Nothing rhymes with orange, and nothing looks good with orange. In fact, I detest the color orange. It does not look good on anyone, it is not flattering whatsoever, it looks tacky, it overwhelms the outfit, it’s obnoxious, it eats everything it is paired with, it is hideous. Or so I thought.
The purpose of this shoot was to wrangle a fear, to tame a (very ugly) beast, and to work with something I hate. Laced with— or perhaps saturated with— sarcasm, this shoot stood to make fun of an ironically ugly color and some stereotypically Instagram-able personas.
A little bit of a backstory: I used to be obsessed with the color orange. My childhood bedroom was coated in a stressful shade of traffic cone, and I was quick to introduce it as my favorite. As I grew up and stopped shopping at Aeropostale, I began to hate the color. It is such a bold, neon shade that it is very hard to work with and make it look, well, fashionable. Not to mention it’s alarming tones conjure images of warning signs, construction zones, airport landing strip lights, and a variety of other things that are intended to keep you away from something.
The color orange has done just that, so I set out to reconnect with my roots, if you will, and control an element of my styling that I would otherwise avoid like the plague. It is just an ugly color, and I needed to find a way to make it visually appealing.
Each look is an Instagram character, in a way. I figured social media was the best platform for my style-sarcasm, because us millennials are just so damn easy to make fun of.
I took a music-festival girl, plucked her out of ‘shroom filled field, and dropped her and her Free People style in an ugly, rocky dead zone. No sound, no people, no grass and hippies; just a rocky lot with some forgotten equipment and nothing to hashtag.
Then, I took the world’s worst camp counselor and pulled her out of the woods and left her among dangerous, industrial equipment. You trusted this Twitter verified 20-something with a bad attitude to take care of your kids during the day, and kept up with her trespassing-tendencies online.
The last target of mine was the one and only Kylie Jenner. If we’re talking sarcastic style on an it-girl basis, she was almost too easy. Of course, taking cues from her solo-shots, her 98.2 Million Instagram followers must pay attention to her for some reason. I took Kylie and I put her in her element: in a T-shirt with her own photo on it (making out with Tyga amid controversy) and dropped her in an over-sexed and grungy setting for the perfect content.
Sarcasm tends to be my medium of choice, and using that to take control of something that has had power over me was very successful. I am truly in-tune with my own social-media stereotypicality, and now I am finally back in-tune with the color orange. It’s still ugly and it’s still not my first choice, but now I feel better about handling it. Beyond that, I feel more confident in my ability to style beyond my comfort zone and work with things (and metaphorically people) that I do not agree with.
Anyways, nothing rhymes with orange still, but at least I’m not afraid of it.
Stylist: Eileen Gillis
Photography: Robert Carter
Model: Akuya Stoddard
clothing all stylist’s own