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Before Fashion Bloggers and TikTok’s #OOTD, There Was K8 Hardy’s ‘Outfitumentary’ | Vogue

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Before Fashion Bloggers and TikTok’s #OOTD, There Was K8 Hardy’s ‘Outfitumentary’ | Vogue

To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

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A young woman walks away from the camera, adjusting herself. She turns and faces the viewer. She’s wearing a long sleeve peach raglan tee over another long sleeve cream tee. Her jeans are skinny, low rise, dark wash, and tucked into scrunched-up pink leg warmers. She wears velcro sneakers. A blue leather belt hangs low on her hips, a thick cuff adorns her right wrist and a clear watch her left one. She slowly twirls, giving us a 360-degree view of her look. Then the camera cuts, and she appears again, seemingly having layered up to go outside. She wears a denim jacket with pastel colored-embellishments, teal fingerless gloves, and a thick cream scarf wrapped multiple times around her neck over a pink hoodie. She cocks a hip, looks down, puts her hands in her pockets and slowly twirls, once again giving us a 360-degree view of her look. Camera cuts. Unicorn sweater, pink skinny jeans, black leg warmers. Hair flip, twirl. Camera cuts. Acid washed jeans with a studded belt, a sweatshirt with a Patrick Nagel–ish print on the front and back. This time she stretches her arms to the walls around her, she walks and does a little kick. Camera cuts. A new outfit appears. And so on and so forth.

This isn’t a description of an endless scroll through TikTok’s #OOTD, but rather the premise of Outfitumentary, a film by K8 Hardy, an artist and filmmaker who decided to catalog her daily outfits with a small handheld camera. “I was making video art and studying film and video,” she explained over breakfast on a recent morning. “I just was like, ‘I'm dressing wild, I have to keep a record.’ I wasn’t sure where it was going to go, or that it was [going to become an] artwork or even a film, like what it is now.” She did it every day, for a little over a decade, until her camera stopped working in 2012. By then social media and fashion blogs had become a thing. “I was looking at social media like, ‘Huh, this is crazy. I’ve been doing this, I have to put this out, actually,’” she recalls. (The film was eventually released in 2016 and is currently screening at Metrograph in New York City.) And so over the course of an hour and 20 minutes, we watch Hardy model almost a decade of looks. Hardy cannot see herself as she poses for the camera, and in that sense there is a sort of pureness about the way that she is capturing herself. We do not see her looking at herself, we just see her looking at us. 

Of course the movie is about fashion, but it’s also about so much more than that—just think about how much one changes and grows over a decade. At the beginning, Hardy poses in her bedroom or in the apartment she shares with roommates. She has a shy demeanor. “You can hear my roommates making fun of me, they were just like, ‘You’re insane for doing this,’” she remembers. “I kept it a secret for a really long time. I went to film school, and didn’t tell them I was doing it.” As the movie progresses, Hardy becomes more confident, more playful, more honest with the way she reveals her feelings. We observe her exploring her identity as a queer person through the clothes she wears. The first time we see her in the movie she is wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads “Inside this shirt is the body of a lesbian woman” in black block letters. 

“That was my motivation in the beginning, to capture [that exploration] because I was doing that,” she explains. “I grew up desperate to know about gay people, and I would go to the public library and look at any books I could find, any photos. And then in college, I would go to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. I felt obligated to make a record of how I was dressing and of this moment because I had wanted it so bad from the people who came before me.” 

Beyond seeing the artist come into herself and grow more comfortable in her skin, we also observe her success as an artist. She begins shooting in a small bedroom, but by the end, she is shooting in her studio, with images of her own large-scale works behind her. “Watching it for the first time was really emotional and psychologically difficult,” Hardy says. “Watching yourself grow up, it’s kind of crazy, so it took me a while to get to the final cut, and I wanted to stay true to my intentions when I was recording. But, you know, still keep it interesting and not totally torture the audience,” she laughs.

The movie is certainly never boring. To start, that’s because it’s an excellent time capsule of the way young indie kids dressed in the early aughts. It’s real fashion, and not what we choose to remember about early aughts fashion which is mostly driven by celebrity red carpets and memorable ad campaigns and high fashion editorials (though I spied a pair of very Marc by Marc Jacobs–esque striped jeans). Hardy has great style, the result of “being a compulsive thrift shopper,” and has often worked within the symbols and systems of fashion in her work as an artist. Among other things, she took part in the 2012 Whitney Biennial by staging the so-called Untitled Runway Show, a send-up of a runway show that showcased her ready-made clothes. She also published a zine called FashionFashion, and briefly worked as a fashion stylist.

“I think of fashion as a tool in my toolbox,” she explains. “If you’re making video art, there’s a person in it and that person’s wearing clothes, and that’s like having a whole palette of color. There’s so much you can do with that and so much meaning behind it.” It’s incredible to see that so many of the things that are an integral part of fashion and pop culture today, Hardy had already thought of and experimented with years before. It’s one of the many reasons why Outfitumentary is required viewing. It’s the fashion movie for our time. 

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Before Fashion Bloggers and TikTok’s #OOTD, There Was K8 Hardy’s ‘Outfitumentary’ | Vogue

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