Chapter one: THE FAÇADE YOU WORE

[Location] London, UK

[Medium] Campaign / Fashion Editorial

[Role] Performer / Talent

[Creative Director] Matthew Howard (Howard Atelier)

[Photographer] Omer Ga'ash

[Publication] KALTBLUT Magazine

[Link] KALTBLUT Feature · Howard Atelier

[About]

There's a reason this project was shot in a bathroom.

Chapter One: The Façade You Wore is a campaign and editorial for Howard Atelier, the London-based millinery house founded by Matthew Howard — a fellow Central Saint Martins MA graduate who has since been selected for the CHANEL & The King's Foundation Métiers d'Art Millinery Fellowship in partnership with Le19M. The work was published exclusively in KALTBLUT Magazine, the Berlin-based platform for fashion, art, and culture.

Matthew approaches hats as sculptural masks — objects that sit at the intersection of theatre, craft, and concealment. When he asked me to be one of the talents for this first chapter, I understood immediately: the project needed a body that already knows how to inhabit the space between showing and hiding. That's the territory I've been working in for years.

The location — a bathroom, red-lit, intimate, a place we don't usually invite cameras into — transforms the editorial from a fashion shoot into something closer to a study of surveillance and vulnerability. You're looking at someone in a space that is ordinarily private. The hat becomes a shield, a character, a second face. And you, the viewer, become the one who has to reckon with the act of looking.

What drew me to this collaboration is how precisely it mirrors my own preoccupation with liminality — the charged threshold between what we reveal and what we keep in shadow. The toilet, in my practice, has always been a site of interest: a liminal non-space where social performance temporarily collapses, where the body is most honestly itself. Setting a fashion campaign here isn't provocation for its own sake. It's a refusal to separate elegance from the raw, unperformed moments of being human.

The editorial ends by turning the gaze back on you. You've been watching. Now you know you've been watching. That discomfort — that awareness — is where the work lives.