Entertainment
With 'OMG Fashun,' Julia Fox and Law Roach bring sustainable, daring style to reality TV
With the years-long success of series like “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” fashion competition reality TV shows are nothing new. But “OMG Fashun” is a different type of series ripe for short attention spans and a style-savvy generation more attuned to the concerns about the environment.
“There’s so many awful things happening in the world,” says Julia Fox, the show’s co-host, over the phone from New Mexico, where she’s in production for a movie. “And this isn’t one of them.”
“OMG Fashun,” which premiered May 6 on E! and airs weekly at 9 p.m. Pacific, is a thrilling reality competition series hosted by Fox, fashion’s “It” girl and cultural renegade, and celebrity stylist Law Roach. The show brings sustainable fashion to the forefront with quickfire competitions and a rotation of guest judges that includes Phaedra Parks of “Real Housewives” fame, “13 Reasons Why” star Tommy Dorfman and more.
But “OMG Fashun” opts for snackable episodes primed for the TikTok generation — roughly 20 minutes each — that feature three rising “fashion disruptors” competing in two separate challenges. The catch? They’re encouraged to use sustainable, upcycled — and often — unconventional materials like insects and condoms. It’s chaotic — and that’s the point.
Behind the series is Scout Productions, known for reality shows like “Queer Eye,” “Legendary” and “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” a company with decades of experience in the reality competition space. After producing the two-season streetwear competition series “The Hype,” Scout Productions co-founder David Collins and Chief Creative Officer Rob Eric were asked by their agent if they wanted to chat with Fox. A 15-minute conversation turned into an hour-long one.
Model Wisdom Kaye, left, a guest judge on “OMG Fashun” with hosts Julia Fox and Law Roach.
(Quantrell Colbert/E! Entertainment)
“She brought this originality to how we look at fashion, how we look at ourselves in fashion, what fashion actually is,” Eric says in an interview alongside Collins over Zoom. “That it doesn’t need to be a $40,000 outfit, but it actually could be leaves that she found in a park.” That sparked the idea for “OMG Fashun.” He added, “We thought, ‘Oh, what would it be like if we could take 90 minutes of ‘Project Runway,’ mix with ‘The Hype’ chopped into it, and put it into a 21-minute show?’
Eric and Collins, who executive produced the series, were in constant awe of how Fox, 34, made her mark in the fashion world with an unwavering sense of authenticity. “She wore a dress made of condoms. She wore a dress made of ties. All [the] sustainable stuff that she was doing, and it kept getting put into TMZ, WWD and Elle magazine. We knew that Julia had that voice,” Eric says.
Reality TV came naturally for Fox, whose prior credits have been in film. After all, she’s used to doing “new stuff.” However, it was admittedly “more work than acting” for her because whole episodes had to be shot in a day.
“It was a lot of outfit changes, a lot of time in hair and makeup, super early call time, ending super late at night,” she says.
But Fox seemingly made it look easy. Collins says everyone was “slack-jawed” from the second she sat down on the stage despite never having starred on a TV show before. “We’re like, ‘What? We’re not having to prompt her, tell her, and remind her?’ She just killed it over, over and over again,” he says.
Roach, 45, who was recruited by Scout Productions after working on “Legendary,” was intrigued by the premise of “OMG Fashun” — highlighting emerging designers and sustainability. Fox also had wanted to work with the stylist for a while. “We both had admiration for each other’s work and the things that she wore. I think her stylist is incredible,” he says over the phone from Los Angeles.
The pair ultimately had a “fun” dynamic, he says, since Fox “doesn’t take herself seriously at all.”
“She gave me so much agency to poke fun at her and she did the same to me,” Roach says. “She’d create this really fun and friendly and kooky work environment, so it was great. It made me excited to go to work every day and to see what she was going to wear because we didn’t share outfits.”
Julia Fox modeling a design on “OMG Fashun.”
(Quantrell Colbert/E! Entertainment)
While Fox and Roach had fun with their roles on the show, the talent was nothing to mock. “These young designers had these incredible gifts and ideas of how to take discarded materials and turn them into wearable works of art,” he says.
So “OMG Fashun” doesn’t just want to be another fashion show. “We’ve seen other shows that have a component where there’s a challenge where they’re instructed to create a garment out of recycled materials or upcycling or discarded fabrics,” Roach says. “But this one, the entire show is based on that principle.”
Fox often struggled to choose a winner because she was in such awe of the designers’ talents. In the nature challenge, for instance, she had to stop filming because she couldn’t decide between the contestants. Luckily, Fox is keen on wearing their designs whether they take home the top prize or not on “OMG Fashun.” “I did wear one of the outfits [from the show] during the press tour — the little black blazer with the underwear bottoms with the metal utensils on them, nail clippers, nail files and forks,” she said. She’s also kept in touch with many of the contestants too.
Amid the release of “OMG Fashun,” Roach made headlines for the “tenniscore” ensembles he helped architect for Zendaya and the hashtag he started — #TashiMadeMeWearIt — amid the “Challengers” press tour.
“Just to see people participate in tenniscore and going out in groups and dressing in this way, that’s the most heartwarming and incredible thing. I’m like, ‘This might be cool to give people this challenge to go out and to create these looks,’ he says.
Fox also admired how Zendaya’s looks were playful nods to the film and its themes. “It was definitely giving ‘OMG Fashun’ for sure,” she says.
With Fox’s presence on “OMG Fashun” and her affinity for daring looks, is a fashion line in her future? Not exactly.
“OMG Fashun” contestants Katya Lee, Chelsea Billingsley and Bradley Callahan.
(Quantrell Colbert/E! Entertainment)
“Is that really what this planet needs — another fashion line? Like, I’d rather prop up kids that are doing it and salute them for their efforts and call it a day,” she says. Fox also would rather rely on someone else’s talents: “Why would I want to do it myself when I could have someone else do it for me?”
Should “OMG Fashun” get another season, the co-hosts already know who they’d love to see as guest judges. Roach wants John Galliano, Grace Jones, Naomi Campbell or RuPaul on. Fox, on the other hand, wants to recruit Doja Cat, Dennis Rodman, Gwen Stefani or Lil’ Kim. “I love accidental-like fashion icons,” she says. “People that didn’t really set out or try but became [them].”
Ultimately, the hope is that viewers watching will shift their perspective on fashion. Fox wants people to “dig a little deeper” and “look inward.”
Roach adds, “We’ve gotten into this culture of once you have something, you post it on social media that it has to be discarded, you can never wear it again. I challenge people to reinvent the clothes that they already have and the way they’ve worn them. If you like it, buy it. If you love it, live in it.”
Entertainment
Why the ‘Harry Potter’ series is recasting a major role ahead of Season 2
Gracie Cochrane won’t be enrolling in Hogwarts this fall.
HBO announced that Cochrane will depart the upcoming “Harry Potter” series ahead of Season 2. Cochrane played Ron Weasley’s (Alastair Stout) younger sister, Ginny, in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” Cochrane and her family attributed the “challenging decision” to “unforeseen circumstances.”
“Her time as part of the ‘Harry Potter’ world has been truly wonderful, and she is deeply grateful to [casting director] Lucy Bevan and the entire production team for creating such an unforgettable experience,” the Cochrane family said in a statement. “Gracie is very excited about the opportunities her future holds.”
HBO said they “wish Gracie and her family the best.”
“We support Gracie Cochrane and her family’s decision not to return for the next season of HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, and we are grateful for her work on season one of the show,” HBO wrote in a statement.
Tristan Harland, Gabriel Harland, Ruari Spooner, Gracie Cochrane and Alastair Stout.
(HBO)
The HBO series was greenlit for a second season in early May, months ahead of its Christmas Day premiere later this year. If the sophomore season follows J.K. Rowling’s second book, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (the first season is adapted from the first novel), Ginny will begin her first year at Hogwarts in Season 2.
Cochrane was cast following a massive undertaking by HBO to find young actors for the show. HBO reviewed more than 32,000 auditions before selecting Dominic McLaughlin to play the boy who lived. The cast was filled out with West End performers, like Arabella Stanton (Hermione Granger), first-time actors like Amos Kitson (Dudley Dursley) and longtime stars including John Lithgow, who will play Albus Dumbledore.
HBO Chairman Casey Bloys explained that they expected a lot of “interest” in the cast because of the cultural prominence of the “Harry Potter” franchise.
“Interest can tip over into more unpleasant and aggressive behavior,” Bloys told Deadline, alluding to racist backlash over the casting of Paapa Essiedu as Professor Snape. “We talked to them about what to expect … but any kind of security that’s needed is an unfortunate aspect of doing IP shows. We just try to be mindful and monitor it.”
In March, HBO released its first trailer for the show, which included a peek at the redheaded Weasley family saying goodbye to Ron at Platform 9¾ before he boarded the Hogwarts Express. The trailer also teased Harry’s acceptance letter from Hogwarts and his wand and Nimbus broom.
Movie Reviews
‘Ben’Imana’ Review: Rwandan Women Confront National Wounds and Family Secrets in a Searing Drama
“I forgive” are the first words uttered by Vénéranda in Ben’Imana, but her ferocious gaze and the clamp of her arms across her chest tell a different story. At the center of a fine cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi brings Vénéranda’s resolve and all her painful contradictions to life in Ben’Imana, a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning.
Writer-director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s drama is set in the Rwandan village Kibeho in 2012. It’s the final year of the Gacaca courts, community tribunals focused on addressing the genocidal crimes committed, neighbor against neighbor, in the previous decade. Through the character’s complex and often tense relationships with her teenage daughter, her sister and her mother, as well as with other women in her village, Dusabejambo has crafted a story that’s both emblematic and achingly specific.
Ben’Imana
The Bottom Line Mother courage.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi, Kesia Kelly Nishimwe, Isabelle Kabano
Director: Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo
Screenwriters: Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, Delphine Agut
1 hour 41 minutes
The person Vénéranda officially forgives in the opening scene is Karangwa (Aime Valens Tuyisenge), the man accused of murdering her siblings and other relatives. Of the eight children their mother (Arivere Kagoyire) raised, only Vénéranda and her sister Suzanne (a riveting Isabelle Kabano, who starred in Eric Barbier’s Small Country) survive. Suzanne’s fury is as explosive as her sister’s is contained. Contending to the judge (Adelite Mugabo) that Vénéranda “has no right to forgive on behalf of our family,” she’s determined to bring Karangwa to justice.
And she has no use for the community meetings that Vénéranda has begun leading, in her role as the district’s social affairs officer. Local women are invited to share still-raw memories, to grapple together with the kinds of things that would be immaterial to the courts. Their sessions are part of the country’s “Rwanditude” program, designed to reunite Rwandans after years of ethnic conflict and bloodshed.
Just as mentions of ethnicity are verboten in the courts, there’s no such identification in these gatherings, no way of knowing whether any of these women is Tutsi or Hutu, whether her husband was murdered or is in prison for murdering, until she stands to tell her harrowing story. (The film’s title is a Kinyarwanda word that emphasizes a collective identity, rather than the ethnic divisions of Tutsi and Hutu that Rwanda’s European colonizers encouraged and enforced.)
The younger generation, personified by Vénéranda’s spirited daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe), and her boyfriend, a low-key photographer named Richard (Elvis Ngabo), has grown up without ethnic labels. But while Vénéranda holds herself as a model of forgiveness to women in the group, she can’t see past Richard’s Hutu heritage, and she turns a cold heart to Tina when she becomes pregnant and is kicked out of school. “Neither Richard or his family has harmed me,” Tina points out reasonably, while her mother fumes with shame and judgment, her inner turmoil finding expression in a baffling hypocrisy.
As harsh as she can be, Vénéranda is a devoted caretaker of her mother, who has lost her voice as well as her memory and is the regal, silent watcher of the unfolding family drama. Vénéranda also tends to her sister, whose health was taken from her, along with her husband and child, during the attacks. Suzanne is electric with anger even as her physical strength dwindles. “Can’t you stop your bullshit on forgiveness?” she hisses at Vénéranda, and urges her to reveal certain long-hidden truths to Tina.
What binds these two is the depth of what they’ve endured, the unspeakable brutality; what divides them is how they respond to it. Ben’Imana offers no simple definitions of courage, but rather a feverishly human group portrait of its possible expressions, with the exceptional triumvirate of Nyirinkindi, Kabano and the radiant Nishimwe forming the story’s broken but still hopeful heart.
Dusabejambo, working from a screenplay she wrote in collaboration with Delphine Agut, is attentive to her characters’ pain and their resolve, mirrored in the vibrancy of the setting. With strong contributions from cinematographer Mostafa El Kashef, production designer Ricardo Sankara and editor Nadia Ben Rachid, the movie is cinematic in an utterly unforced way, from the first images of gently rolling hills and the sound of birdsong to the bright interiors of Vénéranda’s home and the gentle, lilting score by Igor Mabano. Just as a brief piece of voiceover narration notes that a single word, ejo, means yesterday and tomorrow, Ben’Imana contains whole worlds in one very specific here-and-now.
Entertainment
Review: ‘Star Wars’ wends its way back to theaters via an unlikely duo in ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
Nearly 50 years on from “Star Wars” and the launch of a media empire (large or small “e”? You decide), the fandom has become its own galaxy of warring planets. But based on the success of the streaming series “The Mandalorian,” set around the title bounty hunter, we can all agree that his charge Grogu — green, wrinkled, big-eyed Baby You-Know-Who — is still adorable. Of the many “Star Wars” offshoots, this seems to be the sturdiest.
The brand is back together for “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which is a movie, a hoped-for franchise revival, a fourth season of sorts and an affable throwback. But it’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].
The expectations game was never going to help series creator Jon Favreau’s big-screen version, written with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor. Granted, this upscaled, agreeably rangy treatment of an adventure storyline that wouldn’t have been out of place on the show could have attempted more. Especially when it puts sci-fi icon Sigourney Weaver in an X-wing pilot uniform as a veteran of the Rebellion, but barely gives her anything to do besides secure Mando a job and keep tabs on his progress. (Gang, try harder. It’s Sigourney Weaver.)
Aimed squarely at kids of all sizes, “Star Wars” has become a glorified tour of a billionaire’s expanding playworld and “The Mandalorian and Grogu” wants the track well-oiled, not bumpy. The simple pleasures here of good vs evil, IMAX hugeness and composer Ludwig Göransson’s space-opera-hits-the-club score, go down easy enough to not be aggravating. It’s a lot.
But it’s not this reviewer’s position to tell you what “a lot” is — loose lips spoil scripts. When the moment comes at an appropriately dangerous time for our heroes, we sense the kind of thing that only movies can do well when they’re myths writ large: slow things down, shift momentum away from the tyranny of exposition and let emotion, humor, wonder and character co-exist. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” takes the series’ thematic underpinnings — what parenting looks like between a masked human loner and an otherworldly toddler — and deepens them.
The movie takes place in wonderfully detailed environments that evoke the earlier, beloved films. You’re not being pandered to, however; the payoff is a lovely echo. Elsewhere, the action set pieces are serviceably handled by Favreau. (One of them plays like, of all things, an homage to “The French Connection.”)
Otherwise, this is another hunt-and-retrieve narrative for the bounty hunter voiced by Pedro Pascal, physically embodied in armor by Brendan Wayne and, in combat, by fight choreographer Lateef Crowder. Still independent but New Republic-curious, Mando is tasked by Weaver’s Col. Ward to find a wayward scion of the slimy gangster Hutt clan, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), whose return will unlock some important information. Of course, things don’t go as planned, which for a while is interesting — are the Hutts like the Corleones, perhaps? — until it’s not, because then the dialogue would need to rise above the level of a middle-school play.
That being said, one of the movie’s strong points, absent its story deficiencies, is that, across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish famously says in “The Night of the Hunter,” a movie nobody will ever confuse with “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” But we all know summer fare like this is only ever as enjoyable as the monsters conjured up for conquering.
‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
In English and Huttese, with subtitles
Rated: PG-13, for sci-fi violence and action
Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, May 22 in wide release
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