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.
Photo: Courtesy the artist; Hardy Studio; Picture Palace Pictures
“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.
