By the age of 23, Reign Judge had shot campaigns for Miu Miu and Gucci and walked for Tommy Hilfiger and Sandy Liang. She was signed to IMG, the prestigious modeling agency whose starry roster of catwalk queens includes Gigi Hadid, Anok Yai, and Alex Consani. On social media, she flaunted the uncomplicated, high-low personal style that’s made her every fashion girl’s favorite follow. Judge seemed to be living the dream—but it didn’t feel that way.
“I love modeling. I love fashion. But I felt quite unfulfilled by being the canvas all the time,” Judge, now 24, tells Highsnobiety. “I had the talk with myself of, ‘What is the thing that would make me feel fulfilled if I got to wake up and do it every day for the rest of my life?’ And for me, it really clearly felt like music.”
Another model making beats because their agent told them to? Far from it. Besides that line of thinking being a tired write-off in the age of the multihyphenate, Judge is very much true to this, not new to this. At 18, she aged out of her longtime youth choir after a decade spent training in jazz and opera. Trying to figure out what to do with her life, she dropped out of college to find her fortune in NYC. “I got signed to a [modeling] agency pretty quickly after, so there was never any crossover” with music, she explains.
“I feel like now is the first time in my life where [fashion and music] are intertwining, and it's very interesting to see how they do so.”
One instance of said overlap: Judge styled the music video for her new track, “Overdrive,” on top of directing it. Costuming the video’s male actors was a challenge for her, she recalls. “I went to Jet Rag, which is a thrift store in L.A., and I never dress men, obviously, because I’m a woman…so I was so terrified putting these looks together.” Thankfully, the thrifting gods were on her side. She found exactly the yesteryear blazers and shirts she needed to craft “swaggy, eclectic” looks with a retro spin—think the Jazz Age if it took place in Malibu, where the video was shot.
Judge herself is a Monroe-esque vision in a white Yana Matkivski midi dress, her signature platinum locks spun into an artful updo. She sings over chopped-up drums about a lover that’s made her feel crazy, sending her into overdrive. Only her third single to date, “Overdrive” is lighter, lyrically, than its heartbreak-laced predecessors—“Infatuation” and “Wouldn’t You Like To Know.” It’s also the one she felt most ready to write; she describes the words coming to her unusually fast during a studio session with producer RØMANS.
“I love things that feel like they've always existed, and this song just felt like it always has existed, and it was just in the clouds, waiting for a place to land,” she shares.
Judge’s music marries the rich vocals of Amy Winehouse (one of her earliest muses) with the vintage-inspired feel of Olivia Dean. Her warm delivery and soulful sensibilities hint at a beyond-her-years sonic blueprint—it’s no surprise her parents raised her on ‘Jazz for Kids’ CDs and Ella Fitzgerald. “Overdrive” may have more of a “hip-hop quality to it,” as she describes the track production-wise, but it carries the same sparkling spirit as her first few singles.
With each new release, the clamoring for an album grows a little louder in her comments sections. Judge teases that an LP might come first, once the moment is right. “I'm in the studio almost every day. I'm working almost every day. And I'm excited for when the time comes to put together a longer story for people to tap into, sonically.”
