Suited, Outdoors, Wearing a Woman

Nate Hill photographs himself wearing naked women as scarves. He does it in a suit, outdoors, with the composed expression of someone running a casual errand. His explanation for the whole project: I wear white women as an expression of my status and my power.

I’ve sat with that sentence. Hill is a Black artist, the women are white, the suit is deliberate, and the Instagram account is called Trophy Scarves. The project operates somewhere between provocation, performance, and something more unsettled—a joke about power dynamics that refuses to declare whether it’s funny or not, or whether "funny" is even the category it’s reaching for.

Whether the women are in on it matters less to me than whether the joke was ever the point. Maybe the image itself is the point: the composed man, the compliant body, the suit, the street, the camera. You can read it five different ways and none of them land anywhere comfortable, which is probably the most honest thing I can say about it.

I collected stamps as a kid. My sister collected beer mats. Nate Hill collects this.