Photo Credit: Adam Wilder
Nicole Daddona combines the strange and surreal to create the profound and the fun. The New York-based creative has seemingly used every artistic mode available to her: She is a fashion designer, illustrator, graphic designer, filmmaker, writer and, most recently, musician. Daddona and I sat down in early May to discuss her budding music career, the interconnectedness of her varied artistic practices, and the importance of connecting with one’s inner child.
Daddona is the owner and lead designer of Magic Society, a clothing brand specializing in maximalist “lowbrow high fashion.” She is an illustrator and graphic designer whose work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed, to name a couple of publications. Her filmmaking is housed under her company, Magic Society Pictures, which, led by herself and collaborator Adam Wilder, has produced work with Adult Swim, Amazon Studios, MTV and Cartoon Network.
Most recently, Daddona has donned a new identity: that of the indie-rock musician “FRIDAY.” Inspired by everything from Billy Joel to Marc Bolan and 1960s “bubblegum pop,” she has released two debut singles this spring, “Dear God” and “I Do It For You.” Her formidable music prowess shows no signs of slowing.
For Daddona, FRIDAY is an antithesis to the often-harsh reality. “I wanted something that felt almost like an alter ego, that wouldn’t carry all the baggage of my birth name,” she said. “FRIDAY felt like this superhero.”
Daddona grew up as a regular girl in the suburbs of New York. She then began her career in Los Angeles, where she lived for nearly a decade. The West Coast life didn’t last forever, though; she relocated to the greater New York City area today.
“It was nice to have a change. L.A. was really powerful to open me up to my artistic side and to allow myself to express myself fully, creatively,” she said. “But, I was missing the East Coast and my family a lot, so I went back there and it was kind of like an unblocking in a lot of ways. Going back to the East Coast, I had to face all my old trauma. It was really empowering for me to revisit myself and have a Saturn return moment, where you come back to yourself.”
FRIDAY is what followed Daddona’s coming back to herself, and the persona symbolizes the impact she wants her work to have in the world. “I love the feeling of a Friday,” she said. “It kind of ushers in the fun of the weekend. I want to be that usher of fun for the world.”
In the music videos accompanying her latest tracks — produced by Magic Society Pictures, of course — this theme is evident. Daddona appears as a clown in “Dear God” and as a headless figure in “I Do It For You,” which I can only compare to “Harry the Hunter” from Tim Burton’s 1988 cult-classic “Beetlejuice.” The music and visuals feel larger than life, and almost like that of a surrealist superhero. FRIDAY is simply fun.
Putting herself and her work out there in this way is certainly exciting, but also strange and absurd, Daddona notes. “Even now, it’s really weird,” she said. “I’ve always loved and written music, but I never thought ‘Oh, I can release music.’ It was kind of like a secret thing that I would do. It was something I always wanted to try. So, I got to the point where I was like, ‘If I don’t do this now — put out this stuff I’ve secretly been working on — I’m never going to do it.’ So I just decided to go for it.”
The reaction from her friends, family and the general public has been interesting, she told me. Daddona defines the early stages of any artistic venture as the “cringe period,” where one is learning about the craft and gathering resources. “My friends think I’m a little crazy,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a cringe period, I think. Just because it’s something different.”
It’s hard when multimodal creatives are pigeonholed into a specific artistic identity, Daddona said. She’s seen this occur in her own life with the release of FRIDAY’s music.
Her entire career has been thus far centralized on her fashion brand, Magic Society. “I started as a visual artist,” she said. “I was doing editorial illustration, but I wasn’t making enough money full time. I saw a couple of my friends who had started making enamel pins out of their houses. So, I started to design some pins. Eventually, the pins got into Urban Outfitters and were doing really well. From there, I just started exploring, designing some weird handbags, and then they kind of blew up from there.”
Magic Society then expanded to include Magic Society Pictures, Daddona’s film company. It’s inception was an organic, classic Hollywood tale.
“Since I was young, I loved playing in weird costumes, putting on performances and drawing cartoons. I moved to L.A., which is obviously Film City. I met my writing partner, and we started making these weird, short-form videos. They were horrible; I would not want anyone to see them now,” Daddona added with a laugh. “They were not getting any results. My writing partner was very encouraging; he said, ‘We need to be making films.’ So, we started selling TV shows, developing series and eventually writing for film. It became a really cool way for me to channel my creativity.”
Again, with her filmmaking, Daddona experienced a “cringe period.” Without resources and experiences under your belt, she said, the work is inevitably not going to be ideal.
“A lot of the early films were really bad,” she said. “But, that’s part of it. Then they started to get good. All artists experience a period of things being bad, and they know that the thing they’re making is bad, but they only know that because they know what’s good; they have good taste.”
For Daddona, her tastes aligned with her resources and skills over this past year. Her film “The Mundanes” was accepted into the 2023 cohort of the renowned South by Southwest Film Festival. “That was confirmation that ‘Oh, I’m good at this,’” she said. “‘This is a thing where I’m not just dreaming anymore, throwing things on YouTube, but I’m a director and a writer.’ That was really cool.”
Along Daddona’s journey from a struggling graphic designer to an emerging filmmaker and the head of a successful fashion line, she has been met with questions of identity and what defines “good” artistry. For her, both of these questions are answered with the purity and individuality of her work.
“Online, people are like, ‘What, you’re making music? I thought you made movies. I thought you made clothes. What are you doing?’” she explained. “But that’s OK. I’m OK with the crunch time and the low likes because it feels so pure to myself, as an expression of myself. I love it. I don’t care if it’s cringy. I’m having a good time.”
I was curious to know why Daddona feels pulled to create, to constantly strive for new modes of artistic expression. “I think it’s just like breathing,” she told me. “I have to do it. For artists, it’s just part of you. You can’t not do it. It has to come through you.”
Throughout the remainder of her life and career, Daddona aims to become “the biggest rockstar in the world. I’d love Magic Society to grow to be like 50 times as big as it is now. I’d also like to win an Oscar for movies that I feel really excited about and proud of.”
In all of Daddona’s varied, superb artistic work, whether it be in her music, illustrations, filmmaking, fashion designing or writing, it all comes down to fun. “I really hope that people take away a feeling of fun. I really think my mission is to usher in the fun, the Friday. To remind people of their inner child and give that inner child space to play. I think that translates through everything I do. I hope my work connects people to their goofy selves. We suppress that so much out in the world. So, I hope they can take away permission to have fun.”
Follow Nicole at @nicole__daddona, @magicsociety and @magicsocietypictures to follow along on all of her artistic endeavors. Stream FRIDAY’s “Dear God” and “I Do It For You” on Spotify and YouTube.