And now his latest essay collection grapples with the most omnipresent mammal that isn’t actually talked about very much: men. Smith is also a Vogue columnist, red carpet fixture and bestselling author – his 2020 book Trivial Pursuits anatomised the mini, ludicrous traumas of modern life.
The bored it-girl who fell out a window in Sex and the City. “SUNDAYS” appears next to a slide of Trinny Woodall in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Christmas shopping on a budget,” he writes alongside an image of Winona Ryder shoplifting. His captions read like howls of ironic despair and source the universality buried in pop culture camp. To his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, Raven Smith speaks in what could be termed “gay internet”: dry, lusty, disillusioned, pictures of celebrities make up much of his feed.
