dressed in all your clothes

Canadian photographer Libby Oliver’s striking portrait series, Soft Shells, is a playful exploration of how people express themselves through clothes. It features individuals swathed in every item from their wardrobe, flashes of body parts only just visible. “Clothing is an immediate social cue,” Oliver says, “and one of the few things we have visual control over with ourselves.” The subjects range from Ava, four, to Oliver’s grandma Florence, who is 88.
Oliver started the project last summer and now has people itching to get involved. She hopes the series can develop internationally, to explore other cultures and catalogue “the varying masses of clothing and textures in the world”. She does, however, admit that the enthusiasm of her subjects has its limits. “I have to move quickly, because those piles of fabric are quite suffocating!”