10-05-2025
Candy Land: Hari Nef Walks Through a New Exhibition on Actress and Warhol Superstar Candy Darling
Vogue: Hari, I'd love to know when you first became aware of Candy—and what are your first memories of seeing her?
Hari Nef: I probably first became aware of Candy on Tumblr. Prior to Tumblr, I had my own references of fashion as fashion, art as art, film as film, but Tumblr was where these things started to talk to each other. And the time that Tumblr was a dominant social media platform was also a moment when identity politics, as we now recognize it and speak about it, started to coalesce into a language and set of standards on the internet—specifically in the way discourse from college campuses and theory books started to become disseminated and boiled down on the internet. And so Tumblr is where this idea of a trans archive or a trans history started to cohere for me.
You have these really, really compelling images of this woman, Candy Darling, that are so delectable, and they fit so well into a broader grid of Steven Meisel photos and Antonioni movie stills and all of these things that I was discovering. There was this image of this woman who looked like the most gorgeous Old Hollywood movie star, but to find out that she was a transsexual and mixing with the Warhol crowd…
I knew plenty about Andy Warhol; I read any book I could find about him in high school, and Factory Girl came out in theaters when I was in high school. I knew about Edie Sedgwick; I knew about this scene, and I knew that that was the Petri dish of so many things that I thought—and still think—are 'cool.' But to realize that there was a transsexual in this midst, who was so beautiful and so celebrated and left behind her a testimony through her diaries that sounded a lot like the things that me and some other girls were talking about, [regarding] our lives and articulating our desires and identities and bodies… If you just looked a little bit deeper, past the images—here was a woman who was speaking from inside of all that, 50 years before any of us were.
And who had some agency, and was making movies with the likes of Warhol….
