Stuff

The Ladies Of Duke

By Wilfred Brandt

THE LADIES OF DUKE

INTERVIEW BY WILFRED BRANDT
PHOTO BY ELVIS DI FAZIO

Emily Hunt and Raquel Welsh are the two responsible for the Sydney based, celebrity-trash-culture and op-shop fashion obsessed Duke magazine. They are an oddly maternal, eerily co-dependent pair and their homely abode above a shop-front on Parramatta Road makes Grey Gardens look like the Ritz. We sat them down to talk about their lives and the elaborate collections that surround them.

Vice: So tell me about your photo frames.

Raquel: There’s a bunch of rules. If we find a photo of someone in a frame, it stays.

Emily: If we find a frame that has one of those photos that shows you how to put a photo in a frame, we leave that in too.

OK.

R: Sometimes we cut pictures out from magazines. Like there’s the picture of Peter Andre and Jordan’s magical wedding, which we stuck in.

E: It was quite a lowkey wedding, you know.

R: She came in on a pink horse-drawn pumpkin, and a pink Cinderella outfit.

Is her picture on your Love Wall or is she on the Hate Wall?

R: She’s on the Love Wall cause she’s pretty fucking awesome.

E: But Peter Andre’s on the Love and Hate Wall.

R: Yeah, cause we have like, mixed feelings, y’know.

Alright, what’s with your Charles Manson tapestry?

R: I made it for an art show. It’s incredible that nobody bought it. How ridiculous! Nobody’s ever going to make a tapestry of him ever again.

And you named the magazine Duke because you’re both obsessed with royalty?

R: Yeah, but also because we’re obsessed with David Bowie, who’s the Thin White Duke.

I think you guys are obsessed with ordering things. You seem to order everything—all the stuff on your walls and all your books.

E: We are obsessed with ordering. And Duke is really a way of ordering our thoughts.

So you anthropomorphise everything in the house?

E: Yeah totally! Everything’s personified. And that’s why we place them together so it creates more of a life. Because when they’re by themselves, it’s just like, they’re lost.

You have a great collection of monkeys. Are they all from the 80s?

R: Yeah. There was a thing about the 80s with rude chimpanzees acting like humans. But also a thing with a lot of naked women with the chimps as well.

E: It was all weirdly sexualised.

R: It was a weird thing with boobs and chimps.

E: We don’t know why these things happened, but we certainly appreciate them.