Who is Underbite Girl? Meet the Brisbane artist dressing Amy Taylor
image via @underbitegirl/instagram
words by arielle richards
When it comes to punk fashion, no one is doing it like Amy Taylor. She’s being dressed by a 21-year-old.
Char Kemp has just quit her retail job to focus on creating “wearable art” full-time. For the past three years, the effervescent, eager 21-year-old worked at Dangerfield, at all other times sewing “kinda gross, messy, fun, pointy and angry” garments in her grandparents’ Brisbane/Meanjin basement.
Her label, Underbite Girl, is freakish, fab and made for rockstars: raw meat prints, spiked corsets, dogs, mullets and teeth. Teeth everywhere, teeth as a rule – pointy teeth, gapped teeth, teeth in braces, x-rayed teeth, hand-painted close-ups of teeth on bags, boots, corsets, and bikinis – subverting the feminised silhouette and screaming rack off.
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This year, Char’s work was worn by Amy Taylor, front-woman of Melbourne’s own Amyl and the Sniffers, for the band’s worldwide tour, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and, more recently, the ARIA Awards. She says she still can’t believe it.
“Every time Amy wears my stuff, I’m always just like, ‘oh my God’,” she says. “She’s my favourite musician. She’s on my wall.”
Behind where Char sits cross-legged on her bed is a scrapbook menagerie of posters, prints and torn-out magazine pages that stretches beyond our Zoom frame: Pete Burns models a luxurious white Vivienne Westwood coat, its enormous fur collar framing him like an angel, a stunning Slavic frilled-neck lizard. A press shot from Madonna’s 1980 ‘Lucky Star’ music video: mesh singlet over a lace bra, arm cuffs and a lone silver star earring. And a familiar toothy, red lipsticked smile belonging to Amy Taylor.
Char painted it three years ago in her high school art class, and after that began “painting teeth on everything”. Two years later, she posted the painting on Instagram to commemorate her “teeth art anniversary”.
Amy followed her back. “I remember it so clearly, because I was so fucking excited,” Char says. “And then she just messaged me one day asking to buy something. And I was like, ‘yes you can, because I had you in mind when I made it’.”
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In May, Amyl performed ‘Tiny Bikini’, from the band’s Grammy-nominated album Cartoon Darkness, on The Tonight Show, wearing Char’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert-inspired thong bikini top – a bombastic confluence of camp-Australiana excellence. Char says she didn’t know Amy was going to wear it.
“I made it for her just for fun, I was either watching Priscilla or I was watching, like, a video essay on it on YouTube. And I thought it would be such a good idea.”
“But, oh, my God, that outfit, it looks so simple but actually took so long to make. I was sourcing thongs. I was painting thongs. And then I was pissed because I couldn’t find orange ones, like from the movie. I was at a dollar shop in Redcliffe and I found a purple one. I hate purple. But in the end, it actually looked great.”
Char has been making and selling clothes since she was a teenager, screen-printing T-shirts with ‘I love mullets’ and selling them at 15. For a while, she used whatever she could get her hands on, “bed sheets, op shops, stuff stolen from the fabric bin at TAFE”, especially when she was “really, really broke”.
“I love getting random shit at the dollar shop. The dollar shop is an inspiring place,” she tells me. “There’s so much fabric out there, just sitting there. It doesn’t matter what colour it is, you just need a canvas.”
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Amy Taylor’s ARIAs dress, inspired by Thierry Mugler’s silhouettes (one of Char’s favourite designers) was constructed over weeks from leather scraps bought on Facebook Marketplace. It was upholstery leather, thick and absurdly difficult to work with. But she made it happen.
Fashion, like punk music, is political. Vivienne Westwood recognised this in the ’70s, embracing the DIY, the rag-tag, the subversive, and defining the genre’s aesthetic for decades to come. Inextricable from Char’s defiant DIY aesthetic is her passion for heavy music, particularly the feminist, political themes of ’90s punk rock bands Bikini Kill and Riot grrrl. She paints vicious dogs on corsets and hot pants in a tribute to Philadelphia-based Mannequin Pussy.
But the local Australian hardcore and punk scene remains an unwavering source of inspiration. Char cites a handful of female-fronted bands from across the country: Backhand, Boudicca, Masochist and Outright. “I just love girls in heavy music. I wish I was mega rich so I could pay for them all to tour overseas.”
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As a self-professed fan who gained notoriety for working with Amyl, she’s eager to introduce her audience to smaller bands. “There’s so much talent here that deserves to be massive, especially in such a male-dominated genre.”
Char prefers to make “wearable art”. Her inspirations, spanning from Vivienne Westwood to drag artists, provide an unwavering font of inspiration for impractical garments. She hates practicality, creating for the stage is “just fun”.
Her clothes are layered with symbolism – the teeth motif is “biting back”. As Char explains, “It’s owning how people will call you a ‘mouthy woman’ for sticking up for yourself and for others, for being political and outspoken.”
“It also just looks cunt,” she giggles.
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The first time Amy wore one of her meat bikinis at a show in the Sunshine Coast, Char was at work. Then again, when the rockstar texted her to let her know she’d be wearing her thong bikini on The Tonight Show, Char was folding clothes.
“I told some people, and they’re like, ‘cool, anyway, you have to unpack stock now’,” she laughs. “Cool shit always happened to me when I went to fucking work.”
Now, she can focus on her art full-time. “I’m really, really happy that I can do that. Whenever I told my teachers that I wanted to do this as a career, they’d say ‘oh what about graphic design?’ I was told for years it was unrealistic. But I don’t care,” she says. “I love it so much. It’s so good to be able to put my full energy into it.”
Keep up with Underbite Girl here.
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