We’ve all felt it. The subtle change of posture, the discrete adjustment of our pace, the slightly different tone of our voice. We are someone else. We’re in a new city. Or are we just facing a camera?

 

 

In both situations, a common dialectic is at play. Our identity is – for a moment – split. We are who we are, but we also are someone else. Not a complete stranger, but a different version of ourselves. A pose, granted, but not without a connection to our true self. And what if some of the traits temporarily acquired through this experience, whether it is living in a new city or posing in front of a lens, were to stick with us?

Photography and cities offer us the precious gift of becoming. Our identity enriched. our certainties challenged. a shaken sense of self.... Isn’t that what we all ask from fashion as well? to be this unique and singular place where we can re-invent not only ourselves but the relationship we have to our surroundings, whether human, urban or natural?

 

In a series of portraits taken before Soulland’s shows in florence and copenhagen, a few minutes before the models entered the runway, Nikolaj Møller Isachsen captures exactly that. This complex web of questions that lies beneath the surface of what has been mistakenly labelled as “superficial” for centuries. Art, fashion, self- expression, pursuits that are sometimes deemed non-essential or even decadent actually carry some of the deepest questions that humankind has to face. They do so in their own way, not with words, complex structures, or elaborate manifestos. They simply embody them. They literally become these questionings, made sensitive, tangible... And enticing.

 

It’s sometimes good to let a particular location influence who we are.
It’s sometimes good to let a particular pose or posture influence who we are.

It’s sometimes good to let what we wear influence who we are. (At least temporarily?)

Firenze, home of renaissance beauty, Frederiksberg, home of Soulland. Does it matter? It matters when we decide that it does. And when we deliberately align ourselves with it.