Provocative, unapologetic and, best of all, talented. Meet ‘M’, the former model turned furniture designer who knows how to wield a blow torch and take a decent selfie…
Words/ Emmet McDermott, Pictures/ M
If anyone else had been there — apart from the androgynous barista — I wouldn’t have immediately recognized her. She’d always made a point of obscuring her face. Until that moment, all I had glimpsed was an ass cheek, a pair of legs, maybe her lips. Cropped images, meticulously designed to stimulate the imagination, north and south. But nothing conclusive.
She goes by M, just M, a nod to the meticulous segregation of her personal identity from the naked girl in her photographs. I asked to meet her to discuss her work as a model-turned-furniture designer, but I was also interested in the unique way she markets herself on Instagram (@whorehausstudios). Cagey at first, M eventually obliged, agreeing to rendezvous at a members-only coffee club near her studio in Downtown L.A., located in the sepulchral marble lobby of what was once an old Federal Reserve bank.
“The basement is lined with vaults,” she told me, pointing beneath our feet as we meandered with our macchiatos, our footsteps echoing into the vastness. “Beautiful, but it’s impossible to get cell service down there.”
The image of her that I had formed from Instagram vignettes turned out to be a little different from the figure who now led me around, enthusing about the locally-designed leather furniture (“This designer is super Christian, but he actually makes cool stuff.”). Against a far wall sat one of M’s own pieces, a lusciously blanketed bed and frame.
We settled into a deep leather sofa so she could tell me her story. Occasionally, as she talked or smiled or titled her head, I would see flashes of the idealized form she shares on social media. Her hips, her shoulders, her scintillating red hair: the sultry feminine form she choreographs and photographs on a daily basis alongside her stark metallic furniture designs. To humanize the designs, to soften them, and of course, to attract customers.
In broad terms, M’s designs follow an industrial metal trend popular now in gastropubs and bachelor pads, but it’s her marketing strategy — artfully enigmatic selfies of her at work — that sets her apart. After all, it’s not everyday you see a beautiful woman wielding a blow torch. (Unless, y’know, you’re really obsessed with Flashdance…)
In person, M was simultaneously less and more: less (photo) filtered, more real. Flecky marks of manual labor marred her hands. Oily black deposits crept under her nails. Ornate crop circles of metal burns stained her forearms like coffee rings. Her body was like an archaeological dig, periodically turning up small but groundbreaking surprises.
She was slightly older than I was expecting too. From her photos, with those expert poses, honed by years of catwalking, you’d peg her around 26. In the flesh, she looks closer to 29. (Though in actuality, she’s well into her 30s).
The subtle differences between M’s idealized Instagram form and her real-life flaws reveal a fascinating continuum of creator (the actual person) and creation (the idealized person in the photos). On the one hand, as she lives and breathes, M’s body is the culmination of her work in the form of the scars it leaves behind. On the other, in her photographs, M’s body serves as an idealized extension of her creative vision: the feminine form cocooned in the cold steel of industrialization. Her furniture and hard labor is the fulcrum of this balancing act, the prism that refracts this vision.
M is certainly a siren, but this isn’t some frivolous Instagram model filling a mindless void with mirror selfies. This is a girl who, armed with a blowtorch and a fuck it attitude, gave up everything to start over and create something real, recreating herself in the process.
A fashion model for more than a decade in New York City, M moved to L.A. a few years ago in her late 20s. She wanted to try her hand at Hollywood, as many pretty girls do, but she quickly lost interest. She’d met a boy — a soap opera actor — and the two quickly began talking about marriage and buying a farm, filling it with children and stray animals. Somewhere, anywhere but here.
Then, as these stories go, things fell apart. He’d been seeing another woman behind her back. M moved out and the other woman moved in. M’s whole world fell apart. That was that.
By the time she was 30, she faced a harrowing fork in the road: fly back to NYC without a college degree to pursue whatever was left of her modeling career, or give what she’d always been passionate about a real shot.
For as long as she could remember, M had loved tinkering with things. When she moved into a 4-bedroom house in the Valley with her ex-boyfriend, she spent all her spare time buying old fixtures wherever she could find them — lighting, faucets, door knobs — and retrofitting them however she could. This, as one can imagine, involved a lot of rudimentary metalworking skills. So, she made up her mind.
In the wake of her breakup, M did not find herself on a plane back to NYC. Instead, she found herself slogging up and down the sweltering streets off Lankershim Boulevard, hunting for a metal shop — any metal shop — to teach her real metalworking skills.
She never expected this process to be straightforward — it wasn’t exactly the traditional approach to landing a metalworking apprenticeship — but she didn’t expect it to be difficult either. A beautiful young redhead combing sketchy L.A. streets looking for a favor. Usually, girls like her don’t even have to ask, but after more than a few dead ends and myriad scuffed metal workers laughing in her face, M found herself contemplating that plane ticket one more time.
But fortune was in her favor. Trudging home after another day of defeat, M bumped into a welder as he was getting off work. He either took pity on her, fell in love, or both, because he agreed to help her during his night shift at a nearby shop that housed several independent contractors, mostly auto mechanics and security gate builders.
M spent ten months there, speaking whatever Spanglish she could mash together, and the guys were more than happy to have a beautiful woman working (clumsily at first) in their midst, even if they couldn’t understand why this gringa was building coffee tables from their scraps. “I used to be a model,” she would tell them, as if that would alleviate their confusion. They looked at her, a skinny white girl covered head-to-toe in grease, then at the voluptuous Latin woman flaunting a high-waisted thong bikini on their 80s Corona poster. They laughed. M was no model.
When it came to payment, some kind of compensation for everything they taught her, M says she offered, but they wouldn’t take a dollar. All they’d accept as compensation was beer. So, every morning, M arrived to work with a cold 12-pack in hand, trying not to let it bother her that the local 7-11 clerk obviously thought she was an alcoholic.
It was life-altering work, literally. As her apprenticeship drew to a close, M was nearly unrecognizable. In addition to the accumulation of minor battle wounds, the UV light emitted by her welding machine had left her with patchy strips of tanned skin all around her body, wherever her derelict clothes had failed to provide adequate cover. She was once even asked to leave a Trader Joe’s because an employee had mistaken her for a homeless person. But after all was said and done, M had accomplished her goal. She learned how to channel herself through her cold hard medium of choice, from scratch.
“By the end,” she said, “I looked like an orphan from a Dickens novel.”
She would have stayed longer but, as it happened, police shut the place down. Turned out the real business at this location wasn’t metal work after all. It was weed. Little did M know, but behind her familiar metal shop sat a dank little grow house, secretly cultivating massive quantities of bud.
That was two years ago. M’s studio now sits in the back corner of a 7,000-square- foot warehouse in Downtown L.A. near the Arts District, where she’s the only woman in sight. And she’s determined to set herself apart from the design world any way she can.
M called her company (wh)ORE HAüS STUDIOS, pronounced as you might expect, but with a punny visual emphasis on the “ore.” Her strategy — the loud sexual overtones of the company name, the Instagram account — has drawn criticism from purists, particularly from a bizarre subsect of conservative creatives in the DTLA area known as chripsters (Christian hipsters). “I’m sorry,” one asked her, feathers a-ruffle, “What’s the name of your company again?” But overall, M says the haters are few — in person, at least.
M’s product — the whole product (the furniture, the photos, the brand) — is certainly attention-seeking in orientation and tone, and critics are often eager to dismiss art on this basis alone, but what she’s doing across digital and physical spaces is new: M has adopted a digital platform to capture the visual continuum of physical art and the artist who created it. Her side tables and art deco bookends, for example, bear the same angle grinder scars as her hands. Welding burns are more permanent in alloy than on skin, but they blistered her all the same. Her body is her work as much as her chairs or lamps, but unlike other artisans, she embraces this to the extreme, modeling nude alongside her furniture. She captured herself as art as much as everything else.
Where others might say M is (wh)Oring herself out in a more literal sense, I say M’s body defends itself. Her overt sexual presence in these images not only complements her work as an extension of its genesis, its womb, it also serves as a beautiful visual contrast of the organic and inorganic. A woman’s warmth, and the cold unforgiving hardness of steel.
After our meeting, I drove M back to her workshop. The men stopped hammering and grinding for a moment when we arrived, murmuring to each other and glancing at me suspiciously, but the hammering and grinding quickly resumed. It was early, after all, and there was still lots of work to finish.
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