"Closet" by Sofia Lai

CREATIVE DIRECTION & STYLING Sofia Lai
PHOTOGRAPHY Luca Trevisani
STYLING ASSISTANT Lauren Van Meeuwen

The project started in 2020.
Since I was a teenager, I’ve taken pictures of human portraits and peculiar environment contexts, trying to seize emotions and capture the distinguishing features of the world around me. Coming from Florence, a small city in Italy, I have always been fascinated by the differences in people's everyday life in comparison to London.

For this reason during the past couple of years, using my experience in the fashion world, I have decided to merge together my two biggest sources of inspiration, intimate and environmental. Through a subjective lens, I tryied to enhance the essence of a person's identity/attitude and general gestures by creating “marionettes”, often distorting reality and shapes to achieve an emotional effect. These pieces mark how personal experience influences our perception of reality, and call attention on how we sometimes feel, part of a community of strangers who have no information about each other but still build stories around them.

For me these installations celebrate the importance of human connections, contributing to a shared sense of intimacy and understanding of different cultures and communities throughout elements that are relevant in my life like fashion, which is part of my identity, my vision of the world, using this as a tool to express who we are.