The club scene when you’re on the cusp of legality has an edge of danger and excitement that is never as bright as when you’re 20. The moment of anticipation when you hand your $65 flimsy plastic fake ID to the bouncer and pray he doesn’t try to bend it. Inhaling smoke from the fog machine; heels sticking to a beer-soaked floor; purple, blue, and orange light flooding your vision behind closed eyes as you move to synth and bass.
There is a faux-intimacy that is borne with perfect strangers, so much communicated through small touches and eye contact in a room so loud you couldn’t possibly hold a conversation through words– but you don’t need to.
So much freedom comes in the darkness and flashing lights of a dancefloor at 2 AM. Freedom to fall in love with a girl in the bathroom. Freedom to kiss someone you’ve been afraid of kissing in the daylight. Freedom to discover how you move uninhibited. Time to unwind, release, and be your full self after a day or week or month full of being someone for somebody else.
The skin tight clothing that we wear in the club, mirrors the restriction and suffocation we feel “in the real world”– putting up a front for the sake of social acceptance– but here, it feels like liberation.
To stay in this embrace of ecstatic surrender, and to never be turned back out into the street to walk home– the cold drying the concoction of sweat belonging both to you and the strangers next to you.
While the ID was fake– a chunk of laminated plastic illicitly pasted together by someone trying to make a buck– what it gave us wasn’t.
“There’s never been a time when there hasn’t been ritualistic dancing, and I think clubbing is our modern incarnation of that.”
Jon Hopkins (English Producer & Electronic Musician)
Credits:
Creative Director: Kristina Wise
Creative Team: Bianca Justiniano-Padilla, Emma Ogden, Miles Ragin
Photographer: Elizabeth Murphy
Assisting Photographer: Erica Leia
Models: Chelsea Asante, Isaiah Tarrer, Aiyana Everett, Montana Allen, Desire Elmore, Cherri Hansford, Liz DeFluri, Emily Servin, Angella Akoto, Emma Ogden
Hairstylist: Colrain Reed
Makeup Artist: Sensi Carter
Photoshoot Conducted at Fallout- Richmond, VA ⢸ In Collaboration with Blue Bones Vintage- Richmond, VA