Shooting "Tacky Shapewear" landed me a job with New York's most acclaimed young designer.
In other words: about creating with what you know to get to the unknown.
Hola!
At this point you probably already know that I tried REALLY hard for a few years to be a cool New York photographer, and compromised my whole identity just to fit in to a culture and a style of photography that were not my own. That effort only brought me a lot of emotional struggle and an empty bank account. However, I married rich and things are fine now! Just kidding — instead, I slowly realized that the more glamour-obsessed I was, the more I fixated on the way my mom or my sister made themselves prettier every day, or the more Colombian I was, the more value my work had and the more New York clients would come.
This is a short story on how shooting a single piece of clothing that has been looked down upon by Colombian fashion elites and rich society for as long as I can remember, landed me a job for the brand that those same people buy at Bergdorf Goodman’s on their fabulous trips to New York.
Let’s start from the beginning…
Colombian Fajas…
I grew up seeing 90% of the women in my family wearing fajas all day, every day. I also grew up seeing fajas in catalogues, billboards, magazines, and commercials in all the cities and small towns in Colombia. They have literally shaped our local fashion industry, providing solutions, money and a culture of beauty to women of all shapes and sizes. In fact, faja brands were clients of mine back in Colombia and I photographed their collections for many years. Now that I think about it, part of the reason I got an apartment in Manhattan right when I moved to New York was because of the money I made shooting these shapewear items that none of my fancy friends (and probably few of the Latin subscribers reading this post) would ever accept as an aspirational “fashion item.” If anything, fajas have always been considered a piece of clothing that only poor women with fake boobs would wear. I wanted to change that!
Two years ago at the beginning of winter, I realized that it had been years since I had done a personal project: no client, no celebrity and no agents involved — just me and my ideas. The core concept of the project I did was “Colombian fashion history.” I shot nine pictures, eight of which were archive fashion pieces from high-fashion designers that changed the course of fashion history in Colombia. And one of them was a photo of a faja. Looking back, I think I just wanted to prove that in general, our tendency to hate what comes from mass culture prevents us from seeing things as they are. So in order to change that, I needed to create an image that would show a faja in a “Fashion context” (whatever that means, or a.k.a. on a white woman who’s above 5'9’’) so people could actually start seeing them as an incredible piece of engineering and a practical solution to looking great!
This is the picture I shot.
But how did I get that fancy job afterwards?
Well, I posted the picture on Instagram and tagged the model you see above — a beautiful Ukrainian model named Helga who not only me, but New York cool people love and work with often. She re-posted the picture on her profile, and right after that, at around 9 pm, one of her followers re-posted the photo again on his Instagram with the following caption: “Muse Helga wearing Colombian Fajas. Incredible!” I immediately sent him a message to say thank you, and since I was so excited to see people reacting to it, I realized that I had written part of my “thank you” note in Spanish. I apologized for that, and he wrote back: “Entendí todo, soy Colombiano también y vivo en Nueva York” (I understood everything, I’m Colombian too and I live in New York). My heart JUMPED, not only did someone who looked really cool noticed my references in one single image, but he was also Colombian! — and at this point you should know that even if people are horrible I will forever love them just for being Colombian. Of course, he was the opposite of horrible, his name is Pablo, and he told me he worked in fashion too. One week later, we were having coffee near my apartment a that was the beginning of one of the most meaningful friendships I’ve ever had.
But tell us the ending Andrés, this is too long and we were getting used to your “only photos” posts where we didn’t have to read so much…
Well, I think you are right! Or at least that’s what the anxiety voices in my head are telling me right now. So, how about I show the email I got 8 months after meeting Pablo for coffee?
How did we get to THAT e-mail and how did those images taken in Paris look? Come back next week or subscribe to get rest of the story!
Chao!
Andrés
For this project First of all, what is a faja? well, they are just a stretchy corset. Do you have inspirational pictures Marie Antoinette for your dream outfits, well, this is the same, except they
For all these reasons I wanted to create an image where we would use a faja in what many people can recognize as a "fashion context" (whatever that means) - but with it, I wanted to show that we don't have to look further to find fashion and inspiration. We have everything within ourselves and the possibilities to creat magic are endless.
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