“Given enough paint, paper and permission, there’s no telling where we might end up…”
– Bill Hayward
As a kick-off to Fashion Week 2014 befitting the alternative thinkers of Psychology Tomorrow Magazine, the High Line Hotel in Chelsea was overrun with designers, constructors, and artists of all media at our “Let Loose Your Fashion” event.
With giant swaths of paper, pastels, scissors, and tape on site, participants dove into the materials as well as themselves, devising a personal look that could encapsulate their identity at that particular moment in time. And what moments they were, with attendees fashioning everything from headpieces to ruffled collars, paper scarves to duct-tape skeletons, all intent on expressing their individual vision of how personal style translates into fashion. For some, the fashion enlarged, magnified, and heightened, while for others the materials entwined, enrobed, and interwove with their bodies. The fashion could serve as a grand addendum, or mask as a deft concealer.
Legendary photographer Bill Hayward knows this array of expression well, having photographed innumerable subjects undergoing this active outpouring of the self. Regardless of sex, status, or situation, the act of creating this way unites us as creatures of identity, hearkening back to our most primeval instinct to express and define the world, and guiding us toward answering the ultimate question: Who am I?