Rebecca HaithcoatBrooke Candy is buddies with Miley Cyrus. You may have seen the Instagram photo of them kissing.
Candy is a 24-year-old rapper, and yes, that's her real name. She and the former Disney princess could pass for fraternal twins, though only Candy has a tattoo on her torso of a naked black woman squatting underneath the words “Bump 'N' Grind.”
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Candy is making waves on both the music and fashion scenes. But when it comes to shocking behavior, she makes her labelmate Cyrus look downright chaste. Candy favors spike heels, S&M-inspired getups and enough makeup to qualify her for RuPaul's Drag Race. She travels with a crew of mostly gay men, which she calls her “Fag Mob.” She's a lesbian herself, and has campaigned to reclaim the word “slut.”
Twerking? That's a rookie move.
Over brunch at Hugo's in WeHo, she gossips and talks about the latest episode of Real Housewives. In conversation she's frank – “I'm tiny because I diet” – and not shy about revealing her unlikely story.
“Some of the things that have happened in my life are so bat-shit crazy, I would never in a million years have ever expected them to happen,” she says, scooping up guacamole with a tortilla chip.
Candy's father, formerly the chief financial officer at Hustler, and her mother, a nurse, split when she was 8 and growing up in Agoura Hills. As a teen, Candy dressed “really odd” and cut her hair into a mullet, standing out in a sea of Juicy Couture sweat suits. Bullied extensively, she headed to San Francisco after high school before coming back to L.A. – and coming out of the closet – when she was 21.
Brooke Candy; Credit: Ryan Orange
She briefly interned with stylist-to-the-stars Rachel Zoe, styled the windows at the Hustler store on the Sunset Strip, and stripped, first at Cheetah's and then at Seventh Veil. She also frequented such gay-centric parties as Mustache Mondays and A Club Called Rhonda, “dressing crazy, surrounded by a million gay men and drag queens.”
On her Tumblr she began to attract attention with her outrageous costumes; she also drew fame as a fierce, hair-whipping warrior in noted electronic musician Grimes' 2012 “Genesis” video.
Soon after, she released her own video, “Das Me,” which features her rapping and strutting down Rodeo Drive with a toddler on a leash. It caught the eye of Nicola Formichetti, artistic director of Italian clothing company Diesel, who asked Candy to be the official face of the brand.
Singer-songwriter Sia took an interest in Candy, and in December photographer Terry Richardson shot her for the cover of the Diesel 2014 Playboy calendar. A couple months later she signed with RCA Records, and her debut EP, Opulence, is due this spring.
Candy trades on her appearance in curious fashion, claiming to look “like a really beautiful man,” but she's also well aware of her body-as-commodity. (Of stripping, she told Oyster magazine last year, “I may just be a sex object to you, but all you are to me is an ATM.”)
Her lack of self-consciousness is partly due to her father's job. “I was raised from the age of 8 looking at boxes of dildos,” she says. “There was no stigma.”
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