We met in 2021 at a basketball game in Toronto, of all places. Neither of us frankly had ever cared much for sports, but somehow, that evening brought us to each other. I don’t think either of us could have known then how deeply our lives would become intertwined. What drew us together was a shared way of seeing the world, and a desire to make something beautiful out of it.

I’ve spent my career on both sides of the lens, as much a performer in front of the camera as an architect of the visual world behind a beauty brand. Carlo, meanwhile, has built his career around the art of making pictures move. As an executive producer, his eye has quietly shaped campaigns across the industry, including SACHEU. Over the years, we’ve developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s creative instincts.

Domestic Fantasy is, in many ways, the natural extension of that shared language, and our most ambitious collaboration to date, at least until the wedding. For the first time, we’re both stepping fully into frame, as creative directors and models at once, turning the camera on our own imagined future. It feels like a natural evolution for two people whose love story has always been, in some sense, rooted in a shared devotion to creating visual worlds together.

For our engagement shoot, Carlo and I explored one question: what if the mundane rituals of married life received the same fantasy, ceremony, and pageantry as the wedding itself?

Wedding culture invites couples to turn their hopes for a beautiful marriage into elaborate visual productions; this project relocates that bridal spectacle into domestic life. We constructed a series of vignettes depicting an impractically glamorous home life between husband and wife. Set in a mid-century home in the suburbs outside Toronto, Canada, the exaggerated stylistic treatment borrows the excess of wedding theatre while capturing an almost childlike naivety: two people picturing a future marriage neither of us has actually lived yet. The visual language draws from family photographs, old films, and mid-century advertisements, all of which shaped our unrealistic, fairy-tale idea of what love and marriage might look like.

We began by defining the marital archetypes within this imagined future, then treated wardrobe as costume. Each role is paired with a stubbornly ordinary chore, played at the wrong scale: a corporate wife walks the dog in Tom Ford Gucci, and Louboutin pumps after coming home from work, while her devoted husband shields her from the rain with an umbrella. A wife waters the front lawn in a mini dress and floor-length cape just as her husband returns from a party in Yohji Yamamoto. Another, the wife in impossibly teased ’60s hair and a bandage dress, attempts to repair the family Mercedes with a power drill while her husband looks on in a half-tucked Prada dress shirt, the whole scene staged like a melodrama. Across the story, ordinary actions become the set for trying on increasingly heightened versions of husband and wife.

Domestic Fantasy is, at its core, a portrait of anticipation. It isn’t a document of married life as we expect to live it, but of the myth we’ve inherited about it — glossy, theatrical, and slightly absurd. By staging the unglamorous work of a shared home with the same reverence usually reserved for the aisle, we mean to ask what happens to intimacy once it’s dressed up for an audience, and what’s left underneath the costume once the performance ends. If the wedding is the fantasy of a single day, this is the fantasy of every day after it, sincere in its longing, and self-aware enough to laugh at its own excess.