All dressed up

Thrift stores and me like each other a lot. Maybe a little too much. I give. I take. It’s hard for me to go into one without leaving with something. The lack of self-control is real.

Anyway, I had purchased a few dresses overtime to use for different shoot ideas. As it often goes, I get inspired by something found in a thrift store, buy it (because you don’t know if you’ll find it again! Or anything like it!), and then take it home and when I can’t pull a shoot together quick enough (excited by that sudden burst of inspiration), the inspiration fades, and the thrifted item goes into a storage box where it waits for its new owner to be inspired again. Well, those storage boxes get full and I get frustrated with having the stuff, and I have to clean them out. But before anything gets donated again I have to use it in a shoot first. That’s the rule. My rule. And the dresses were up. They had to go. So, I pulled them all out, thought they collectively had some high-school-dance-vibes — which sparked an idea — and I was off and running.

Dream Teens

It worked out that I had just recently shot with Linnea, the female model, a couple months before (that shoot coming soon) and thought she would be perfect for this concept. Finding the right guy, though, was not as easy. But, after falling down the rabbit hole of Instagram’s discover page, I found Watson who ended up being one of those lucky finds — up for it and comfortable in front of the lens. They worked out perfectly together and it ended up being a really fun evening with these two.

From the initial spark of the idea to the execution, I was able to pull this shoot together within five days and then safely send those dresses back off to the thrift store … except for that last dress. There’s still one more idea linked to that one ... so … it’s back in a storage box.

Photographed September 2019

Linnea is represented by Niya Management