The ultimate badass cat lady (reports vary on how many she actually had, but it was somewhere between 15 and 25!). Leonor Fini was an artist who defied classification, rejected the established art movements of the day, and just did her own sweet thing in fabulous outfits.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1907 and raised in Trieste, Italy, Fini arrived in Paris in 1931 at the age of 24 and rapidly became the talk of the town. Self-taught, she worked across six decades — painting, illustrating, designing costumes for ballet, opera and film — producing a body of work defined by powerful mythic women, gothic atmospheres, sphinxes, and cats. She died in Paris in 1996, aged 89, still painting and still surrounded by cats.

There are many, many reasons why she deserves a permanent place in the Haus, not least because her very way of being has been an enormous influence on me and how I present myself and my artwork. For example, she was particularly enamoured with cats, and like me, used them throughout her work as symbols of independence and power, often blurring the lines between herself and cats in her paintings.

Her outfits are the stuff of legend - bordering on costume, but worn with such integrity they feel completely natural - like, of course you’re wearing an owl mask to dinner. Why wouldn’t you?

From elaborate animal masks, to feathered wigs and gowns, to crowns and armour, she lived to command attention, and bollocks to what anyone else might think of her. Even in her studio, the clothes she wore to paint in were beautiful. My particular favourite is the black and white striped cape you can see in the image above (it’s because of her I paint in a gorgeous floral kimono).

All of the images above are taken from the Leonor Fini archive site

She said it herself: "I liked to go solely to make an entrance, to be intoxicated with myself for a few moments. That my costumes were so beautiful, so exaggerated, that everyone would stand back to watch as I passed by - that satisfied me completely."

And also: "To wear a costume was to move in another dimension, another species and space."

The writer Jean Genet (for whom Fini illustrated a book of poems) once wrote a letter complaining about her theatrics, saying that she was “using the mask of costume to shield her from the realities of life.” Needless to say she ignored him, and continued to be as theatrical as she pleased.

She was openly bisexual and polyamorous, and refused every label on offer - including ‘woman artist’, which she found as reductive as all the others. She delighted in subverting norms in her subjects - painting women as powerful and dominant, and men as passive and decorative.

She was powerfully non-conformist in everything she did, and also like me, otherness wasn't just a theme she explored. It was baked into and celebrated in everything she did and every aspect of her life. When the Surrealists came calling, she was happy to show up at their parties and exhibit alongside them, but she took what was useful and point-blank refused to offically join the movement. She loathed the homophobic and misogynistic views of André Breton - the co-founder of Surrealism - and the patriarchal structure. Her own words: "I never saw the point of being part of one group. I preferred to walk alone."

And apart from all of the above, the thing that really appeals to me about her is that she understood that the life is the art. Not separate from it. Not in support of it. They’re the same thing.

One vision, multiple avenues of expression.

The costumes, the legendary parties, the theatrical apartment, the refusal to be claimed by any movement or label - none of it existed outside the work. It was all one continuous act of self-creation, as deliberate and as carefully composed as anything she put on canvas. Her friend Dorothea Tanning described her as "an imperious flash of taffeta and perfume and feathers", and that wasn't a description of her outfit. That was a description of her presence. Her entire way of being in the world.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do here at the Haus of Cats. Fini didn't separate her work from her life - the cats, the lovers, the costumes, the parties, the refusal to be labelled - it was all one continuous act of meaning-making, and the whole thing together was the art. She was the artist, she was the art. I'm reaching for the same thing. My work is all about otherness, and so is my newsletter, my YouTube channel, the cultural curation, my outfits, my parties, my friends and my life.

Like in Fini’s world, none of those things are decorative additions to an art practice - they're all the same statement, made in multiple ways. You can't pull one thread out without catching all of the others.

I’ll talk about her amazing paintings another day (although if you’re curious you can see a selection here).

See more outfit magic in The Dressing Room

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