Honey Dijon

Coming to a music festival near you this summer, Honey Dijon likes her day-wear simple and expensive. Here, she is wearing a white cotton shirt and white cotton trousers, both by EDUN. The gold jewellery is Honey’s own.

Horacio Silva: Honey, I don’t know any-one who moves in as many circles as you. One minute you’ll be DJing at some too-cool-for-school night in New York, the next you’re off to Cartagena for a beaumonde party.

Honey Dijon: I do move through quite a few. But I’ve always been interested in different lifestyles, sexual orientations and gender expressions. I relish that. The surprising thing for me is that I’ve man-aged all I have by playing underground house and techno.

HS: I can never remember who said it, but talking of social agility and mobility brings to mind that quote “The essence of style is someone who can be comfort-able in any room.”

HD: I’m a contributor to Style.com, so I’ve been thinking about exactly what style is a lot lately. I like to think of my-self as a stylish person. Not because of the clothes that I wear — which for day normally consist of a perfect jean, a cashmere sweater and a blazer, inci-dentally — but because of the way that I live my life. Above all, I’m curious

about people’s experiences, so it doesn’t matter to me how much money or what social standing they have.

HS: I think curiosity has a lot to do with it. From what I know of you, you’re an autodidact who’s devoured magazines for years and acquired so many that you have a special storage place for them.

HD: No, it recently got destroyed! There was a fire two units down from mine at Manhattan Mini Storage. The fire department doused all the rooms around it, and half my magazine collec-tion got ruined. I had The Face, Blitz, Italian Vogue from when Steven Meisel first started photographing for it, French Vogue, Details, Per Lui, Jill…everything. I’m devastated.

HS: That’s awful. How influential were they for you?

HD: Very! I grew up in a middle-class household on the South Side of Chi-cago, and I’ve been a huge magazine junkie since I was 12. They were my ed-ucation in art, fashion, culture, living. I actually got into them because my

uncle was a tailor. I used to go into his shop with my father to have his clothing fitted, and there were always GQs around, dating back to the 1960s. The first time I saw them, which would have been about 1988, I was hooked. The ones from the late ’70s with all the Charivari and Matsuda ads and the ones from the early ’80s when Bruce Weber and Denis Piel were shooting for them — I couldn’t believe there was this whole world that I’d never seen before.

HS: Which title best represented your generation, would you say?

HD: When I discovered Details, and particularly Interview, that completely changed the game. I mean, in the ’80s and ’90s, Interview was unbelievable — you’d have an artist interviewing a night-life person, a bartender interviewing a designer. People from different social places all talking to each other. I guess that shaped the way I see the world.

HS: Do you think growing up in Chicago had an effect?

HD: Oh, it did. I grew up around

Modern Mobility

Honey Dijon is all over the place, in a good way. One minute she’s rocking a black-tie party in New York for the CFDA, and the next she’s at Berghain in Berlin, jazzing up the famous techno club with her trademark sound that mix-es old-school house from Chicago — her home-town — with anything from disco to funk to soul. Not for Honey the jeans-and-T-shirt uniform of her fellow DJs. By night, she’s more likely to be in Alaïa or Givenchy. Maybe it’s her combi-nation of androgynous allure, musicality and old-fashioned politesse, but for Honey, it seems that all doors are always open.

InterviewHoracio Silva

Portrait Annemarieke van Drimmelen

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Honey Dijon

the birth of the house music movement. I started going to clubs when I was 12; there was a train station where you could get a fake ID for $15. Chicago’s very segregated, so the black clubs, like the Muzic Box, where Ron Hardy often played, and C.O.D.’s, where Frankie Knuckles used to play, were where you’d hear early house music and disco labels like Salsoul, West End and Prel-ude, mixed in with a lot of Europop, like early Yazoo, Depeche Mode, Spandau Ballet and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. At the same time, all of the white gay clubs were playing high-energy. So I was getting two different educations. Plus my parents played a lot of R&B, soul and Motown at home. I had all of these references just bouncing around in my head.

HS: It sounds fairly factional. Did you have to identify with one particular group?

HD: I’d talk to the Chicago house kids about disco, because all the early house music was based on the breaks in disco music. And then at the white gay clubs I could talk about the synth bands, be-cause a lot of that music was playing at the house clubs. So for me, there was a total cross-pollination. It prepared me to travel the world.

HS: When did you move to New York?HD: In 1996. So I’ve been here for 19

years.

HS: That was a time when uptown was still mixing a lot more with downtown.

HD: Oh, yeah, it’s a different world now. I remember being in the first issue of Numéro magazine, when that launched in New York in ’98, and go -ing to Nan Kempner’s house for a story about contrasts and similarities. Can you imagine — me, this downtown kid, being invited to her famous Park Avenue apart-ment? And she was so chic and polite. I thought it would be the most uncom-fortable situation, given my background or my gender or whatever but I have never felt more welcome.

HS: Since you brought it up, when did you start questioning your gender? Was there a moment when you thought, “This isn’t who I want to be?”

HD: Yes and no. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about being born in the wrong body. I really don’t like this sort

of thinking. How could the body you’re born in be the wrong body? There is no wrong body on this planet. We’re still stuck in this very binary way of think-ing about life: good/bad, black/white, male/female, straight/gay. We need to rethink that. You can make changes to the exterior to match how you feel spir-itually and energetically, which is what I did. But for me, the evolution of my consciousness and realising who I was as a human being was more important.

HS: Walk me through that evolution. HD: Well, if you wanna get really spe-

cific about it, I didn’t even know what trans was until I moved to New York, because I didn’t have access to that in-formation when I was a kid. You had drag, but I never really related to that. I thought that I was just an effeminate person that was gay. I was inspired by artists and performers like Greer Lank-ton, Teri Toye and International Chrysis, so I started coming to the city and got into the downtown scene. Then I met Con-nie Girl, and it was like, “Wow, you can be an artist, and you can be vibrant.” And it just snowballed. I always say that I was born in Chicago but I grew up in New York, because this is where people taught me who I was and celebrated it instead of making me feel freakish.

HS: I find it interesting that you didn’t relate to the spectacle of drag and con-nected more with the fashion world.

HD: The funny thing is, when I was doing drag, I was always the low-key one. I used to get criticised because I wasn’t flashy enough, but that approach didn’t really interest me. I worshipped at the altar of fashion; I was never into the campy show tunes. The only reason I knew about Liza Minnelli was because she was the best friend of Halston!

HS: That’s funny. Why do you think that house music, which really is a product of the ’80s, has endured and infiltrated so many eras and social circles?

HD: It’s just one of those art forms that continues to morph and evolve. There’s always a new generation discov-ering “Your Love” by Jamie Principle and Frankie Knuckles or “Finally” by CeCe Peniston — underground hits that crossed over into the mainstream. Through those new converts’ eyes, house continues to stay vibrant and fresh. Plus, technology has made it a lot easier for younger

people to make it really cheaply; you don’t need to go out and buy a lot of drum machines and synthesisers. You can get one software program and make a track in your bedroom.

HS: One aspect of music that I know you find retrograde is its appreciation by the fashion set. You’ve said they’re a bit backward-looking in their tastes…

HD: Don’t get me started! I never understood the reigning love of pop and disco among such global tastemakers and cultural movers. They’re supposed to be avant-garde, but they’re still listening to music from 30 years ago. Most fashion events are like weddings or high school dances. The fashion world embraces new ideas in everything but music.

HS: I guess that’s why you’re there, Hon-ey. Is there ever an occasion where you don’t feel like you fit in?

HD: All the time, every day. I feel like there’s a glass window in front of me and I’m on the outside, looking in on every-one else. Since I move in many different situations, I’m a combination of so many different cultures and social groups that I don’t feel I truly fit any one of them. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m a Gemini, so I like contrasts, and I’m not afraid of being a fish out of water.

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