HARDzine Investigates "Menswear": Behind the Shoot

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The menswear photoshoot was one of the first photoshoots Geneva and I discussed and planned together as co-editors of HARD Magazine. It wasn’t necessarily the technical fashion aspect itself that initially interested us, but the idea of starting the year with something we hadn’t experimented with before. During our meeting to plan the year ahead, menswear came up as something we wanted to explore, as we hadn’t previously done a shoot centred around men’s fashion.

For the shoot, we decided on suits as the main theme, but wanted the models to have some freedom with how they interpreted it. Rather than styling every outfit ourselves, we gave them direction and allowed their own choices to come through.

For Sam R., Geneva sourced a silk tie from Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. Sam D. wore a patterned button down and also brought a few spare shirts from his collection, and Aasil wore a suit that had been handmade by a tailor. Each model’s outfit was curated to their personality, which shone through in the styling and the shoot itself.

Choosing the Locations

When putting together our moodboard for the shoot, two of the main visual references we kept coming back to were staircases and elevators. We had collected reference images of both, so when it came to choosing our locations it was very straight forward. 

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We thought it would work best to start the shoot from an accommodation and then move outside, eventually making our way to the Tower Gardens. 

On the day, Geneva and I were both behind the camera, photographing the shoot ourselves. Starting indoors meant we could work with the staircase and elevator references from our moodboard before moving outside and experimenting with a completely different setting.

A lot of the shoot came together on the day itself. While we had planned the locations and had an idea of what we wanted to capture, being able to move around, try different shots and work with the models meant that some of the images developed naturally as we went. For example, some of our favourite ones ended up being the photos we took of the models walking by the river.

As one of our first photoshoots together as co-editors, it was really exciting to finally bring the idea to life. We had been discussing the different projects we wanted to work on for the magazine, so being able to complete one of them and tick it off our list was really rewarding. We also had a lot of fun putting the shoot together and were excited to use it to introduce the new year of HARD Magazine and welcome our readers to what we had coming up. It felt like a great way to start the year and gave us even more excitement for the projects still to come.

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