Venice Beach feels like an audiovisual hidden objects picture. Around the boardwalk, with its sports facilities, roller rinks, and skateparks, bodies blur into motion. Colorful stands line the boardwalk, which ends just before the amusement park on Santa Monica Pier begins, and skinny, tall palm trees sway overhead. It’s one of the few places in Los Angeles where people from vastly different backgrounds genuinely share space. In a city structured around privacy — homes, cars, gates — Venice becomes a site of unfiltered presence: sun-faded, chaotic, alive. That friction between solitude and spectacle, anonymity and visibility in the city, became the conceptual base for this story. Venice has been the backdrop for countless fashion shoots and ad campaigns, but instead of importing models, writer Celina Plag, photographer Eva Baales, and I spent time on the ground, getting to know the people who actually live, skate, and move here. Our cast is made up of real locals: roller skaters, skateboarders, performers, whose presence in Venice isn’t staged, but lived.
Styling functioned as a second skin: pieces were chosen for their ability to move — skirts that whip through the air behind a skateboard, fringes that catch the wind mid-spin. There are gender-disrupting gestures — men in voluminous skirts, long net muscle shirts paired with delicate accessories like a Chanel pearl bag to flex just for the sake of it. There’s a deliberate mismatch in many of the looks. The clothes underscore the individuality and performative energy of the people wearing them. It’s all about playing with codes, with character, and how fashion can exaggerate, subvert, or amplify the story someone already tells with their body.