Barre Trash
Louis DeFelice and Lucas Labrador first approached me to talk about product and brand storytelling. The conversation came from a mentoring perspective initially, but quickly evolved into something more collaborative.
The suggestion was simple: join them in Tokyo during a Barre Trash shoot to explore, through photography, an understanding of the ballet world and the culture surrounding it. Spending time alongside the founders also revealed how Barre Trash speaks to ballet dancers in an authentic way, shaped by people who understand what it takes to perform at the highest level. A year of monthly meetings would never come close to the understanding that immersion, shared experience and time spent within an environment itself can offer.
Partly, the trip became an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the brand, but also to spend time around the founders, hear their story, and observe the world the brand exists within.
Alongside photographing throughout the trip to spark conversation, ideas, and play with additional content ideas, the intention gradually became to help shape a beginnings of a manifesto for Barre Trash, something that reflected back an understanding of ballet formed through proximity to the dancers and founders, the routines, and the atmosphere surrounding the brand.
From the beginning, what felt compelling about Barre Trash was that it wasn’t attempting to romanticise ballet from the outside. It came from dancers who understood what it takes to perform at the highest level. Not just performance itself, but everything surrounding it: the training, repetition, pressure, humour, exhaustion, discipline and devotion that shape daily life inside ballet culture.
Documentary photography has, for me, always felt less concerned with directing and more with understanding - being respectful, curious, and patient for authenticity to reveal itself, then responding photographically when it does.
Rather than photographing ballet as spectacle, the focus became the spaces around it. The moments before and after. The warmth layers. The subway journeys. Recovery. Waiting. Conversation. Stretching. The parts an audience rarely sees, but ballet dancers live daily.
Mixing documentary authenticity with product integration has become a central pursuit within the approach, allowing product to exist seamlessly within real situations rather than feeling staged or static. The clothing appears the way it genuinely exists within the world around it: worn between rehearsals, layered through warm-ups, carried through the city, worn daily. That balance between documentary observation and functional product storytelling has become the holy grail of the process.
Alongside the documentary moments, portraits of dancers became a way of aligning the brand with the people themselves, profiling their lives, personalities and discipline, while reflecting both the art form and the spirit of the brand.
The work ultimately became a way of entering the world around Barre Trash simply by being present within it.
The book itself eventually became a kind of souvenir back to them, something to reference, reflect on, and return to over time. Less a polished campaign piece, more a document of a particular brand moment.