
by Viktoriia Stanieva. Cover image: Irene Pria, Core Moments, 2021.
Irene Pria chose to portray the inner child concept as the main theme for her work. For Pria, “inner child” means the feelings, beliefs, and experiences we went through in our early childhood, which somehow stayed in our subconsciousness and affected our behavior as adults.
Irene encourages us to reconnect with our inner child to heal from the stress we experienced during the pandemic.
“I feel that after all the lockdowns and the isolation we’ve been through,” says the stylist, “it is important to learn how to express ourselves again and to communicate our feelings.”
To help this process, Pria wants to emphasize the sense of touch, our primary source of knowledge, as the skin is the first layer we use to study the world.
In her photoshoot, there are many carefully selected props that remind us of the tactile feelings we experienced, such as toys that comfort us with their softness, or the texture of the plastic dinosaurs we used to trace with our fingers. But also, a handmade crown and stars, brushstrokes, and crayon scribbles.
The garments also reflect the idea of transparency, a second-skin effect to better emphasize our connection with reality, through our bodies and clothes, that help communicate our identity.
The photos show the playfulness and creative freedom that sadly most of us have lost growing up.
In the stylist’s multiple scenes, we can recognize things that we all did as children, such as sleeping in an enormous blanket, surrounded by our favorite stuffed toys, or imagining ourselves as a hero, pointing a crossbow at our enemies to win some imaginary battles.
Overall, the photoshoot evokes a feeling of nostalgia for the time when our world seemed so beautiful and vast, a world where we had so much time and space to express ourselves.
A feeling that can still inspire us today.






Photographer: Marco Rossetti
Stylist: Irene Pria
Make-up: Valentina Resca
Model: Valentina Levorin
Garments: Stilnology, Giorgia Putignano, Elena Baldacci, Alessia Santoro, Jessica Nicodemo, Maria Sapio Knit Couture
Irene Pria is an undergraduate student in Fashion Styling & Creative Direction at Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
Viktoriia Stanieva is an undergraduate student in Fashion Styling & Creative Direction at Istituto Marangoni Firenze.