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"embrace"
This honors thesis project is a personal narrative through a collection of six looks about my journey throughout college to love and embrace myself. This journey includes the challenge of embracing the beauty of imperfection that can be found in oneself and nature. This narrative includes rejecting societal standards of beauty based upon perfection, and instead, redefining my own definition of beauty as configured by personal experiences and introspection of the values that scrutinize the beauty of nature.
Look 1:beauty of pain
Look 2: beauty of ephemerality
Look 3: beauty of imperfection
Look 4: beauty of friendship
Look 5: beauty of gentleness
Look 6: beauty of vulnerability
This collection started from a desire to discover what beauty is, what is beautiful, and how beauty is defined based on my experiences. At the very beginning I knew there was an underlying statement on beauty, however I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I wanted to convey at the time. Fascinated by the beauty of a flower I picked up, through close examination I began to look to flowers as a visual inspiration and metaphorical motif. The groundwork of my collection started with a foundational belief that every human has been created so uniquely. When looking at nature, no two flowers are identical. Flowers can be identified from afar, but the closer you examine a flower and pay attention to the details, you realize all the different details about a flower that make it even more beautiful. Similarly, with humans, the more you get to know someone, the more bits, and pieces of them are revealed to you, and with that, they become even more beautiful to you. Beauty is more than just what meets the eye. Beauty goes beyond one's first impression and physical appearance; beauty comes from the heart. A beautiful heart has been refined by the pain of heartache and loneliness and the hardships in life, from the loss of a friend or a loved one. To conclude, this project is inspired by major events in my life that have shaped my character, values, beliefs, and outlook on life. The overall message of my collection is "embrace." Encouraging people to embrace themselves, embrace others, and let themselves be embraced by others. By recounting painful experiences of heartache, loss of a loved one, trials and hardships, and the gift of friendship and the ability to share life with others, I realized the importance of not just embracing others, but myself. As I have been working on this project, reflecting upon myself and my experiences, I have come to embrace myself and who I was created be.
photography by
Lauren Lee & Joanne Lee