Annakim Violette's dad is one of the world's biggest rock stars, but she strikes plenty of original chords of her own. Tom Petty's youngest daughter is an artist, style icon, budding movie producer and 21st-century muse, and even without knowing her lineage, it's impossible not to notice her free-spirited, vampire-meets-fairy aesthetic, which gets this 28-year-old plenty of attention.
PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON
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Violette finds a way to decorate every part of her life, beginning with the purple steps outside her 1922 Silver Lake house, which she shares with a cat and four dogs, including a wolf hybrid. From her glitter-covered taxidermy artwork to the vintage lace, leather fringe and elaborate jewelry in her massive one-bedroom "closet," Violette's vision is eerie yet attractive, reflecting her own life philosophy.
"It's not that I don't see a dark side, but the dark side doesn't look any different to me than the light," she says. "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow."
That might explain her fascination with works like Blade Runner and Paradise Lost. Violette admits to being obsessed with apocalyptic themes and unexplained phenomena. In fact, she's working on producing a retro-futuristic film of her own, Garden of Eden, written by Rachel Kolar and directed by Maximilla Lukas, and she recently traveled to the Salton Sea to appear as a quasi-synthetic human in director Alia Raza's short film Dual.
While Violette's style makes her a regular in fashion blogs, she doesn't necessarily think of herself as a "fashion person." She's not a fan of cosmetic surgery, trends or attitude. "Unapologetically, I love costumes," she says. "But I hate the fashion industry. I don't have a standard. My low is my high, basically."
Her fashion sense sometimes draws the wrong kind of attention, since she never thinks of dressing a certain way for a certain occasion. That can spell trouble at public places, like LAX. "I'm always like the Tin Man at the airport," Violette says. "I don't stand out to myself anymore, whether to some people I would. It makes me more blind and more honest, in a weird way."
The self-described "love terrorist" doesn't think of her clothes in terms of outfits but rather as memories, believing that garments only look good when they don't have labels, or when they've been traded. When it comes to her wardrobe, "it's just a love of creating a world," she says. "It's that simple. When you're doing anything in the world, you want it to be seen as simple."
Despite her fashion sense, she's now the subject of a forthcoming psychedelic "naked book," a collaboration with music photographer Autumn de Wilde.
"I've lived an eccentric life and I'm a boring person, so I don't have to defend it," Violette says.
You can't blame her for thinking that, as the Petty tune goes, "there's a little more to life somewhere else. "
