PHOTO SHOOT + ARTICLE
Dinner Party
By Deandra Mercedes Villamil
Models
Bebe Smith, Kapil Rajpopat, Irene Hwang, Omar Falki, Monika Jakubowski
Stylists
Anu Patel, Brandon Silva
Photographer
Giacomo Silvestri
Dinner Party
It's the party we've all been waiting for. The lead-up to it was the only reason to get through the end of the week. The suffocation of everyday life, its mundanity, makes the anticipation nearly unbearable. But the mere daydreaming of what the event offers is enough to satiate the hunger.
Here we are. We set the dinner table in our most precious fashions, layering every possible fabric, pattern, and texture possible. Green, red, silk, feather, blue, leather, everything. The table, carefully and carelessly decorated in our clothing, is hugged by us, our love.
We embrace it as one of us, dressing it with love as we would ourselves, until the lines of object and human are blurred. The table's original state and its use to us hide under the numerous layers of flashy costume, hoping to conceal the reality that the extraction of our labor may not greatly differ from that of the table.
Love has been commodified and community replaced by individualism. The world outside this room operates on transaction — what you can give, what you can take, what you're worth in quantifiable terms. But here, over dinner, the sanctity of life is protected, celebrated. The table becomes an altar, and the meal becomes a communion.
Laughter and dance fill the room with a vibrancy and colorfulness that the outside world has been stripped of. Here, under the warm light, surrounded by fabric and food and the people we love, we are reminded of what it means to be fully alive. The dinner party is not an escape from reality — it is reality, distilled to its purest form. Connection. Expression. Nourishment. Love.
