Bare It All: The Intimacy of Clothes

Two photographers and a stylist capture vulnerability in young people's self-expression.

- Upasana Das

In a pair of red socks and black panties, Jahnavi's friend stretches on the wrinkled bed sheet in a photograph.

Bare-chested, she exudes the quiet discomfort of a summer afternoon when men take off their shirts and we blaspheme internally, wishing we could do the same. It's finding the freedom within a certain kind of intimacy with one's underclothes that the Delhi-and-London-based stylist and creative director, Jahnavi Sharma, and her friend and photographer, Carina Lammers, focus on, in Drawers, a zine released earlier this year. "It's about how we feel in these private moments," says Sharma.

Standing amid blooming flowers, a man laughs as water from the garden hose drizzles all around him like a midsummer rain shower. When British-Indian designer Ashish Gupta took this photograph for his book Looking for Now last year, he was taking from vintage porn magazines and their idealisation of the male physique in all its musculature, clad in skintight Speedos. It glorified the body, but it also thrived on sexualising a very primal and instinctual relationship with one's underwear. Perhaps that's why he photographed his models in the very clothes they'd arrived in for the shoot, highlighting their choice in picking up a grey undershirt or white pants. It's this decision—the choice behind donning a certain piece of underwear—that Drawers gently pushes from the private towards the public.

Sharma works with the community she has created in London, whose intimacies she highlights through the undergarments they have come to subconsciously adore. It included moving away from the usual poses of fashion photography while showing the body and its curves, folds, and hair.