Luminescence

A couture fashion magazine that captures the melancholic quiet of the ocean floor, inspired by Studio Ghibli's Ponyo.

With my lovely girlfriend as my model, I sought to create a fashion magazine that captured the quiet loneliness of the seafloor. It took various attempts with different lighting methods, including a projector, to capture the perfect lighting that matched the look I intended for.

For the clothes, I personally changed a black umbrella-brimmed hat into a blue, jellyfish-like hat that almost felt like a weight coming down on the model- this was necessary for the story I wanted to tell. I thrifted the blue shirt and pearlescent pants, and used props from our studio for accessories and makeup.

The story told by the layout and the pictures is a lonely daughter under the ocean, who feels the weight of a controlling parent (similarly to the movie serving as inspiration). As you flip the pages, she gets a glimmer of hope in the form of Ponyo's iconic green bucket- before ditching her jellyfish hat to wear the cheap plastic bucket in an embrace of the surface's whimsy that puts an ironic twist on the concept of couture fashion.