![\"Sophisticated](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/62496.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nPhotographs Cian Oba-Smith<\/p>\n
Inside Isabella Burley\u2019s white mews home in Clerkenwell, London, there is a stainless-steel kitchen, three sleek pieces of furniture, a velvety whippet named Bambi, and that\u2019s it. The lack of stuff (a single silver kettle sits on a kitchen surface, one yellow orchid on the table) would be less surprising were she not the founder of one of the most interesting new bookshops in the world.<\/p>\n
Established in London in 2020, initially online, Climax sells rare or overlooked books and erotica, alongside branded (what Burley calls) \u201cwearables\u201d \u2013 cropped pink hoodies, socks, a latex shopping bag. Currently for sale are an invitation to a\u00a0Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition from 1979 and the first edition of a book called A Project with Bj\u00f6rk along with posters, books and ephemera from a recent history of cult art. A first pressing of Madonna\u2019s Sex book, a Japanese VHS of John Waters\u2019 infamous Pink Flamingos and a Virgin Suicides zine have all sold out.<\/p>\n
To enter the New York store with its pink tinted windows, which opened last year, or the London shop that opens near her home next month, is to step quite quickly into Burley\u2019s mind, a place of provocative, disarming creativity. She grew up in south London, dipping in and out of art college and working at American Apparel, where shop girls appeared in the company\u2019s controversial adverts wearing hotpants and tube socks. In 2007, aged 17, she got a job at Dover Street Market, the Mayfair concept store created by Comme des Gar\u00e7ons\u2019 Rei Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe. This was a place of \u201cbeautiful chaos,\u201d Joffe said recently, where the cashier sat in a little wooden hut amid teetering art installations. On the shop floor Burley would wear a long Junya Watanabe ballgown with an open back and (purchased with her first paycheck) platform shoes with leather fringes that swished perilously across the concrete floor.<\/p>\n
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Sophisticated tastes: much of the Climax Books stock came from specialist Japanese suppliers<\/p>\n
\u201cDover Street was my education,\u201d she says. \u201cReally iconic creative people like [graphic designer] Peter Saville or [fashion designers] Rick Owens and Michele Lamy came in. And because I was so young, people took me under their wing in a really sweet and very generous way. There was a constant creative conversation happening.\u201d When Dover Street Market opened, in 2004, it felt like the centre of avant-garde fashion. As well as passersby who came in off the street, appalled and confused by the store, \u201cthere were the really hardcore Comme des Gar\u00e7ons fans, who would leave in crazy 2D-printed sculptural pieces they\u2019d just bought. It was amazing to see these museum pieces worn out in real life.\u201d Still living with her German mother and New Zealand-born father (in a house she describes, with affection, as \u201cquite hoarder-ey\u201d), she left art school early, frustrated at the obligation to listen to lectures about people she\u2019d interviewed yesterday while freelancing for British style magazine Dazed. Her time at art school was largely spent photocopying books in the library, then pasting them together. Later, she realised she was editing magazines.<\/p>\n
Burley worked for a year as the fashion features editor of Dazed, then another as editor and then, at 24, she became their youngest ever editor-in-chief. For the first time they had somebody reflecting youth culture from the inside. The magazine landscape was shifting as print media adapted to online platforms. In the fashion press, music journalists were being replaced by stylists. Giving Burley the job of editor-in-chief, says Jefferson Hack, Dazed\u2019s CEO and co-founder, \u201cwas a natural progression, one she truly earned, having found her voice early in her creative journey. She was always so plugged-in to the coolest scenes in London. Age and experience never factored into it, she was just ready for that next step. It made perfect sense that the person behind the magazine reflected the energy and spirit of the person reading it.\u201d<\/p>\n
A memorable Dazed cover, their 25th anniversary issue in 2016, involved Burley interviewing Pamela Anderson, reframing her as a \u201cpostmodern artist\u201d \u2013 the shoot by Zo\u00eb Ghertner had Anderson on a beach in Yeezy and Simone Rocha, and Burley\u2019s piece began with a quote about Anderson from Ed\u00a0Ruscha. After a year spent commuting between London and New York as editor-in-residence for Helmut Lang, she became the brand\u2019s creative editor, then chief marketing officer at the luxury Swedish label Acne Studios.<\/p>\n
![\"Isabella](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/62497.jpeg\")
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Isabella Burley: working at Oxfam she learned \u2018how important books are for different types of people\u2019<\/p>\n
In lockdown, Burley launched Climax as a rare book dealership online from her bedroom and, this year, having just turned 35, she\u2019s expanding, opening a new, grand brick-and-mortar store \u2013 previously its London branch was hidden down a tiny Soho sidestreet. It was there that she launched its first publication, a book of photos taken in the 1990s by Sophy Rickett, called Pissing Women. All the pieces of her life to date, \u201chave clashed together in this strange way, challenging the traditional notions of a\u00a0bookstore.\u201d If it\u2019s intriguing, her thinking is, \u201cyou\u2019re going to consume it\u201d.<\/p>\n
While the store carries \u201cuncompromising voices that we love, like Kathy Acker or Gary Indiana, or Hilton Als or Bell Hooks,\u201d Climax\u2019s social media sees celebrity customers like Kyle McLachlan and Dev Hynes talking about the books that have influenced their lives, alongside \u201ceducational\u201d series about art and film \u2013 as the market for print dissolves, this, perhaps, is what a magazine might become. \u201cThe wearable product side of what we do is such a huge part of it now, too, and it\u2019s really fun to be like, \u2018Could Climax be a pair of reading glasses?\u2019 It feels so limitless.\u201d One of its bestselling products is the latex shopper, a nod to traditional bookshops\u2019 canvas tote bags, but made by a gay sexwear company in the UK. They are transparent and stiff, with a slight wobble. A balance of luxurious and thoughtful, \u201cwith a tongue-in-cheek winkiness\u201d.<\/p>\n
Behind a white cupboard door<\/b> off Burley\u2019s kitchen are the only books in the house. Here is a shelf of monographs and vintage pornography, including a 1980s fetish magazine called Madame in a World of Fantasy. The back cover is a black and white image of a woman with a whip, framed with a graphic illustration of an opening zip. The books and ephemera that Burley collects are typically shared with, then dissected by, designers who will use this inspiration to shape a collection or aesthetic that will inevitably trickle down through the culture, emerging in various forms on the high street two years from now. This is how fashion has always worked, artful magpies picking through history and reshaping what they find for now. The word \u201cinfluencer\u201d has hardened and sharpened as social media became a\u00a0viable career path. Burley is like an influencer from a\u00a0different time \u2013 there is a quiet coolness here that comes with experience. She\u2019s not telling you, necessarily, what to buy, but instead what to read, or how to look at an image, meticulously and with purpose. She wears no makeup, a\u00a0square-toed mule and the word Bambi in silver round her neck. Though she was a club kid in her teens, zipping from the shop floor to a club, then getting a night bus home before school, a journalist who knew her said by the time she was at Dazed there was no hedonism evident, that Burley took the work very seriously and approached fashion through a literary lens. Another told me she was \u201cscary, in a\u00a0good way\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"Gone](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/62498.jpeg\")
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Gone already: the Virgin Suicides zine is sold out<\/p>\n
She pulls out another Japanese fetish magazine, which features another woman with a whip, this time in saturated colour, and describes the picture, while holding it delicately, as if a bible. \u201cShe\u2019s wearing an oversized men\u2019s shirt in this acid yellowy green and matching socks with a whip in hand. It\u2019s so iconic on every level. Sometimes we\u2019ll see a\u00a0page like this and be, \u2018Oh, let\u2019s make a hoodie in this colour palette.\u2019\u201d These are publications designed for men\u2019s pleasure, deconstructed and appreciated decades later by a\u00a0woman for its bold visual language and loaded sense of luxury. And because it would be fun as a hoodie.<\/p>\n
Stacked beside the fetish fanzines is a slim pamphlet from 2006 by German artist Wolfgang Tillmans called Why We Must Provide HIV Treatment Information, and a\u00a0glossy catalogue of portraits by the art photographer Nigel Shafran, produced to market a block of John Pawson-designed apartments. While much of the Climax stock comes from Burley scouring eBay, or from specialised Japanese stores, she found this while volunteering at an Oxfam bookshop, in a brief gap between major fashion jobs.<\/p>\n
It was here, too, that she first came across Sophy Rickett\u2019s women. Working at Oxfam (she says, flicking through pages of leather fetishwear), she learned, \u201cthe value of things. And about community, and how important books are for different types of people.\u201d Burley is noticing a shift in the interest of customers (around 60% of whom are women), from the 90s to the 2000s. She\u2019s keen to continue joining dots for them in the same way her fellow shop girls did for her when she was 17 \u2013 the bookshop as a project in cultural education. Browsers are welcome \u2013 each store has a\u00a0little reading area, upholstered in latex.<\/p>\n
Being a shop girl completely shaped my life, my aesthetics, everything. I\u00a0learned so much\u2026<\/p>\n
Despite her many and varied careers, a huge part of Burley\u2019s identity remains fixed, she says, as \u201cshop girl\u201d. It\u2019s a frilly yet loaded phrase that describes a\u00a0role that\u2019s sometimes theatrical and where power (status, money, knowledge) regularly flips. You\u2019re decorative, yet in charge; subservient yet able to guide a\u00a0customer towards something they want that you want them to buy. \u201cBeing a shop girl completely shaped my life, my aesthetics, everything. I\u00a0learned so much. And when we opened New York, a lot of friends were like, \u2018Oh my God, I\u00a0want to play shop girl, too!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Friends who had worked in retail and now were successful stylists or art directors, or artists, \u201cPeople like [content creator and former porn actor] Mia Khalifa, who has been a customer for a while.\u201d Khalifa worked a shift wearing one of their Book Fantasy shirts, posing coyly behind the stainless-steel desk. Supermodel Paloma Elsesser, a\u00a0Climax regular, explains its appeal. \u201cIt feels like stepping into Isabella\u2019s brain: it\u2019s tender, subversive, funny and full of feeling.\u201d It\u2019s a place Elsesser goes, \u201cto be surprised, or to remember that desire and curiosity can be deeply personal. I\u2019ve spent hours there, pulling things at random, talking shit with friends. Isabella has created somewhere that reminds you that taste can be intimate, even a little mischievous, and I love that.\u201d Recently, Climax started selling a cropped T-shirt that says, \u2018I only go to Climax for the shop girls\u2019.<\/p>\n
![\"Bestseller:](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/62499.jpeg\")
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Bestseller: the latex shopper, a nod to traditional bookshops\u2019 canvas tote bags, but made by a gay sexwear company<\/p>\n
There is the question now, as Climax makes its way across the world (with sites planned for Los Angeles, then hopefully Paris and Seoul), with Burley as its face, of how she feels about shop girl evolving to \u201cIt girl\u201d. Burley, who speaks with singsong earnestness, and is planning to switch her ketchup-red hair for blonde, contemplates as Bambi watches politely. \u201cI think It girl was often used for people who weren\u2019t doing things, but I\u2019m happy to be an It girl when it\u2019s about the work that I put out, because that\u2019s really meaningful to me.\u201d She\u2019s ambitious for the brand. As well as the new stores (in New York people dawdle outside, unsure of whether it\u2019s a gallery, or sex shop, or both) she\u2019s thinking seriously about the fashion \u2013 the shirts, the reading glasses. \u201cI feel like we can be the next Supreme,\u201d she says, unblinking. \u201cI don\u2019t see why not.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all her pivots, from shop girl to editor to couture librarian, fashion remains her obsession. \u201cI don\u2019t\u00a0think\u00a0there\u2019s a\u00a0distinction any more between a magazine or a brand or a\u00a0bookstore \u2013 it\u2019s just information.\u201d Fashion, as a part of that, \u201ccan be outrageous and a bit unnecessary, but also totally necessary\u201d. While a woollen coat might keep the wind off your back, it can also have wings. \u201cAnd all the weird contradictions that exist in fashion, for me, totally exist in Climax.\u201d What she\u2019s saying is, the most interesting new bookshop in the world is not just a bookshop. It\u2019s a\u00a0rare invitation into Burley\u2019s world. A\u00a0siren sounds outside and the dog purrs. \u201cClimax is an attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photographs Cian Oba-Smith Inside Isabella Burley\u2019s white mews home in Clerkenwell, London, there is a stainless-steel kitchen, three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-518935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115416371594375125","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}