VIA NOWNESS

Text by Alexander Hawkins

Female bodybuilding is a phenomenon poised between sport and pageantry, born out of circus strongwomen and 19th-century Vaudeville acts. A fiesta of Herculean bodies fills the music video for Desert Sound Colony’s “I Get Fixed,” as New York director Callie Barlow unmasks the quotidian rituals of its pumped star: 20-year veteran bodybuilder Colette Nelson.

Though the beauty tropes of bodybuilding jar with those of the fashion industry, they both have a tendency to revel in ideals and extremes. Well versed in the beauty standards of her sport, Nelson moonlights as a makeup artist and spray-tanner for gym-obsessed ingénues.