was a little bit confused to be absolutely honest,” Bae says of the challenge. “I went to Berlin by myself because I wanted to become Sonmi. She is very miserable at the beginning and I was also really lonely, but Lana and Andy Wachowski were amazing. In the end we were like a family.”

After Cloud Atlas wrapped, Bae elected to travel straight to London to tackle her next project – mastering English. “When filming ended I could still hardly tell my friends and my directors how much I loved them, and how much I enjoyed making the film,” Bae explains. So she spent six months living with her dialogue coach in Primrose Hill, enjoying a spell of rare anonymity. “No one knew me, no one bothered me. It was refreshing.”

What challenge next awaits the multilingual, award-winning actress? Bae remains undecided. But it seems likely she will undertake it with characteristic dedication. “I really love learning and working long hours. I was even jealous of my Cloud Atlas stand-ins because I love being in front of the camera,” she says, earnestly. “In social situations, when I’m surrounded by people, I become very shy. But if there’s a camera in front of me, I feel free.”

Cloud Atlas is out on February 22

Photography Lauren Ward
Styling Sara Paulsen

We’re all savvy these days. We all know our signs and signifiers, that blue jeans aren’t just blue jeans. Above all garments, they are within each of our grasps, yet continue to represent the most potent aspects of street fashion and sub-cultural style: aspiration, fantasy and drama.

Democratic yet so detailed as to simultaneously appeal to elitist instincts, jeans deliver authenticity, that most alluring of all qualities inherent in objects of sartorial desire.

As embodied by the Levi Strauss 501 - an unimpeachable glory of design and content manufactured in San Francisco from hardy cotton twill from France (de Nmes) for cowboys, gold-rush prospectors, farmhands and railroad workers in the 1860s - denim looks and feels mighty real.

When I put together my book The Look - an investigation into the combustion which occurs when great music meets fantastic visual style - and followed the twisted trail which wound from the utility-wear sold in 1946 by Elvis’s tailors Lansky Bros in Memphis to today’s multi-national, multi-billion and monstrous denim label frenzy, I discovered denim, and in particular blue jeans, at every turn.

The beauty of blue jeans lies as much in the story behind their arrival in the arsenal of popular taste, for it was unplanned, as organic as the fabric from which they are made. I was enlightened to this by the late Malcolm McLaren. As well as being the greatest cultural iconoclast of his generation, he was alsoan astute and educated fashion historian.

For it was at McLaren’s early 70s shop Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road that I first encountered jeans presented not as fashion items but as fetishised totems: the straight-legged Levis were neatly arraigned in single pairs, stiff as boards, the Selvedge seams on display and cards carrying washing instructions proudly foregrounded.

“Look at what the beats, people like Jack Kerouac, were wearing after they left the marines and the army and went on the road,” McLaren advised me long ago. “Blue jeans, white t-shirt, leather jacket. When Hollywood looked around for rebellious images which would suit stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, they settled on that look. And when kids in Britain saw it up on the big screen, they wanted it to.”

For many years – decades – big business did not understand denim’s desirability, so could not co-opt it. Far from the mainstream in the 50s, Britain’s first menswear boutique, the subterranean Vince Man’s Shop in Soho, sold some of the first home-made denim in light-blue shades to its largely gay clientele (Sean Connery, then a wannabe actor muscleman, posed in a pair in magazine ads) and Marc Bolan, then Mark Feld and one of the UK’s first mods of the early 60s, used to reminisce how there was just one shop in the whole of London – a surplus store in Leman Street, Whitechapel - which stocked original Levi’s originally intended for US service camps around the UK.

“One day we turned up on 40 scooters and stole the lot,” said Marc during his 70s glam heyday. “They were there, one wanted them so one took them. My scooter zipped off without me so I stuck a couple of pairs up my jumper, ran down the road and jumped a bus. My heart was pounding; it was great knowing we were the only ones among a few people in England who had them. That was very funky.”

It was also smart: Modernists such as Bolan prided themselves on The Who manager Pete Meaden’s standard line for his peers: “Clean living through difficult circumstances.” Conversely the art-school graduates who powered the beat boom and British music – the Stones, the Pretty Things, The Kinks – incorporated denims into the scruffy, blues-associating coffee-bar look of Chelsea boots, matelot shirts and pea-coats. That way they could identify with the founding fathers of black music such as Leadbelly, who had been forced to wear denim during his years on the Texas chain gang. One of these young Brits, Peter Golding – who later invented stretch denim in the 70s – even moved to the Beat Hotel in Paris. “I busked on the boulevards and understood the relationship between railroad blues and dungarees,” he once told me.

In the years after the beats, art students and mods, denim was embraced by rockers, Hell’s Angels, skinheads, punks, rockabillies, casuals, hip-hop crews...hell, at the height of Baggy, acid-housers and Cheesy Quavers donned dungarees as the ultimate ant-fashion statement. And in doing so, naturally, effortlessly, in their very British way, they made a fashion statement.

It is here, down the years and in this diversity, that the seriously significant element of any enduring garment comes into play: mutability. At every price point, in different silhouettes and shades, with every conceivable elaboration and variation of detail, denim has multiplied, proliferated and survived.

And so today we crave Fennica x Orslow’s stunning adherence to traditional values and appreciate the recasting of this staple in a contemporary context by the likes of Christopher Shannon[below]and Martine Rose[above].

Denim’s ability to withstand renewed waves of invention, nuance and flair is evident at Pokit, the Wardour Street shop situated just a few hundred yards from where Vince Man Shop traded in flamboyant “Continental-wear” jeans in the 50s.

Pokit’s Seven Foot Cowboy range is the result of Bayode Oduwole’s investigations into the styles worn by rodeo riders down the decades: “We wanted to look at the larger than life characters of the west, the melting pot who made America and the world what it is today,” he says, using an example the side-buttoning Crazyhorse, which have a yoke inspired by those on the seat of Hussar Guard’s britches while the high-waisted shape utilises the roomy design for jeans worn by rodeo clowns, who need maximum mobility to perform their stunts safely.

As worn by Dexys leader Kevin Rowland on the cover to last year’s stand-out album One Day I’m Gonna Fly, the Crazyhorse represents all that is great about denim jeans. I ask you, which other garment could contain circus and military references so comfortably? And which continues to exude toughness and cool in equal measure?