He’s styled everyone from Rihanna to Naomi Campbell. Carlos Nazario’s first book isn’t what you might expect
By David Mack, CNN
If you were to put together a time capsule that might reflect what life feels like amid the chaos of the 2020s, what would you choose to include? Which artists and subjects — which bodies or voices — would you feature? And would you have the confidence to even trust yourself with such an ambitious project to begin with?
These are questions that Carlos Nazario knows all too well, having grappled with them extensively while working on his first-ever book, “Silver Lining,” an ambitious aesthetic adventure through the zeitgeist as Nazario both sees it and wants it to be seen. The celebrated 38-year-old stylist said he felt an urgent pull to produce something substantial to document this moment in the world — an era in which he feels a unique sense that he is living through history and everything that word implies. But in keeping with Nazario’s reputation for daring, even ground-breaking work, this couldn’t be just any fashion book. It needed to send a message — in Nazario’s voice — to future generations.
“What I wanted to do was to leave a document that suggested that not everyone thinks that way and that there are people who look different and think different and see different, and they’re no less sophisticated, and they’re no less important, and it shouldn’t be treated with any less respect,” Nazario said. “I hope that people can look back on this and think, ‘Oh, wow, that was the start of that,’ or ‘Oh, that looks really different than I thought 2026 looked like.’”
As the newly announced editor in chief of the British fashion title Wonderland, (and contributing style director for Vogue and style director at large for Harper’s Bazaar US before that), Nazario speaks the language of a magazine fluently. His work reflects both a lived-in reality — Nazario, who is Afro-Latino, often champions diverse models — but still plays with fantasy and mythology, as evident in his otherworldly shoot with photographer Tyler Mitchell at the Texas Southern Border to mark the country’s semiquincentennial. He’s styled everyone from Rihanna to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, notably dressing the Democrat for a 2020 Vanity Fair cover in a custom-made white suit (a nod to the suffragettes) that was designed by a Black man from her congressional district. That was soon after Nazario had dressed Lizzo and Naomi Campbell for Vogue, becoming the first Black stylist to style one of the magazine’s covers since its founding more than a century prior. “The fashion industry can’t seem to get enough of Carlos Nazario,” New York magazine’s The Cut declared in a 2021 profile celebrating the staggering 14 covers he produced in a single year.
But as Nazario’s career was taking off, he felt conflicted. The new decade had begun with a deadly pandemic and racial justice movement, which had each morphed into dizzying culture wars mined by political actors seeking power. It felt like a whirlwind. At the time, Nazario was unable even to enjoy his history-making work at Vogue. Instead, he felt angry that it had taken so long for a Black person to be chosen for the opportunity to begin with.
The 2021 death of his friend and industry peer Virgil Abloh, the acclaimed menswear designer for Louis Vuitton and founder of streetwear brand Off-White, was another push Nazario needed make the shift to editor of his own work. “All of those things happening at once is really what catapulted me into saying, ‘OK, I have to lock in. I have to make this thing, and maybe it’s OK if it’s not perfect,’” Nazario recalled. “I think that fear of imperfection or failure is a lot of times what prevents us from starting or finishing things.”
But although afraid, Nazario wanted to be bold. A book, rather than a magazine, felt like a “more permanent…complete thought,” and a form befitting the deep questions Nazario wanted to tackle. “I didn’t want people to think about this like another stylist making a magazine,” he said. “The content felt way more serious and way more urgent, and certainly covered topics that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing so in mainstream magazines.”
Stretching across more than 300 pages, and containing various pieces from Nazario and collaborators, “Silver Lining” is indeed an ambitious work. It enjoys the free-wheeling sprit of a fashion or literary magazine, but with the permanence and heft of a prized coffee table tome. Themes of race and the corporeal form echo throughout the book. Luis Alberto Rodriguez’s gorgeous black-and-white photos examining the beauty and varying body types of Black men, are followed immediately by an essay by Darnell L. Moore in which the writer and activist navigates memories of his own body, Blackness and sexuality.
Nazario is interested in questions of gender, too. In one project, he and photographer Pieter Hugo traveled to India to shoot a series of sensitive portraits of hijras, a community of third-gender people in South Asia with a semi-sacred status. There is also a striking series by the South London photographer Gabriel Moses, “Bureau of Imagination,” in which models seem to emerge from dark, pop-art canvases, like painted figurines out to reclaim their autonomy. Then there’s the series of inspired conversations between models Alex Consani and Paloma Elsesser, singer Erykah Badu and video artist Arthur Jafa, photographer Ming Smith and musician Solange Knowles — all friends and confidantes of Nazario’s in what can be a ruthless industry. A number of his peers unsurprisingly showed their support for Nazario at his “Silver Lining” launch parties at the boutique Dover Street Market in both New York and Paris leading up to the book’s release.
Frequently, though, Nazario pulls us back into the reality of our moment. In “Red Pill, Blue Pill,” the French-Swiss photographer Thaddé Comar captures portraits of rallygoers in the heated 2024 election season — a time in which a comedian sparked outrage by denigrating Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at one such Trump rally. Then, in “Los Borinqueños,” Oliver Hadlee Pearch and Nazario takes us to that island to spend time with young Puerto Ricans, including the island-born model Joan Smalls, all posed with great dignity and beauty in barber shops, in bed or among nature.
The heart of “Silver Lining” can be found halfway through the book in a deeply felt and intimate conversation between Nazario and his own grandmother, Efna Plaza-Merritt, whom Nazario once had pose for the cover of Vogue Italia, wearing Prada, no less. The pair recall how Plaza-Merritt helped raise her grandson, how her anti-gay bigotry came to slowly be replaced by total acceptance and how she continues to struggle with body image issues as an older woman. Some of her dysmorphia comes from her upbringing and identity as a Black woman, but other parts of it have been taught to her by a fashion industry that her grandson is now firmly part of.
But this is where Nazario feels a unique mission in his role in the fashion vanguard to try to change perceptions of who and what is celebrated. His photos of his grandmother, for example, shine with an ethereal radiance that transforms the lines in her face and hands into markers celebrating her life and impact. And if beauty standards are going to change, Nazario wants to help drive the conversation from the position of power he enjoys. He recalls the 2011 Chris Brown song “Look At Me Now” in which the singer remarked, “I don’t see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can’t even get in.”
That’s an ethos that mirrors what Nazario believes has been among the few silver linings to come from this contentious climate: a growing awareness of what we owe to each other and to the world. “The biggest silver lining we’re experiencing and starting to accept is that we all have to live in this world together,” Nazario said. “We all have a very important responsibility to contribute to the world in whatever format it is.”
The-CNN-Wire
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