Milo Burgess is a London based artist graduating from Central Saint Martins. Whilst Fine Art is his primary focus, he also explores creativity through music and has a deep love for fashion. He works as the creative director at Vertice London and models under MiLK Model Management.
Does working as a model within the London fashion scene effect your own work as an artist?
Yes. Massively. A lot of my work is inspired by going to talent shoots and castings. One of my pieces is called The Puppet and it represents me since I’ve started modelling. Going to 100s of castings a day and then they just treat you like a human mannequin. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about what you’re about. You’re either right or wrong for the look. And that’s one thing that I’ve found tough with modelling. There’s no way of getting better, you turn up and you either have the look or you don’t.
How is your look defined by the industry?
So I’m 5 different nationalities. My mum is Brazilian and her mum is Malaysian and her dad’s German. And then my dad’s Italian and English. But I’m always cast as the Asian male. I always feel linked to that stereotype – rights what are you Chinese or Japanese? I just think well I’m neither of them but I’ll go for it because I’m getting good money. One piece of my work is called The Asian Ghost and it represents the fragments of my heritage and what people initially see is this oriental figure.
Obviously coming here (Saint Martins) there’s a lot of Asian people, I’m in this weird kind of mid-point when doing modelling for them they all love my look for some reason because they can’t really tell what I am. And they like that. But at the same time I’m British and I don’t speak any of the same languages. When I grew up I went to an all boys group and everyone was white. I was like the oddity that didn’t really fit in and then I came here and everyone is accepted.
What publications and brands tend to be interested in your look?
The Pink Prince magazine, I’ve done a collaboration with them. I’ve gone for quite a few castings for Diesel and Fossil. And then also Hermes so hopefully I’ll be in Paris as they seem to be quite interested in Asian influences at the moment. Where as Milan is not interested at all – they just said no. And I’ve gone into more of the commercial modelling world where as here at Saint Martins I wouldn’t say it’s commercial – not at all.
I got scouted at reading festival, and am now part of the new look model squad. And they were basically like we need 3 guys and 2 girls, so they’ve got one black guy, one white guy and then I’m the Asian guy. I think for me that’s what I’m going for, these commercial brands. I’m on hold for a Wella commercial, the hair company, and they showed me a brief and they needed a guy that was like this, Japanese, Chinese Korean, and he basically looked like me but older and with longer hair. And then they told me that they were going to dye my hair green and basically have to look as Asian as possible. I’m cool with that because its fro 6 grand but…
Do you see the way men are represented and the expectations of men changing, especially within a fashion context?
Another piece of my work, the ballet aspect is taken from Billy Elliot. It was the first film that I watched that challenged what it means to be a guy and explored ideas of class. So my collection is all based on gender, race and class so I interviewed my granddad and my dad at the age of 22 basically looking at things in that respect, and how the three categories have changed. My granddad was in the war, everyone was generally quite racist, people hadn’t seen that many foreigners. It was also very common if you were gay to be put in prison or beaten up on the street. And my dad when he came along he was ½ Italian so already a bit of a mix and then my mum was a big mix and they met in London where everything was quite liberal. Then I came along and I’m a big mix so I’d never really questioned it. Over the years it’s changed slowly.
My final piece is of one of my gay friends and he spoke about how being black and gay is still a big taboo. Where he’s from it’s not really accepted. But one of his favourite things is manga cartoons hence the samurai and Japanese influences. So its kind of taking all these individual stereotypes to create a new stereotype that doesn’t totally exist. This is what we should be looking at.
