September 30, 2020 |
Since March, we have been inundated with countless lockdown vlogs and working-from-home fashions, but somehow they haven’t felt relatable to our own days trapped indoors – filled with 7-day old hair and crumby, banana bread fingers. Model and LGBTQIA+ activist working to amplify queer voices, Josephine Jones, has created her own lockdown diary that shows the importance of finding glamour in the mundane whilst demonstrating the frustration of loneliness and solitude. As Jones says, “we are all on the same page, we are in this together, we are all fighting the same fight. [We need to] break down the veneer and the distance that social media creates.”
“I have always been an obsessive diary-keeper,” explains Jones, “for sanity, or vulnerability, for clarity.” Her weekly video diary, which you can watch above, is the ideal outlet for the multi-media creative to “explore [her] reflections and honest reactions to these times.” Narrated by a stream of consciousness as Jones navigates isolation with the help of second-hand theatre costumes, a “heavenly” satin slip dress and a watermelon costume which she concludes doesn’t fill the ever-common void of loneliness. The film celebrates freedom of self, as Jones twirls along London high-streets and expresses her desire to find fulfilment in her own company.
Drawing parallels with Cinderella in terms of the impact of isolation, whilst also creating a juxtaposition between the model’s own freedom of self and Cinderella’s reliance on a so-called ‘Price Charming’. She describes diaries as an “act of resistance” and has used any extra spare time over lockdown to question notions of idealised femininity and “what does it actually mean to be a woman in 2020?” Jones also uses her political voice, or first and foremost her voice as a human being, to “pray for the lives of her brothers and sisters” and proudly exclaim, “I will never stop being transgender.” As for ‘Prince Charming’, “I listen to more Prince versus waiting on Prince Charming these days,” something we could all use a little more of!
As the days get colder and socially-distanced picnics become a thing of the past, Josephine encourages us to “stay connected to the present moment as much as possible, creative freedom lives in the here and now. Of late, I’ve come to understand my vulnerability as a grounding force that can be built upon. we are all fighting the same fight. We must keep going.”
