In the 1980s, when my career as a financier was in full tilt, the worlds of fashion and fine art were undergoing a merger. Fashion photographers began to borrow from the vocabulary of art photography; art photographers started to appropriate the sorts of pop-culture memes and influences, and the emphasis on glossy surfaces and vivid colors, that were so much a part of fashion photography. Though I am a lifelong photographer, this culturally significant crossover helped me discover new ways in which my own sensibility could find its true expression. Since my childhood, that sensibility has embodied an awareness of fashion, and of how fashion can be a part of everyday life. When my mother and father went out for the evening, whether to a party or the movies, they always dressed to the nines. My mother often wore one of her several pairs of long-sleeved opera gloves, itself a deliberate reference to an earlier, more fashion-conscious time and place. In fact, gloves would go on to become one of my obsessions: I have commissioned roughly 350 custom-made pairs, many of them altogether fanciful and decorative rather than practical, and I use them as props in my photographs. As an adult and a working photographer, I understand keenly the value of my mother’s attitude about style and fashion. She knew intuitively that they aren’t reserved for a particular class of people or specific environment, but can be adapted by anyone to create a personal statement that transcends cultural context. This notion informs the images in this series, and has driven both my photography and my endeavors in other fields such as fashion design.