High Fashion, Baby Faces
It takes a minute to wrap your brain around it all.
The images on the Acrylic Nails Photography blog are unabashedly edgy — brimming over with pose-y high fashion attitude. In one, a girl clad in cocktail attire is almost totally immersed in a watery bathtub; in another, she's zipped inside a see-through plastic garment bag.
But beyond the charming D.I.Y. brand of creativity coloring each photo shoot, there’s the glaring fact that the models barely look old enough to get into a PG-13 movie. And there’s good reason for that — they are.
The photo blog, which is shot guerilla-style all over L.A., is produced and operated by five 14-year-old eighth graders. The collective of longtime friends — who attend the Oakwood School and Immaculate Heart Middle School — have been snapping fashion stories (which hearken back to the envelope-pushing editorials of defunct British fashion bible, The Face) since they were in the fifth grade.
Initially, the friends captured their glorious games of dress-up on a camera phone, then progressed to a point-and-click Canon PowerShot and recently started using a beefy Canon EOS D5 digital camera which was given to the group’s steady-handed makeup artist, Syd Lynch, from her grandfather, legendary filmmaker David Lynch.
Unlike Tavi, the precocious 13-year-old fashion blogger who’s found fame gushing over Comme des Garçons and Lanvin on her blog, the Acrylic Nails kids create their own fashion moments — ones that have nothing to do with designer labels.
Photographed by Walker Bunting, a preternaturally mature teen with a penchant for classic lace-up loafers (which he paired with walking shorts and an arm-full of silver bangles on the day we met), the images mirror modern fashion editorial of the W magazine ilk. But they’re shot in a way that only a 14-year-old could conceive of. Without the jaded eyes of overworked editors and the mucky-muck of advertisers, the results are expressions of pure, unfiltered fashion — for fashion’s sake.
Case in point: An adult lensman might find a laundry room too mundane a locale for a high-fashion shoot. But Bunting was inspired to shoot Lynch, decked out in a fluffy tulle skirt, inside a clothes dryer. Why? “We ran out of places to shoot.” And like brilliant street fashion thrown together, out of necessity, in Goodwill stores, it just works.
“We like the juxtaposition of the high fashion and white trash,” added the young photographer, sitting on a curved couch with his equally fresh-faced colleagues, Lynch, Jack Karaszewski, who maintains the site and co-produces the shoots, and models/co-conspirators Zara Ferro and Nora Mathison, at his Beachwood Canyon house.
“Teen fashion is just really cheesy and corny,” he added. “They try to appeal to teens by, like, putting magenta skinny jeans and these gross graffiti tops together…Honestly, I think kids should be able to appreciate more sophisticated things. I think there are a lot of kids who can comprehend a lot more.”
The group is certainly fashion savvy. Lynch and Mathison showed up for the interview in sky-high boots and skinny jeans, while Karaszewski was clad in a grey trench coat and two-tone Sperry topsiders. The teens’ grown-up style, though initially jarring, quickly turns winning when you realize that they aren’t mini-me fashion robots, but normal, well-rounded kids who eagerly talk up each other’s talents, frequently chattering excitedly over one another.
But surely they’re the coolest kids in school, right? “Our schools are very artsy so we don’t stand out that much,” Karaszewski contended.
But almost all say they only share the blog with choice classmates — for fear of peers “not understanding.” And some adults they’ve shown the blog to, “think it’s really intense,” said Mathison.
Locations for the shoots vary, but are almost always spur-of-the-moment. Abandoned houses, backyards and construction sites have all served as backdrops for fashion fantasies. Once, the collective staged a shoot at the Hollywood Forever Cemetary, only to be busted by guards, who made them delete all the photos on the camera. “We went around on Wilcox and did it there and it ended up having a bit more of a documentary-ish feel,” said Bunting.
Most of the clothes for the shoot are borrowed from the abundant closet of Ferro’s mother, a costume designer and wardrober for TV and film. "Her closet is so inspiring to me," said Ferro.
“We just kind of go into each other’s closets and pick out the clothes,” added Bunting. “It’s really a collaboration. It’s not about one person.”
