Sometimes my ideas start from something that I learned from my personal evolution and sometimes, my ideas stem from an outside source. In this case, the inspiration for this project came from an outside source, Jourdan. I met Jourdan while working my last restaurant job. Immediately I noticed that she would always come to work wearing the coolest and funkiest jewelry. She is the queen of a statement piece. After talking to her a little bit here and there, I realized that not only did she have a great sense of style, she was also smart, funny and a fellow artist. With her own hands she creates some of the most beautiful and eclectic ceramics I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t long before I knew that I wanted her to model for me.
With this project, I wanted to combine the physical beauty that I knew that Jourdan would bring to the project with the deeper expression that an artist exudes through their creativity. Thus, I decided to name this project, “Eccentric Allure”. The word eccentric means to deviate from the recognized or customary character. It basically means someone who is “odd” and can’t be placed into the box that society tries to fit them in. Eccentric people are my favorite kind of people.
Without even realizing it, we are constantly injected with different ideas and standards about who we should be and how we should show up in the world. From things as serious as your parents telling you they will disown you if you don’t live your life according to their rules, to things as simple as a TikTok video telling you that it’s “tacky” to style your hair or do your makeup a certain way. Not only are these ideas constantly projected onto us, but sometimes deciding to deviate from these made up rules and standards causes real life conflicts and consequences. There are people in the world who have been disowned, fired, bullied, and rejected, not because they hurt anyone or had malicious intentions in their heart; simply because their sexuality, clothing style, preferred music genre, or the way that they express themselves was deemed “wrong” by other people with power.
This exact cruelty is why I love eccentric people. It takes a certain amount of bravery, even if these people don’t see the bravery within themselves, to be able to exist authentically in this world. Being loudly authentic is what my brand and life purpose is all about because I know that it’s not easy being ostracized, but there is a massive strength in one’s sense of self for showing up authentically anyway. In my personal opinion, you can’t learn true self love from someone that is liked and adored by the masses or someone that has always “fit in”. True self love is to still love and adore yourself, even when you feel like the entire world is rejecting you.
Through these photos, I wanted to highlight the beauty that can come to exist when we allow ourselves to be eccentric. Oftentimes, the greatest artists are considered a little weird, or maybe very weird by society. Yet, it’s with that same weirdness that they are able to create paintings, music, ceramics, books, sculptures, recipes, dances, and photography that the world has never seen before. It is through oddness that new trends are created and new ways of being slowly become accepted. It is through oddness that we evolve as a collective consciousness and begin to integrate new ideas and frequencies into our daily lives. By eccentric people simply existing, they challenge the status quo and trigger us into growth. If you allow yourself to be intrigued rather than intimidated, you might be surprised at just how much of your own oddness you’ve been holding back.
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