My awesome denim boots, some cat fur, and a handful of buttons.
We are not in the habit of outfits posts on Threadbared, for multiple reasons. But for this joy + ride, a lovely blog given to creative inspirations and interviews, Minh-Ha and I each shot a series of photographs that reflect quite handily our distinct sartorial personalities.
Minh-Ha's photographs are thoughtfully composed. Her sweetheart (a talented photographer) helped to stage these scenes around their apartment building with careful attention to light and angle to set a reflective mood. She wears clothes expressing her concerns for architectural details and interactions between fabrics and the space around the body, clothes reflecting recent insights into her wardrobe (blacks, steel blues, and grays) and new efforts to broaden her sartorial vocabulary (er, other blues and fuchsia). Any viewer can tell that Minh-Ha took care in these photographs, and that she knows her own mind about what she wants.
Me? I stalled on taking these photographs until the very last minute and then decided that I would be a debauched 1979 New Wave party girl waking up on the toilet after a night out at the Mubahay, or Madame Wong's, getting dressed for her day job reshelving at the public library downtown. I threw together these outfits and took these photographs over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes in my upstairs half-bathroom, which I had stripped of its fucked-up colonial wallpaper (the previous dwellers enjoyed a palm tree-laden map of the "darkest interior" where the "barbarians" lived) without yet scraping off the bits. I didn't think too hard because "New Wave party girl" is a sartorial staple in my wheelhouse, and there's about a million more outfits where these came from. I should have worn fishnets in the photograph I'm pulling on my red leather and suede boots, but I was too lazy to reshoot.
One of the things I love most about collaborating with Minh-Ha is our productive differences -- here, made clear with visuals!
