“I always say that I love fashion, but I don’t necessarily love clothes,” Carlos Nazario tells CULTURED. It’s a provocative admission from a stylist whose career has taken him from the fashion director’s seat at i-D to the title of style director-at-large at Harper’s Bazaar, with covers for Vogue and Vogue Italia along the way. But after years spent shaping some of fashion’s most arresting images, Nazario wanted to make something entirely on his own terms. The result is Silver Lining, a weighty hybrid of magazine and art book, featuring a constellation of creative accomplices ranging from musician Solange to creative director Ferdinando Verderi.
Among the book’s more memorable contributions are portraits of India’s hijra community, photographed with Hugo as part of a collaboration that builds on their earlier work documenting Jamaica’s Gully Queens, a queer community living on the outskirts of the island nation’s capital city. Elsewhere, musician Erykah Badu spends an impromptu day in Tokyo with photographer Fumiko Imano, and Nazario returns to his Puerto Rican roots with photographer Oliver Hadlee Pearch for Los Borinqueños, a portrait series documenting young people across the island. The volume’s experimental cover, printed with UV-sensitive ink that only fully reveals itself under the full force of light, offers a fitting introduction to a publication with plenty of depth in its pages. There are no algorithms to satisfy, and there’s no obligation to make the strange palatable.
Here, the stylist sits down with CULTURED editor-in-chief Sarah Harrelson to consider the politics of self-presentation, and what happens when an industry veteran makes something on his own terms.
How did you choose this title? Is the silver lining a hopeful claim, a provocation, or something more ambivalent?
I started making work for this book about four years ago. Initially, I wasn’t entirely sure what form it would take, or even whether it might become a periodical. Silver Lining was never supposed to be the name. It was a working title I gave the project at the time, partly because it made the whole thing feel a little more real. I suppose it also reflected the emotional space I was in at that moment. I spent the next several years trying to come up with a better name and, to be perfectly honest, eventually ran out of time. But when I finally saw all the work together, I felt reassured that the title was exactly right. The phrase comes from a passage in John Milton’s Comus: “Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night?”
There’s something beautiful to me about the idea of finding light in darkness, or hope in uncertainty. We’re living through a very complicated moment, culturally, socially, and politically. But there’s also so much extraordinary creativity, ingenuity, humor, and humanity in the world. The book holds all of those things at once. It’s not necessarily an optimistic view of the world, but it’s a hopeful one.
If you could only point readers to one spread or moment in the book, what would it be?
That’s an almost impossible question because every contribution represents something quite personal to me. But I might choose the conversation with my grandmother. She’s been the single most influential person in my life, and having the opportunity to sit down with her and document her memories, experiences, and perspective on nearly a century of change was incredibly meaningful. She’s lived through so much, and her understanding of the world is full of wonderful contradictions.
She’s glamorous and incredibly down to earth, progressive in some ways and completely immovable in others. She’s hilarious, sometimes outrageous, and endlessly fascinating to me. There’s something very moving about placing her story alongside the work of artists I’ve admired for most of my life. In many ways, she’s as responsible for my understanding of beauty, identity, and culture as any of them.
Walk us through the experience of working with Ferdinando Verderi. How did you collaborate on the book’s design and storytelling layout?
Ferdi and I have worked together for the better part of 15 years, across editorial, commercial, and personal projects. We belong to a very close-knit circle of friends and collaborators who have grown up together creatively. What makes Ferdi so remarkable is his curiosity. He’s just as excited about the emerging and underground as he is about the established and extraordinary. He’s endlessly inquisitive. Always digging, always searching, never quite satisfied. He’s a genius collaborator because he’s constantly pushing you to understand the why behind what you’re making. With Ferdi, everything connects somehow, somewhere. Nothing exists in isolation. We wanted to create something that existed somewhere between a magazine and an art book, without necessarily following the conventions of either.
The work is incredibly varied, and it was important that each contribution maintained its own identity while still feeling part of a larger whole. Daniel Mason was also absolutely instrumental in bringing the book to life. He was almost like its architect, taking all of our ideas, whims, and sometimes rather ambitious demands and figuring out how to make them exist as a physical object. The cover is a wonderful example of that experimentation. It uses UV-sensitive printing technology in which the ink only becomes fully visible when exposed to light. I love that the book reveals something of itself through interaction with its environment. There’s a beautiful relationship between that idea and the title.
The contributor list moves between Erykah Badu, Carrie Mae Weems, Paloma Elsesser, and Anok Yai. What went into building it? Was it instinct, relationships, a deliberate cross-section of voices, or some combination?
It was all very personal, very instinctive. Ming Smith is literally my next-door neighbor. Ollie, Tyler, Ferdi, and Luis have all been collaborators for a decade or more. The girls are my girls. They’re my real friends, confidantes, and colleagues, people I’ve grown up with, who have inspired and supported me throughout my life. David Sims and Carrie Mae Weems are two of my photographic GOATs. Their work has had an enormous influence on the way I see pictures. I wasn’t interested in assembling a roster of important people for the sake of it.
I wanted to bring together the artists, thinkers, and creative minds who have shaped my understanding of the world and give them the freedom to make something that felt meaningful to them. I also wanted the book to move beyond photography and fashion. The contributions from artists like Lauren Halsey, Derrick Adams, and Nate Lowman were an important part of that. I love the way their practices expand the conversation into fine art, cultural memory, community, and the visual language of contemporary life. The result is a very personal portrait of my creative community, but I hope it also captures something much broader about the moment we’re living in.
“Silver linings” are what we might say after something has gone wrong. Is this book a response to a moment in your life, to the larger culture, or not a reaction at all?
It’s a response to both a personal and a cultural moment, although I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a reaction. I’ve spent nearly 20 years working in magazines. I love magazines. I love the collaboration, the process, the extraordinary things that can happen when you bring creative people together. But I’ve also become increasingly conscious of the limitations of commercial publishing: the speed at which we’re expected to produce work, the influence of advertisers, and the pressure to make things that appeal to the broadest possible audience.
At the same time, we’re living through a period of enormous cultural and political change. The way people understand identity, beauty, sexuality, community, and belonging is constantly evolving. I sometimes feel that the images we’re producing in mainstream media don’t adequately reflect the complexity of the world around us. I wanted to create a space where artists could explore those things with very few rules, where the work didn’t need to sell anything, satisfy an advertiser, or appeal to an algorithm. I wanted to make something that could document this moment but also exist beyond it. Perhaps the silver lining is that, despite all the uncertainty around us, there’s still an extraordinary amount of beauty and inspiration to be found if you’re willing to look for it.
You’ve styled prolifically for magazine covers with once-in-a-generation talent. What does this book communicate that those moments cannot?
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with extraordinary artists, editors, and institutions, and those experiences have shaped who I am. But when you’re working for a magazine, you’re ultimately contributing to someone else’s vision. I love that process, but there’s inevitably a certain amount of negotiation and compromise involved. With Silver Lining, I wanted to explore the parts of myself that aren’t always visible in my professional work.
People often associate my aesthetic with a particular kind of glamour, polish, or refinement. I love all of those things. But I’m equally interested in work that’s raw, sexual, strange, experimental, uncomfortable, or difficult to categorize. The pictures that first made me want to work in fashion weren’t necessarily fashion pictures at all. They were artworks, films, and photographs of people and communities that challenged my understanding of beauty and the world around me. I wanted to make something that reflected the full spectrum of those interests, something that felt honest to who I am, the people I love, and the things that excite and inspire me, without having to explain or justify every decision.
Silver Lining features imagery from your time with photographer Pieter Hugo in India, when you both developed a portrait portfolio of the hijras. Bring us into that experience.
Pieter and I first collaborated in 2016 on a project called PH & HBA, when we traveled to Jamaica to photograph the Gully Queens, a marginalized LGBTQ community, and other subjects wearing archival Hood By Air. It was an incredibly formative experience for me and very much the kind of work I wanted to continue making. I’ve always admired Pieter’s ability to photograph people and communities who are often misunderstood or represented through a very narrow lens. His pictures can be confrontational, but they’re also incredibly human.
For Silver Lining, we traveled to India to photograph members of the hijra community, whose history and relationship to gender, spirituality, and social identity are incredibly complex. What interested me was the opportunity to explore a community whose understanding and expression of identity doesn’t necessarily fit into the Western conventions we’re accustomed to. I’m fascinated by the ways people construct and communicate who they are, particularly when those identities exist outside of conventional expectations. What I love about the resulting portraits is that they’re not fashion pictures in any conventional sense, but to me they’re absolutely about style, identity, beauty, and the extraordinary complexity of being human.
You’ve said that you think of your work as a way to communicate how people present themselves, rather than strictly as a matter of clothes. How does that credo drive your creative practice?
I always say that I love fashion, but I don’t necessarily love clothes. The distinction is important. That said, I absolutely love extraordinary fashion. Rei Kawakubo, Azzedine Alaïa, Miuccia Prada, John Galliano. The greats. I LOVE fashion. What interests me is fashion and clothing as communication, as identity, as protest, as entertainment, as provocation, as armor, as decoration, as enhancement. That’s fascinating to me. I come from a place and a time where your presentation counted for so much. It was almost invaluable.
Growing up in New York, I learned very early that you could speak volumes through the way you presented yourself, without ever saying a word. Are you a church boy? A gang member? Are you on your way out for a night with your girls? Going to a baby shower? The way people dressed communicated where they came from, what they believed in, who they identified with, who they wanted to be. Sometimes it was about belonging, sometimes about standing apart. That’s what has always fascinated me. Not necessarily the clothes themselves, but the people wearing them and what they’re trying to tell the world.
Can you tell us about three unexpected (and particularly memorable) collaborations included in the book?
One of my favorites is the collaboration between Erykah Badu and Fumiko Imano. They were both in Tokyo at the time and decided to meet at Fumi’s house. They ended up spending this fantastic day together, hanging out, shopping, and getting to know one another. Two kindred spirits who might otherwise never have crossed paths, connected through a shared curiosity and a wonderfully eccentric way of seeing the world. I love that something so spontaneous and personal could become part of the book.
Another is Solange and Ming Smith. Ming is my neighbor and a friend, and someone whose work I’ve admired for years. Solange is one of the most thoughtful and singular creative minds I know. Bringing these two women together, from different generations but with such extraordinary individual visions, felt incredibly natural. They interviewed and photographed each other, and I love the intimacy and mutual admiration that comes through in the work.
Then there’s Los Borinqueños with Oliver Hadlee Pearch. Ollie and I have made pictures together for years, but this was an opportunity to bring him into a very personal part of my life. We spent a week in Puerto Rico with my family, meeting friends old and new, exploring the island, and photographing young Puerto Ricans in their own environments. It was a homecoming for me, but also a return to the kind of spontaneous, exploratory image-making that made us fall in love with this work in the first place.
You styled the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” and now this book. How do you separate your work as a style archivist from your contemporary profession?
Style archivist isn’t necessarily a term I would have used to describe myself, but I understand the sentiment [laughs]. So much of what I do comes down to a fairly simple question: What is worth documenting? What’s the most interesting, beautiful, relevant, or revealing story, person, place, outfit, gesture, or moment? What does it tell us about the world we’re living in? I’ve always been fascinated by the way people choose to present themselves. When you tell someone to wear something they want to be photographed in, they’ll usually choose the best thing they own. They want to look their best, or at least how they most want to be seen. There’s something incredibly revealing about that instinct.
Working on “Superfine” was an opportunity to explore the ways Black people have historically used fashion and self-presentation to communicate identity, dignity, aspiration, resistance, and power. But those same ideas inform the work I make today. I don’t really separate the historical from the contemporary because everything we’re making now will eventually become a document of its time. That’s part of our responsibility as image-makers. We’re not just creating beautiful pictures. We’re contributing to the visual record of who we are, what we value, and how we want to be remembered.
The conversations in Silver Lining include powerhouse cultural figures such as Ming Smith, Arthur Jafa, and Solange Knowles. How did you decide to pair these particular conversation partners?
In each case, I started by asking the participants who they wanted to have a conversation with, who they were curious about, inspired by, or had always wanted to engage with. Then I tried to connect the dots. I wanted these to feel like genuine exchanges rather than conventional interviews. These are people who are deeply fascinated by one another’s work, and that comes through in the conversations. There’s a real sense of curiosity and reverence, but also a familiarity and openness that allows the discussions to go somewhere unexpected.
I wasn’t particularly interested in prescribing what they should talk about. The idea was to create an opportunity for people whose work and ideas I admire to engage with one another on their own terms. Some of the most interesting things happen when you bring people together without knowing exactly what the outcome will be. That’s really the spirit in which much of Silver Lining was made.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
In London for Frieze? Here Are 12 Must-See Museum Shows Outside the Fair
How Many Men Does It Take to Get a Man to Pick Up a Book?
Four Art Critics Walk Into a Bar… and Debate the Met’s Pollock-Krasner Retrospective
The Best New York Restaurants for Every Conceivable Scenario
How Jonathan Van Meter Convinced Kim Kardashian to Participate in Her First Authorized Biography
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
