Industry, Now
GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON
GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON
Portrait by Ben Hassett for Models.com
#IndustryNow The cycles of social media impel us to embrace then move on from trends and discourses faster than ever before. The life span of a single work––an editorial, a campaign, a show, a stint––is shorter for it. Fashion’s only unconditional term is the future: operating a year ahead, after all. So, in an industry where change and relevancy are the full stops at the end of every sentence, Models.com wanted to highlight individuals who add permanence to the community–some at their start and some at their top. Photographer Ben Hassett gets up close and personal for Models.com with the creative forces often behind the scenes. They are the Industry, Now.
Fashion narration has long been a powerful tool for inciting debate and changing perceptions. Bewitching readers through her sartorial storytelling, stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson has flipped on its head cotillions, intergalactic cowboys, and the perception of black womanhood all through the lens of extremely good luxury fashion. Starting her career under the tutelage of then-Wonderland’s Julia Sarr-Jamois and Vogue’s Hamish Bowles and Tonne Goodman, Karefa-Johnson has risen through the ranks to become fashion director at Garage Magazine working on genre-pushing projects with the photographic new-guard like Ryan McGinley, Nadine Ijewere, Tyler Mitchell and Campbell Addy. With her presence and creative impact, Karefa-Johnson has continued to erect her artistic monuments in the fading world of the WASP woman in fashion.
Is fashion better today?
It’s funny, I find fashion to be entirely and deliciously contradictory. We are always moving forward but constantly referencing the past. The fashion industry is designed to operate in pursuit of modernism—it’s all about what’s next and what the future holds—but I personally think fashion is sneakily retrospective and incredibly nostalgic. It’s why trends resurrect.
Is making beautiful things enough?
Generally, I believe that working in service of creating and spreading beauty is a worthwhile endeavor. But I also think our notions of beauty in a conventional sense have been incredibly harmful and false especially in fashion. So, I suppose making beautiful things is enough if you are also constantly questioning, challenging, and redefining what “beauty” is and means.
What’s your favorite part of the process?
I am very much in love with the process of creating characters in the pictures I help to make. Ultimately, for me, it’s all about telling a story. Maybe it’s a story that’s never been told, maybe it’s one that’s been overlooked or underrepresented, maybe it’s something entirely frivolous, maybe it’s something worth communicating. Every girl has a fictional history; things she likes, things she dislikes, her own vibe, and mood, and style. For some time I thought it was a creative crutch to rely on narrative frameworks but I’ve actually found that it’s incredibly liberating to start from something I see in the collections and build a whole world. A huge part of building these mini universes is research— I love looking at images in the visual history of fashion, but I also love watching movies, listening to music, scouring art and design books. I really love submerging myself in work that I admire and using that inspiration to come up with something entirely new.
