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The article looks at SELF-LOVE – Reclaiming Visibility, an editorial by SEPIA, founded by Pia Ahmed and Yashvi Sheth, which centres South Asian creatives in Berlin and their presence across subcultures like skate, goth, and queer spaces. Shot by Marlen Stahlhuth, the piece highlights the editorial’s Y2K-inspired visual language, as a project about reclaiming visibility through real representation and lived participation.
SELF-LOVE – Reclaiming Visibility is an editorial that comes out of SEPIA, a Berlin-based platform founded by models Pia Ahmed and Yashvi Sheth to create space for South Asian creatives working across fashion, art, and culture in Europe. Both founders come from within the industry, who started SEPIA from the lack of South Asian representation they were seeing around them in cities like Berlin. The platform focuses on building visibility through real people and real networks instead of waiting for the industry to catch up.
The cast includes South Asian creatives based in Berlin who are already part of different scenes — skate, underground music, goth, and queer spaces. The project follows how they exist within these spaces, with everyone coming through with their own style and not the caricature representations of subcultures that are appropriated as an aesthetic for a visual project.
The series is photographed by Marlen Stahlhuth, a Berlin-based photographer whose work usually leans into surreal, constructed, experimental fashion imagery. She often works with controlled lighting, strong setups, and treats the body as imaginative staged compositions. Marlen is also the co-founder of MADWOMEN, a Berlin-based all-female creative collective bringing together women across photography, styling, and art to build projects together while pushing for more visibility and representation in the industry.
The images in SELF-LOVE are built around bright, flash-heavy lighting with a sharp, slightly glossy finish that links back to Y2K fashion photography. This kind of visual language is closely associated with photographers like Jack Bridgland, whose work is known for using direct flash, high contrast, inspired by cartoonish Looney Tunes lighting and colours. Marlen’s approach is similar — high colour saturation, dramatic shadows, and visible, luxurious texture that make subjects pop.
The styling moves across different fashion references from skate, goth, and streetwear but stays close to how people actually dress within these scenes. The editorial is built through four collage works, layering portraiture with full-body images. This layout highlights the individual while also showing how they exist within a larger group.
SELF-LOVE – Reclaiming Visibility stays rooted in the idea of South Asian diaspora being visible within the spaces they are already part of, shaped by their own choices and their own ways of showing up.
Follow SEPIA here.
