Enfnts Terribles

To identify who Flo Windey is, we went the opposite way: buh-bye signature brown hair and cute face, hello bleached brows and red wig, how are ya? “The thing with the whole look … It was totally out of my comfort zone. It was scary, but I was like: ‘Let’s do it!’ When make-up artist Lili was done, I was like, ‘WHO IS SHE?’ The red hair does something with you. I can’t explain it, but you feel like a bad bitch. Same with the fake nails. I couldn’t move like I normally do; I couldn’t even pick up my phone. For a second, I felt like the hottest piece of shit in the room. It was powerful to see a completely different version of myself that I normally wouldn’t dare to explore. But everything fell right into place.”

Flip the switch

As free as she feels now, it took Flo a while to come to a point in her life where she would stop caring about what people would think of her online appearance. “I used to think a lot about what people were thinking of me on social media. ‘Oh, this picture didn’t do well. I don’t look good; I have to be funnier…’ I was always trying to one-up myself, to reach my idea of what success encompasses, but social media doesn’t have to be a parameter of success.

Same thing with my looks: I can obsess about a pimple or my nose or anything. I can be upset for a moment, but I learned to let it go. Fuck people who always look good on Instagram. You can’t always look good. That’s why I’m cutting back on using filters, for example. Or just the fact that pictures are always ‘planned’. You could be having an amazing moment with friends and capture it as it happens and just post it instead of planning it. That’s why I like that nowadays a lot of people are doing photo dumps. Like showing people what your day or week looked like.

Breaking out

You wouldn’t think some bleach and a wig could make an impact, but it certainly did for Flo. “A few weeks after the shoot, I had been wearing face masks a lot because of work, and my face broke out. And I didn’t feel like covering it up with make-up or putting a filter on it. So I just posted a picture of my skin, and it was so freeing. Doing this shoot made me think, ‘Fuck it, let’s go with it!’ It was so empowering.” A big lesson, Flo admits, after struggling with it for years. “I have struggled with getting validation from online strangers. It feeds a need for self-affirmation I didn’t know I had. It was confronting to realize that, but I learned to not do things for a bunch of people online, but to do them for me.”