The First Blonde: Nadia Lee Cohen, Martin Parr, and the Fiction of Memory

Some people are born with a love for drama. Others find it watching their babysitter put on lip liner in a semi-detached house in Essex.

For Nadia Lee Cohen, glamour arrived early and wore Spice Girls perfume. Her name was Julie Bullard.

Now, years later, Cohen returns to that foundational spark—not with nostalgia, but with narrative control. Julie Bullard, her latest project, isn’t a memoir. It’s a fictional biography, a memory in prosthetics, a love letter laced with irony. Shot by legendary British documentarian Martin Parr and staged as a book and installation at Dover Street Market London, the project is at once high camp and kitchen-sink realism.

Julie—played by Cohen herself—lives an ordinary life: weddings, roast dinners, hanging laundry. But every gesture is mythologized. Her home, her hair, her heartbreak. It’s all staged with the exaggerated sincerity of someone who remembers growing up bored and looking for magic.

“Julie was the first person who made me aware of the importance of physical appearance,” Cohen says. Blonde, glossy, kind—she was Cohen’s first glimpse of an aesthetic otherworld.

There’s a morbid twist: in the book, Julie dies. Cohen lies in a coffin, full glam. The funeral is catered by her real-life friend’s mum. It’s part performance, part eulogy, part suburban surrealism. “The death has nothing to do with Julie,” Cohen notes. “And everything to do with me.”

The collaboration with Martin Parr is a meta loop of British visual language. Parr, known for his sharp, candy-colored sociologies, shoots Cohen’s tableaux as if they’re real—his lens giving her fantasy the patina of truth. It’s a dance between artifice and authenticity, where Argos catalogues and jelly shoes live alongside staged grief and quiet longing.

There’s something moving about the way Cohen curates her inner child’s memories with such precision. The cereal boxes. The wedding canapés. The alien slime egg. It’s not about retro chic—it’s about how deeply an image can lodge itself in you. How a babysitter’s hair can become a career.

Julie Bullard is not just a project. It’s a theory: that glamour is a learned language, that working-class beauty is theatre, that reality is best understood through fictions we build ourselves.

And in this story, the first blonde was everything.