Behind shades and a moniker, Princess Gollum bridges the gap between her two selves

Los Angeles Times

6 days ago

Almost every time Princess Gollum leaves her home, she's shielded from the outside world by her favorite Rick Owens Hollywood Kriester lenses. Whether she's taking a business meeting or running errands, the multi-hyphenate model prefers to move through the city like 'a rock star in hiding,' with the goggle-like shades dominating the majority of her face.
'I'm very free to look anywhere I want and not have to make eye contact,' she says. 'I can get kind of shy outside, but [with these shades], I role-play almost.'
She's always gravitated toward funky-shaped and oversize frames. This pull toward the ultra-modern and eclectic aligns with how Princess Gollum presents herself online. With piercing eyes, an ever-changing haircut (teensy microbangs, a quasi-skullet, dip-dyed wigs) and a mostly black avant-garde wardrobe, she comes off as an otherworldly, experimental siren.
Princess Gollum is Josephine Lee's internet alias. She created it when she was 23 years old (she's now 33) as a way to bridge the gap between two opposite ends of her identity: her princess-like tendencies and her 'darker, more complicated' side.
'It captures two parts of me that I had a really hard time making into a whole,' she says. 'It's my attempt to kind of merge both of those personalities together and make peace with both of them in a fun, visual way.'
It's not that she lives her day-to-day life as this online moniker, but the name allows her to freely express a more extreme extension of her personality. It's why she felt liberated to create the faux world of Gollum Corp Enterprises, for which she poses in corporate offices with pushpins tacked into her acrylics and jams a ruler and scissors into her updo. It's why she can unabashedly pose wearing fangs or Hello Kitty face paint on her Instagram grid. But it's also how she presents in the world of modeling, hooked up to wires, contorting her body to emulate a snake and sprawled across a hospital bed. Her spirit remains dark, yet whimsical — captured through the way she peers into a camera's lens or the way she artfully tilts her head.
Beyond modeling and maintaining an online following, the Princess Gollum ethos has acted as a vehicle for her 'slasher' lifestyle, meaning she has her hands in many creative pots. Over the years, she's worked as a DJ, jewelry maker (under her brand Spit Snot) and a visual artist, dealing mostly with multimedia projects. Up until recently, she put full-time modeling on hold to focus on Blip, a nicotine replacement brand she co-founded.
'I move through life very organically. I'm not much of a future planner,' she says through a Zoom call on an unusually gloomy summer afternoon. She wears a black, rhinestoned Kuromi tee with her blue contacts, offering a pop of color in her white-walled apartment. 'This new setup has given me a better balance of everything. I still am in survival mode, but my mindset has changed. What fuels me is the want to make the best thing, and now I'm not chaotically trying to do everything anymore.'
In this new vein of life, she feels her style evolving. During her 20s, Princess Gollum remembers going all out and pushing every look to its limits, from her health goth phase to rocking a mohawk. She doesn't regret any of it — except for dyeing her hair orange, she confesses. Nowadays, she finds herself taking risks on a much smaller scale.
'I still dress like myself, but now I know what I like. I like to experiment within those bounds. It's just not as experimental as it used to be.' She recalls having a candid conversation with a friend recently where she posed the question: 'Do I dress boring now?'
But no, Princess Gollum doesn't think 'boring' is the right word. She thinks 'refined' and 'comfortable' are a better fit. If anything, this newfound style has allowed her to dress with ease, including when it comes to eyewear.
'In the last 10 years, I have really learned what's going to fit my face, and I fall in love fast,' she says. Right now, her collection mostly consists of '90s Moschino, Oakleys (for her 'basic' needs) and rare vintage finds. Whenever she's on the hunt for a new pair, her first stop is the Rose Bowl Flea Market where she finds Allyn Scura, a local vendor, who customizes vintage frames. Out of all the pairs she's purchased from Scura, Princess Gollum treasures her custom, bat-winged prescription pair the most.
To Princess Gollum, sunglasses are the final touch that can make or break an outfit all while functioning as a key piece of armor. In hiding her eyes behind these immense lenses, she fights off unwanted energy exchanges and unsolicited stares. She finds her most treacherous battleground to be none other than luxury grocer Erewhon. 'Everyone is always just checking each other out. But I'm shy. I just want to get my smoothie and go.'
Growing up in different Los Angeles and Orange County neighborhoods, Princess Gollum has encountered all kinds of sunglasses wearers. There was that one really cool girl in high school who wore Ray Ban Wayfarers and carried a Chloé purse. There were the athletes who wore their Oakleys religiously. And as she started to indulge in parts of L.A.'s nightlife, she noticed how many people kept their glasses on all night. To her, there's only one instance where nighttime frames can be acceptable.
'It's only OK during a bender or when you're way too wasted and you don't want to get caught. And you're stumbling around at CVS looking for a hangover cure before you go home.'
She starts to laugh about these messy moments where sunglasses aren't a luxury, but rather a necessity. In this flash of shared laughter, it becomes clear what both sunglasses and the online moniker offer to the artist. They give her the room to make a decision, whether she's protecting herself from glaring strangers on the street or the online masses.
Princess Gollum will choose when she wants to share her cutting-edge outfits with the world or keep them to herself. Some mornings she'll neglect her color contacts and rock her natural brown eyes. She'll decide which creative shoots to be a part of and keep her future goals close to her chest. Even then, she'll determine when's the right time to be caught under the fluorescent CVS lighting, dark shades fully intact.