Brandee Brown Sets Her Scene
When Brandee Brown is cold, her immediate surroundings seem to be cast in shadow. Her limbs and lips shiver grimly, and you get the sense her mood could easily devolve into intense anger if the chill continues. She is, after all, wearing a shredded denim carpet square for a shirt and a knee-length pencil skirt with bare legs. It wasn’t her decision. Brandee showed up to this wintery shoot in a sweatshirt and jeans, varsity jacket and a Mickey Mouse headscarf; the stylist has given her a more minimal look, and Brandee is game.
More artist than model, Brandee Brown understands the importance of fulfilling a particular vision, regardless of weather, budget, or timeline. She filmed her most recent project, a video for rapper Kitty Cash’s mixtape, in eight hours with no budget. She pulled together a crew and directed the piece — an eerie, nearly charming profile of a long-haired boy — on a Friday. By Monday it was ready to post.
In an ideal world, Brandee would have time to be considerate; she would indulge her constant questioning until she felt satisfied. She wants to look through the footage again and make a director’s cut, she says. But in this case, fashion week got in the way. Brandee walked for a rejuvenated DKNY and Pharrell’s new denim line for G-Star RAW. You might have also seen her, defiant, in the giant DKNY posters that claimed to represent “real New York.”
Her fellow campaign faces — British singer Rita Ora, California-based model Soojoo Park, among others — seem like convenient ambassadors of cool, tied vaguely to New York like everyone is. But Brandee is born and raised in Harlem, the daughter of a hospital secretary and a train janitor. “I was always the weird one in my family, so it’s kind of inevitable that I would turn out to be an artist,” she says. Little Brandee initially thought that being an artist meant being a painter, and when it turned out she couldn’t wield a brush, she was devastated. “I was like, my career is already ruined!” She says, laughing.
“I was always the weird one in my family, so it’s kind of inevitable that I would turn out to be an artist.”
Thankfully, the discovery of alternative mediums led to Kenneth Cappello, a photographer familiar with magazine cover shoots and high profile ad campaigns. 15-year-old Brandee found him through a photograph on a friend’s t-shirt, then looked up more of his work and sent an email. “It must have been the cutest email I ever wrote in my life,” she says, and she still remembers its words. She titled it “cupcakes and tap water,” strategizing that with the odds of success so low, she’d better stand out. Within five minutes, she received a response.
She grew to love her internship with Kenneth more than any class in school. And, she realized, it would be preferable to continue working after high school rather than spending time and money in an arts program. The college opt-outs she knew showed her: “It’s about the people you know, and having an eye. It’s about the connections you make throughout life.”
For a few years, Brandee was best known by one particular connection, photographer Ryan McGinley. After Kenneth, she began working with Ryan, gaining a reputation as his “hype girl.” Ryan photographs young men and women, naked. He manages to capture vulnerability and ambition, lust and innocence. The span of emotion is due to Brandee; she made his studio a comfortable space. When British GQ profiled Ryan, writer Alice Gregory witnessed Brandee at work: “Have you ever broken any bones? What’s your boyfriend like? What’s with those Canadians who think they’re French? These are the type of questions that occur to Brandee,” Alice wrote. “Her extemporizing is impressively arbitrary and incredibly disarming. She is really great at her job.”
Whether setting a model at ease or making music videos, Brandee cares deeply for the unexpected, the breaking of routines. “Working for Ryan, I noticed the more you’re around something, the more you see something, the more it becomes normal to you,” she says. “I’ve seen ten thousand dicks, titties, vaginas. At the end of the day, I would look at them like I’m looking at you right now, and you have on a fucking shirt. It becomes the same thing, you know? That shows you the power of media.
We react, adapt, and become desensitized, over and over. Brandee wants her work to pursue this process in a positive way, defying expectation to redefine the norm. Her hip hop video starred a skinny white boy: “He could probably dance to hip hop too,” she reasons. “Like, it happens! Why does it look weird to us? Because we see a person and place them. We have to put things in categories and label things to understand them.”
“I want to take that whole context and just like — ” She smacks her hands together, then shrugs. “It could be a boy putting on makeup but he could be straight.” Brandee goes on to describe other “skits” she’s imagined. One involves kids with milk and cookies and Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love.” Another stars a drag queen. Another involves cunnilingus and pie. You get the sense these ideas are ever-flowing. Brandee grew up in the chaos of New York city, and she’s become a special kind of anthropologist, one that studies real moments and tweaks them to achieve some level of absurdity.
Back at the Bushwick basketball court, shivering Brandee is especially worrisome because she’s usually bright and emphatic, wide-eyed and snapping her fingers to indicate the timing of the scenes she sees. She beams when describing her future short films. One idea involves a breakdown of gender lines, and Brandee’s attitude is the opposite of academic. “That’s like, fun, you know?” She can’t resist a good plot twist.
