My good friend and fellow photographer/studio mate Brae Howard has this dress that looks like a wedding gown but is actually her grandmother’s high school graduation gown. She even has a photo of her grandmother, Elise Ruth Pastrana, wearing it for her graduation ceremony on June 15th, 1938. She is 17 years old in the photo.
We decided to photograph Brae wearing her grandmother’s dress. It fits her really well! It was truly magical and made us want to photograph other women wearing something they have from their mother’s or grandmother’s wardrobes. While photographing Brae in her grandmother’s gown, I kept thinking about passage of time, memories, being young, feminine beauty and the link between three generations of women. Faded memories and the past are some of my favorite concepts and I want to explore them a bit by pursuing this project. I am going to call it “Vintage Beauty” for now. So if you have a dress that was your mother’s or your grandmother’s and perhaps a story, I would love to hear from you and photograph you in the dress. Let’s see where this is going to go.
Special thanks to Brae for the great idea and looking amazing and to Meredith Devine for doing Brae’s makeup for this shoot!
