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Felipe, I once read an interview where you said, “I think the language of the image is like an autonomous language.” You talked about developing that language without words, without the structure or organization of the verbal side. When I look at your work, I feel a very strong sense of storytelling; there’s often something unresolved happening in the images, even when you don't tell us exactly what it is. How do you understand that relationship between an autonomous image and storytelling?
I think that’s precisely where the contradiction becomes interesting to me. When I say the image can function as an autonomous language, I don’t mean that it exists without meaning, but rather that it doesn’t need to follow the structure of verbal language in order to produce meaning. An image can produce something without verbalizing it. I’m interested in building on that gap.
Do you think you were successful in building that gap with this campaign?
Yes, I think so, although I would always understand that success as something partial. The gap is never completely constructed by me alone; it is completed by whoever is looking at the image
It took me a while to feel confident enough to ask you to shoot our campaign. I knew I wanted it to have this storytelling, almost documentary feeling, rather than feel like a traditional campaign. I wanted the clothes to exist within a real world rather than create a world around the clothes. Now that you see the images together, how do you feel this relates to the work you normally make?
It was quite a particular job for me because it was fed by a tradition that I know very well; one that I hadn’t revisited so directly for some time. There was something familiar about it, but also something that felt new within my practice.
After seeing the images together, I was actually talking to a friend about them, and he said that he could see a “new-old” side of my work in the photographs. I really liked that idea. This project allowed me to reconnect with something that was already part of my visual language, but approach it from where I am now.
What did the car do for you during the shoot? Did that physical limitation, that distance from the subjects, change the way you photographed?
I think the limitation was actually very productive for me. I always work from within some kind of structure, and in that sense, there is always a form of limitation in my practice. Being inside the car created a very specific structure that I couldn’t completely control. That made me observe differently, but above all, it gave me the perfect distance to photograph what I was looking for.
The more I look at the campaign, the more I think of the car almost as your shell. You were working from inside it, looking at the world through this small protected space. And in our way, our jackets are another kind of shell, a protective layer between the body and everything around it. I like the idea that the people in the campaign are looking at you through their own shell, while you are looking at them from yours.
Also, in this fast-moving world where efficiency is prioritized, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the work you created instead of just throwing ‘content’ out there and hoping it performs. There is a layering here that I really admire, and that was one of the main reasons I wanted to work with you. There is always this feeling that we are looking at a real moment, but at the same time, there is a story happening underneath it. How do you see that relationship between reality and the story we create around it?
Thank you, Sjoerd. Yeah, definitely. For me, an image doesn’t necessarily need to communicate everything at first glance. I like the idea that something can stay with you, and that you can come back to it. I think that’s also what makes photography interesting: it can hold a reality, but at the same time open up a wider spectrum of that reality.
I also think this relationship comes quite directly from my own experience as a human being and, of course, from the place I come from. Growing up in Colombia, the way I experienced reality has always been very complex and layered, and that naturally entered the way I look at and make images. Photography allows me to stay close to that reality while also questioning what an image can show. Even for a commercial job, I’m always trying to bring all of that background into the present.
Next to your artistic practice, you also work in fashion and editorial. Do you see those two sides of your practice as separate worlds, or do the things you learn from one end up in the other?
I don’t really see them as separate worlds. It’s true they have different contexts and different ways of working, but there is always an exchange. My artistic practice has deeply shaped the way I look, and that inevitably comes into the commercial work. At the same time, fashion work puts me in situations where I have to respond quickly to environments, and that also feeds my practice. They are different spaces, but the way I look at images moves between both.
Your practice often centers around friction, time, and lived human experiences, which feels quite far removed from clean commercial aesthetics. How does fashion resonate with your personal visual research? And when you enter a fashion context, how do you make sure that your way of looking remains intact?
This is tricky, because at the end of the day, we are all part of it, and we contradict ourselves deeply. However, I try to avoid that clean and overly polished aesthetic that has worked so well within the political context of our time. Even when I enter a fashion context, I want to preserve that way of looking and allow something less resolved to remain in the image.
What got you into photography in the first place?
When I was a kid, there wasn’t really a tradition of taking photographs in my family, so photography was never something I grew up around. When my sister bought a semi-professional camera, I tried taking a photograph for the first time, and it felt like magic. That feeling of being able to somehow fix a moment and turn it into an image stayed with me.
You have an academic background, a PhD in media studies. How does that background inform or steer the work you make today? Is it something you consciously carry with you, or has it become more instinctive over time?
I think my academic background has definitely informed my practice. Doing a PhD gave me a space to slow down and question things that I might otherwise have taken for granted, particularly the way images produce reality. I don’t consciously bring an academic methodology into my practice, but that research process has simply become part of how I work.
After seeing all of the images of the campaign together, which image stays with you the most, and why?
The one that stays with me the most is the image of Alex looking out of the car while Anis is driving. There’s something very narrative about it that takes me somewhere else. It feels like a moment within a larger story, and I find myself asking different questions of that picture.
Felipe, I once read an interview where you said, “I think the language of the image is like an autonomous language.” You talked about developing that language without words, without the structure or organization of the verbal side. When I look at your work, I feel a very strong sense of storytelling; there’s often something unresolved happening in the images, even when you don't tell us exactly what it is. How do you understand that relationship between an autonomous image and storytelling?
I think that’s precisely where the contradiction becomes interesting to me. When I say the image can function as an autonomous language, I don’t mean that it exists without meaning, but rather that it doesn’t need to follow the structure of verbal language in order to produce meaning. An image can produce something without verbalizing it. I’m interested in building on that gap.
Do you think you were successful in building that gap with this campaign?
Yes, I think so, although I would always understand that success as something partial. The gap is never completely constructed by me alone; it is completed by whoever is looking at the image
It took me a while to feel confident enough to ask you to shoot our campaign. I knew I wanted it to have this storytelling, almost documentary feeling, rather than feel like a traditional campaign. I wanted the clothes to exist within a real world rather than create a world around the clothes. Now that you see the images together, how do you feel this relates to the work you normally make?
It was quite a particular job for me because it was fed by a tradition that I know very well; one that I hadn’t revisited so directly for some time. There was something familiar about it, but also something that felt new within my practice.
After seeing the images together, I was actually talking to a friend about them, and he said that he could see a “new-old” side of my work in the photographs. I really liked that idea. This project allowed me to reconnect with something that was already part of my visual language, but approach it from where I am now.
What did the car do for you during the shoot? Did that physical limitation, that distance from the subjects, change the way you photographed?
I think the limitation was actually very productive for me. I always work from within some kind of structure, and in that sense, there is always a form of limitation in my practice. Being inside the car created a very specific structure that I couldn’t completely control. That made me observe differently, but above all, it gave me the perfect distance to photograph what I was looking for.
The more I look at the campaign, the more I think of the car almost as your shell. You were working from inside it, looking at the world through this small protected space. And in our way, our jackets are another kind of shell, a protective layer between the body and everything around it. I like the idea that the people in the campaign are looking at you through their own shell, while you are looking at them from yours.
Also, in this fast-moving world where efficiency is prioritized, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the work you created instead of just throwing ‘content’ out there and hoping it performs. There is a layering here that I really admire, and that was one of the main reasons I wanted to work with you. There is always this feeling that we are looking at a real moment, but at the same time, there is a story happening underneath it. How do you see that relationship between reality and the story we create around it?
Thank you, Sjoerd. Yeah, definitely. For me, an image doesn’t necessarily need to communicate everything at first glance. I like the idea that something can stay with you, and that you can come back to it. I think that’s also what makes photography interesting: it can hold a reality, but at the same time open up a wider spectrum of that reality.
I also think this relationship comes quite directly from my own experience as a human being and, of course, from the place I come from. Growing up in Colombia, the way I experienced reality has always been very complex and layered, and that naturally entered the way I look at and make images. Photography allows me to stay close to that reality while also questioning what an image can show. Even for a commercial job, I’m always trying to bring all of that background into the present.
Next to your artistic practice, you also work in fashion and editorial. Do you see those two sides of your practice as separate worlds, or do the things you learn from one end up in the other?
I don’t really see them as separate worlds. It’s true they have different contexts and different ways of working, but there is always an exchange. My artistic practice has deeply shaped the way I look, and that inevitably comes into the commercial work. At the same time, fashion work puts me in situations where I have to respond quickly to environments, and that also feeds my practice. They are different spaces, but the way I look at images moves between both.
Your practice often centers around friction, time, and lived human experiences, which feels quite far removed from clean commercial aesthetics. How does fashion resonate with your personal visual research? And when you enter a fashion context, how do you make sure that your way of looking remains intact?
This is tricky, because at the end of the day, we are all part of it, and we contradict ourselves deeply. However, I try to avoid that clean and overly polished aesthetic that has worked so well within the political context of our time. Even when I enter a fashion context, I want to preserve that way of looking and allow something less resolved to remain in the image.
What got you into photography in the first place?
When I was a kid, there wasn’t really a tradition of taking photographs in my family, so photography was never something I grew up around. When my sister bought a semi-professional camera, I tried taking a photograph for the first time, and it felt like magic. That feeling of being able to somehow fix a moment and turn it into an image stayed with me.
You have an academic background, a PhD in media studies. How does that background inform or steer the work you make today? Is it something you consciously carry with you, or has it become more instinctive over time?
I think my academic background has definitely informed my practice. Doing a PhD gave me a space to slow down and question things that I might otherwise have taken for granted, particularly the way images produce reality. I don’t consciously bring an academic methodology into my practice, but that research process has simply become part of how I work.
After seeing all of the images of the campaign together, which image stays with you the most, and why?
The one that stays with me the most is the image of Alex looking out of the car while Anis is driving. There’s something very narrative about it that takes me somewhere else. It feels like a moment within a larger story, and I find myself asking different questions of that picture.
What was the starting point for Doll Dressing?
At the suggestion of a friend, I listened to a New Yorker Critics at Large podcast at the end of 2023 about how that year had become “the year of the doll.” That was the year the Barbie film was released, along with Poor Things, and they talked about Emma Cline’s The Guest, which I had read. I had always been interested in dolls, but that podcast got me thinking about how I could represent the idea of the living doll through fashion.
I started exploring all sorts of cultural references to dolls— runways and editorials, of course, but also music videos and films—and seeing how I could whittle this vast universe of doll-related ideas into themes related to fashion. Some of it was as simple as looking up the word “doll” in the Vogue archive and discovering all these references from the 1920s. Ultimately, I realized the relationship works in both directions: not just how fashion has inspired fashion dolls and how dolls have been used to disseminate fashion, but how dolls themselves have inspired high fashion.
Fashion dolls existed long before Barbie. How has their purpose— and what they teach us about femininity— changed over time?
There’s a really fascinating shift. In the 18th century, before fashion plates, photography, or even magazines, fashion dolls were essentially how women disseminated information about the latest fashions. A woman of means could look at one and say, “That’s what’s in fashion. That’s what I want to wear,” and have her dressmaker make a copy.
By the 19th century, dolls had become children’s toys, and they were really meant to teach girls what to expect in adulthood: decorum, doing your hair, having the right clothes and undergarments— learning femininity. Then you see baby dolls emerge, particularly in Germany, which encouraged maternal play. So dolls have never just been cute objects. They have historically communicated ideas about what girls and women were supposed to look like and how they were supposed to behave.
Those traditional ideas of femininity can be quite restrictive. How did you want to expand the idea of who or what a doll can represent through the exhibit?
One of my early concerns was that so many of our ideas about what a fashion doll is are rooted either in 19th-century North American and European fashion dolls or in the idea of stereotypical Barbie. But I wanted to be certain that anyone who comes through the exhibition can connect to one doll or another. Part of doll play and creative play is feeling that you see yourself reflected in it.
That includes gender-inclusive dolls like Creatable World and Black Dolls Matter, which was founded by Mark Ruffin because he felt there was a need to get more black and brown dolls into the world. I also love the photos of Pat McGrath’s glass-skin technique for Maison Margiela because it upends this idea that “porcelain skin” means white skin, when it is actually a smooth, flawless material.
The exhibition also complicates the idea of hyperfemininity through doll dressing. How do you play with the idea of doll dressing as a form of agency?
The “dolly bird” section is a great example. The term was primarily used in Britain to derogatorily describe young women who weren’t considered serious. But many of these women saw dressing fashionably as a statement of freedom— working, living with girlfriends rather than immediately marrying, and buying their own clothes. I wanted to unravel that representation. Lolita has a similar story: Though the look is girly and youthful, it counters a culture of uniformity. The women are dressing for themselves, not for men, and embracing the freedom to look exactly as they like.
What drew you to the darker, more haunted side of doll imagery?
I have a section called “Broken Dolls,” and there are some really great references to horror, from the local maker Ren Britton of Pure Vile to Rodarte, whose leather-strap dress was influenced by Living Dead Dolls— these baby dolls that take on the personas of horror characters. One of them is a little bit of a jump scare for visitors, but I think it’s so beautifully made.
There’s also Dilara Fındıkoğlu’s “dissolved doll” dress, which went down the runway with a wig that looked like a hacked-up doll’s wig, smeared lipstick, and this illusion of organs evolving beneath flesh. I find her way of pushing past the very conservative ideals of her childhood really compelling. It’s rebelling against typical beauty while still being very beautiful. And then there’s Hans Bellmer, who created these reconfigured, often very disturbing dolls and photographed them.
There’s an entire section devoted to the dollhouse. How does the idea of a miniature home connect back to fashion?
That section came about quite naturally. I started with Lirika Matoshi’s apartment coat and then began thinking about all these other miniatures, from the GCDS Polly Pocket collaboration to a dollhouse-sized Barbie in a box. There are really interesting overlaps between fashion and housing because clothing, at its core, is meant to shelter. But when you get into fashion and dollhouses, that functionality is upended. Fashion becomes as interested in aesthetics as functionality, and dollhouses are, of course, too miniature to actually live in.
The exhibition also looks at paper dolls and two-dimensional fashion. What interested you about that relationship?
Paper dolls were one of the first themes that came up because there are so many references to them in fashion. I love the idea of making something that has to be three-dimensional to look two-dimensional— it’s sort of the reverse of what you might expect. Claire McCardell published a paper-doll book in the 1950s, while Comme des Garçons later created a “2D” collection that became known as the paper-doll collection. Jeremy Scott similarly referenced paper dolls for Moschino, adding the little tabs you would traditionally use to attach clothing to a paper doll. There’s something really interesting about designers moving back and forth between two and three dimensions, and translating that sense of play into actual garments.
With such a vast history to pull from, where did you source the dolls and objects in the exhibition?
The dolls are either pieces that we purchased for the collection— which are quite few— or things we borrowed directly from designers, institutions, or private owners. For example, we have loans from the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum. I probably went through hundreds of possibilities while researching the exhibition.
One of the pieces I was particularly excited to secure was a pair of Merci, or Gratitude Train, Dolls from the Brooklyn Museum. They were created in 1949 as part of a gift from France to the United States for being allies during World War II. They wear historicized fashions, including a Madame Grès interpretation of 1808 and a Jean Lanvin design representing 1878. They’re stunning, incredibly detailed, and not seen all that often, so we were really lucky to get them for the exhibition.
What are some of your favorite pieces or sections in the exhibition?
I love the Monster High and Off-White collaboration. It was one of Virgil Abloh’s last projects, and what’s great about Monster High— and so many pieces in this exhibition— is that these are goth dolls. Maybe children aren’t always looking for the polished perfection of the dolls from my childhood. They actually seem to be interested in more self-expression and something that, for lack of a better term, is a little weirder. I think that’s really cool.
What surprised you most about the role dolls have played in designers’ creative lives?
One of the things I found so exciting was how many designers talk about getting their creative start by designing for dolls. It’s very accessible. It’s a little figure that you can experiment on; you only need scraps of fabric, and it can be a very solitary endeavor. Margiela talks about being around 13, having the house to himself, and deciding to experiment by making a jacket for a Barbie. That was his first foray into fashion.
Jason Wu has one of the greatest doll-designing stories. When he was a teenager and still at boarding school, he started designing dolls for Integrity Toys. He made money doing that and was able to launch his own label, and he continues designing for Integrity Toys to this day. Anna Sui has also made doll-sized versions of her runway looks (and she is also the first designer represented as a Barbie), while Bode presented its entire Fall 2025 collection in miniature on handmade cloth dolls.
What do you hope people take away from the exhibition and perhaps reconsider about dolls?
One of the things I hope people take away is that, yes, dolls are very cute, and we can have this nostalgic cultural connection to them, but there is a really vast social history behind them that I think is very important.
I also want everyone to feel welcome in the exhibition and feel that they can relate. Dolls can be a form of creative expression, and part of that is being able to see yourself reflected in them. The idea of the doll isn’t fixed: It can be changed, subverted, and made much more contemporary.
