Words: Kevin EG Perry

Photography: Charlotte Rutherford

Photographer’s Assistants: Morgan Kranston , Christopher Joseph

Production: LMC Worldwide

Production Design: Kaycee Tarricone

PD Assistant: Travis Fischer

3D Artist: Metapoint.xyz

Styling: Jessica Worrell

Makeup: Anthony Nguyen

Hair: Chanel Croker



Five days before her 31st birthday, Claire Boucher is sat on a pink suede banquette in the Terrace Room of the Sunset Tower Hotel facing out towards a glistening swimming pool. Beyond it is the humdrum brilliance of another sun-bleached day in Los Angeles. If she looks like she’s just rolled out of bed it’s because she has. She’s decided to postpone her birthday celebrations until summer, but whether you acknowledge them or not, birthdays have a special way of making you reflect on the year just gone.

Boucher has had a lot to reckon with. She’s been better known as Grimes since she started making music under that name in 2007, but in the past 12 months the power to define her creation seems to her to have slipped from her grasp. “Without me doing anything, just by random association with other people, I’ve watched my career and my reputation get totally fucking smashed,” she says. “I worked my whole fucking life for this and now everyone thinks I’m so stupid. I was just sitting there incredulous watching my life’s work go down the drain.”

It was in May last year, a couple of months after she turned 30, that Boucher and her partner decided to make their relationship public by appearing together at the Met Gala in New York. This decision was complicated by the fact that her partner is Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who, depending on your perspective, is either humanity’s last hope to colonise Mars and save the species or a union-busting, megalomaniacal James Bond villain in waiting. They made a striking pair: him in a white blazer and an inverted notched priest collar, her in a Musk-designed white marbled high-cut corset paired with a metal collar which looked, as online commentators were quick to point out, not entirely unlike the Tesla logo.