Stephanie Perez
The surface of the water at night is most honest. Reflecting, refraction, the camber of light upon it crinkles and points back to heaven’s gates above, the pearly promise flickers and questions itself as darkness repossesses its own depths. There is distance in these depths, subtleties, beauty that is only beautiful because it is imbued with mystery, permitted to stagger towards endurance. Normally appearing blue to reflect the midday sun, the performance runs until sundown, until things start to tatter, fray and fracture, a violent explosion of colored emotion before dreams begin to unfold. The dark water becomes a metaphor for life in New York, the underlying currents of anxiety thrash when possibility meets expectation and disarray. Staring into this aquatic abyss, New York based stylist and creative director, Stephanie Perez, sees clearly.
Distorting pop culture by infusing it with cimmerian forms, organic matter and a love for science, Stephanie’s work builds bridges where rifts belong. The images she has a hand in creating straddle a realm of silent screams and a tangible fantasy, there is a sentient gravity to them that brings you into her orbit. But what is Stephanie tethered to? Her career trajectory has woven circumstance with temporality and her influence over Next Century, an offshoot of the Century21 department stores which curates a selection of downtown New York’s ideas of fashion, where she worked as the Social Media Director has bolstered her sense of community while challenging her own individuality. Coeval speaks with Stephanie about the realities of navigating creative passions against corporate pursuits, reincarnation and reality itself.
Wow, well quarantine was truly an experience for everyone in terms of introspection, stillness and a chance to experiment with anxiety, what was your quarantine like and did you have any breakthroughs per se in these avenues? Do you feel changed?
I stepped out from the shell of me that arose out of my experiences in the city. It was both negative and positive in many ways. Now that I’m describing it, it sounds like an acid trip. I do feel changed though, disconnected to who I was before. My everyday routine consisted of working out near the river by my house and swimming. It was lovely at first but I definitely missed the adrenaline rush of being occupied with projects and work. Abandoning my identity was very freeing but my identity also brings so much meaning to my life. Lacking those defining characteristics of my life led me to become bored and a bit complacent. I did not feel the excitement and passion I was used to feeling.
We know you for your styling, creative direction and tantalizing work with Next Century and Century 21 but to kick things off, where’s home for you and what does home mean to you?
It’s a tricky question because I feel like Brooklyn is my home since I have family here, I was born in Brooklyn and I lived here until I was six. I have early memories of my time here that often arise in the form of flashbacks but we moved to Orlando, Florida and I was raised there. Orlando is where all of my direct family is now so that's naturally where I think of home to be but New York doesn't feel foreign. It kind of feels like coming back to something from the past.
When and why did you decide to come back to the city?
I decided to come back at the end of 2016. I was looking at different colleges to go to and I wanted to do fashion butI also wanted to do business management or something oddly more corporate. I had friends that lived here and I would just stay with them all the time. My parents did not want me in New York, they were not supportive of me coming back and wanted me in their immediate vicinity but despite that, I went to King’s College but I ended up dropping out because I got really overwhelmed and decided to go back to Orlando. I was really depressed for a long time back in Orlando and came back to New York just for a casual trip. During that time my advisor from the school I had left told me they had a dental assistant position for me which I was willing to take because I simply wanted to be in New York. I ended up not getting that job and instead took a job at Century 21 which is where I’m still at now with Next Century.
Right and Next Century was not just a retailer but really a part of the community here in the city. I remember Telfar’s collab with them, a bunch of brand’s throwing parties there, having shows there, it felt like it had a pulse.
Yeah all of that and that’s where I started styling in a way. I started as a sales associate for and was there right in the beginning, I saw all of the changes and met everyone and had the opportunity to work with a lot of different people. The experience introduced me to fashion and people in New York and the scene here. I had been working there for so long and became really involved after I started taking over their Instagram. As I was curating things, we started throwing parties with office Magazine, we had the Barragan show here and executed the Telfar collaboration. It was really a poppin’ place in New York City for a little while and social media became a big part of it so we started doing campaigns and that’s how I got more into styling.
Do you remember what your first shoot was?
My first photo shoot was for Next Century. It was really overwhelming because I had so many responsibilities and I had never even been on set before. I remember there being all these little details here and there that gave rise to stress but it turned out really great. I loved the experience, it was really unique because I work in marketing now and the way the creative team does their campaigns now is so different from me having the freedom to grow, express and create. I think they might be closing Next Century and have it folded into the rest of the store but it was fun while it lasted. I think a lot of things in New York are very temporary, if you're there, you're there. It’s exciting, you get to know people through these temporary circumstances and places that exist for just a moment.
The temporal nature of the city and the community fostered as a product of these very coincidental circumstances seems to manifest in a unique tension that lies at the crux of your work.
I think once you're in New York for a while, a lot of the romance of it fades and more of a realistic tone to things sets in. I feel like everyone that moves to New York is craving this experience of something beyond, something really exciting, the wild parties and those very rare, chance things that can happen to you. Those things do happen but I think you often experience those things while going through a lot of other things in your life, things that can be synonymous with struggle and a lot of people here are struggling just with money in general.
Yeah especially in our industry, I find it painfully ironic but also sinfully idyllic.
Yeah I read this piece in 1Granary about the reality of fashion and how so many people depend on broke interns wearing Prada [laughs]. It alluded to a certain kind of realism and I wouldn’t say that our industry is fake but there’s a certain kind of facade that people have of everything being okay. No one really has a stable or quantifiable income and it's hard to get to that point without working in corporate or having a commercial job.
Yeah exactly which makes the idea of possibility that you touched on particularly interesting because it is tangible, but it becomes a question of threshold for which you can handle stress, anxiety and instability. Your use of the word “realism” is interesting because your work seems very fantastical in some senses.
Totally and looking back on this past year, I tend to go through a lot of seasonal depression in New York. I just get kind of moody and I kind of like feeling sad or just looking at things from this dark perspective. It's similar to when you glare at ocean water at night, it's mysterious so you don't really know what's underneath the surface but the mystery of it is what's beautiful about it. The uncertainty is beautiful but at the same time, kind of scary. This can be a metaphor for what living in New York feels like. There's always this underlying anxiety, you're always trying to think of a way to make a better outcome for yourself in the long run.
Definitely and that just plays into the grand narrative that everyone desires living here, the conviction that fantasy is rooted in reality. The metaphor you used for the water also implicates this desire for depth. We can view darkness as something deep or something lacking but inevitably, we have to be willing to dive in, to make ourselves vulnerable. Do you consider yourself vulnerable and do you allow others to see you as vulnerable?
I do feel kind of vulnerable. On my social media I just say whatever I feel and tend to use it as a diary at times. I think it's a good tool and platform to be super genuine on, you have so much power to influence other people simply by being yourself. There are some things that I'm reserved about sharing but for the most part I'm transparent. It's kind of odd how I feel like having a 10 minute conversation with someone is not enough to get to know know them but if you follow their Instagram for a week or two, you can feel like you know a person just from what they choose to share about their life, their aesthetic, what represents them and what feels most genuine to them.
Where do you think empathy comes into that conversation? Do you think as a generation nowadays that we are a bit more empathetic because we are constantly sharing and being exposed to other thoughts and perspectives?
I think so, people have so much more information on their hands and are aware of the tragedies and what’s going on, it's a lot more probable for people to have empathy, you know?
All living things come from the same source and we're just all living things beyond our egos, that's what unites us. Empathy and love are things that are really indescribable but when you're a living thing there’s ultimately something that resonates. It's training yourself to not ignore when you see other people that need help or are in a position that might be different than yours and asks something different of you.
I feel like your work is kind of like very futuristic and that harkens back to your time at Next Century. Even the name itself there's an innate sense of doing something that hasn't been done before, or envisioning it in a totally different way. What are your feelings towards the future and what is your relationship to the past?
Yes, that's exactly what’s at the root of what I like to explore in terms of an apocalyptic future, or just the future in general and questioning it. I think the future does really make me nervous, especially right now, it just feels like a lot of doom. But at the same time it feels very hopeful because when there's so much intense change and chaos, destruction allows for something to rise up and be new. I think it's a positive thing that the world is in chaos because it's letting us know that the things that we were doing were not working for us, we've pushed it to the limit and we need to change the way that we work as a society in order to propel into the future, alive.
Right and what are some of those changes that you'd like to see happen?
I'm not an expert in economy or society and building those structures, but I think for me an ideal world would get rid of mass consumption and mass corporations and have us live a little bit more sustainably in smaller towns and communities. I think if you have smaller communities, that might promote more individualization. New York is still a really big city but there are a lot of small businesses, there's not a Target or Walmart on each and every block. I feel like that's why there's so much more individuality in New York because there are so many more local shops and places to buy things allowing for people to express their sovereignty by making choices.
Yeah definitely and it’s interesting to see the ways in which individuality and community have become intertwined. One can argue that this ever interconnected community we live in is comprised of individuals who are but mirrors to one another, simple versions of the same being. Publications post the same stories, we all follow and validate the same people, everyone is a “curator” in their own right, resonance has become synonymous with homogenization.
I think having an actual voice today has become a lot more powerful. For instance, my friend was telling me that I should stay in New York because there's not anybody like me in here and there's more people like me in Europe. I've been really wanting to go to Europe precisely because I feel like there's more things that interest me there. I’m constantly trying to pull from designers based there and it would just be a lot easier for me creatively. I value having my own unique perspective on things and it's sometimes intimidating to be in situations where I feel like I'm very different from others. But I try to look at it from a perspective of where I can learn something from this other person and they can learn something from me.
In what situations do you feel that disconnect from other people?
I think mostly at parties. I just try to stay away from them sometimes because of just how this scene is. There's not much depth in conversation and it's kind of apparent that people are just trying to network. I'm not against networking but it just seems so vacant. Having friends that I have actual deep connections with where we build up on each other's thoughts and ideas to the point that we’re able to create things has been so life changing for me. That being said, I don't try to be in just one circle, I don't limit myself or distance myself from other people, I just feel like an outsider sometimes.
I love the word “vacant,” it conjures up such a visceral image in my head and leads me to wonder what your own personal definitions of fulfillment and success are? It can all get so muddled when success becomes about mass appeal.
I completely agree with you. I feel like that's something that I am tackling a lot when there is this unspoken pressure to become popular. You have to go into the mainstream to be really successful, work with Vogue, work with all of these people and if it's like if you don't appeal to a large number of people, then you're not a success. That was my mindset for a long time, especially working from a more commercial perspective where my mind was more focused on Century 21’s social media and having to look at things from a viewpoint that wasn’t necessarily my own. Now that I'm hanging out with people that are so far removed from that sort of mindset where they're just so pure, it's really changed the way that I look at things now. At the end of the day, I just want to do whatever I feel excited about. If I don't feel excited about what I'm posting or what I'm doing, then it really doesn't matter. The only thing you have as an artist or in any creative community is how you feel about your work and if the emotional investment isn’t there then it feels really empty.
Yeah definitely and I'm wondering where does the balance lie then, it’s kind of a nuanced shapeshifting almost.
I have a love/hate relationship with mainstream culture because I think pop culture is so funny. I used to be a really extreme fan of the Kardashians when I was a teenager and for a long time I had this aversion towards that aesthetic because it reminded me of my teenage self and I was just like, I can't go towards that. However, I've noticed that everything I was, I still have a bit of it in me now so naturally if I want to look like Kim K. and have a really hyper-sexualized outfit, I let myself do that. I think it's cool to fuse all these aesthetics from Instagram culture, pop culture and things that are current and contrast them against stuff that people may not know about and are a bit obscure. I want the Kim K. baddies, scientists, physicists alike to all be in the same room together and to all be really into my work, I really like those two worlds and am interested in them coming together.
Taking a turn from that, do you have any desire to be an educator? In being an educator, I’m also thinking about your relationship to learning.
I've never wanted to be a teacher per se, but I have definitely wanted in multiple instances to quit everything I've been doing and become a physicist or to start studying geology. I've been seriously looking into it and I want to incorporate those elements somehow into what I do. I allude to it in some ways and I tried to educate myself through reading all kinds of research papers and books, even going to seminars and stuff like that but you can only get so far. I have gotten so thirsty for knowledge, for education, to learn. There's so much deep fulfillment that comes with academics, there's so much power in it and it feels so good because it keeps you really humble and healthy as a human being. Everyday it’s good to be curious, learn something new, to feel small and understand the processes of how things work. I still love fashion because fashion is a tool for me to express what I'm into. The times that I'm really unhappy with fashion is when I feel like I have to be a certain person or change myself. What I've come to realize is that in being a stylist, you're always in service to another person but that’s when you're really making money through it. I've done a bit of commercial styling before but I seek something deeper than just styling, I enjoy it when I’m in complete control and I’m very specific about what I like to do.
Yeah and everyone talks about career burnout but I think that often comes when you've turned your passion into your job and it becomes something you inevitably begin to resent. I think there's also some strength in perhaps not pursuing it professionally and keeping it for yourself.
I think my situation with Next Century was so idyllic where I had so much freedom and then after it was over, I had to rebuild everything including my vision. I came to the realization that I lived in this fairytale for like half a year and was devastated when it was over. I wouldn't say I was living my dream life because I feel pretty happy now with who I am and what I have discovered within myself but it was a good situation. I think at the end of the day, life is not so easy. There’s no formula; where you go to school, get a job and then that's it. There's so much more complexity to it. The way I'm handling it is just by taking each day step-by-step and answering whatever question I have at the moment. I've let go of that fear because what's been working out the best for me is to follow whatever intuition I have.
Oddly enough that leads me to ask if you believe in reincarnation?
This is so funny because I’ve been talking with my friend about a lot of the same questions we've been talking aboutand I have been really pondering these same questions so I'm glad I actually have an answer for you. I feel like I don't know what's going to happen after death. I like the idea of it just being an abyss and like I was saying earlier, I think we're all just souls and the things that separates us is our experiences on earth. When we die, our experiences just kind of go away, our ego goes away, our carnal body goes away and we become a plain canvas. So maybe there is reincarnation, who knows where that energy goes to create a clean slate of energy.
Lastly, can you tell us a bit more about your concept for the editorial you've crafted? Merging self-portraits with environmental diptychs feels like looking in a mirror.
I tried creating a reflection of my inner fantasy world. Portals of memories fusing together in the space of one’s mind. There are simple moments in life where we can notice subtle beauty through our own individual eye. We all have them, what catches our attention? These pictures are what i pay attention to.
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