Disclaimer
This project is a non-commercial student work, created solely for educational purposes. The project represents an independent authorial concept and reflects my personal perspective on how a potential collaboration between a brand and a photographer might look.
This project is not an official collaboration and was not commissioned, agreed upon, approved, or supported by the brand or the photographer. All names, images, and visual materials are used exclusively within the scope of this academic concept. The project was not created or distributed for commercial or promotional purposes.
Context
«Mama Allowed» x Artemy Zhitenyev is a collaboration project built on the clash of two visual languages: fashion and documentary. «Mama Allowed» is a fashion brand aimed at a young audience that gravitates toward infantile elements in their wardrobe, but chooses them not as naïveté, but as a form of expression. The brand’s aesthetic combines childishness, a rebellious mood, outrageousness, and a desire to talk about growing up through irony, vulnerability, and protest.Artemy Zhitenyev, meanwhile, works with Moscow as a living organism: his photographs form a documentary narrative about the city and its people, one where light, a random gesture, everyday life, and the inner state of a person dissolved within the urban environment are significant.
«Mom said it was okay”—this is a Russian fashion brand defined by a young, streetwise, and manifest aesthetic. The brand describes itself as a statement on position and freedom: not about following trends, but about „blowing them up, ” transforming clothing into a way to rewrite the rules.
It feels like a brand where infantile elements, irony, decorative flair, and a rebellious gesture converge: ruffles, volume, deliberate stylization, and pieces with personality function not as «cuteness, ” but as a form of bold self-expression. This positioning is reflected in the public descriptions of the brand as a manifesto for inner freedom and the right to „be yourself.“
Artem Zhitenyov is a Moscow-based photographer who works at the intersection of street and documentary photography. In his work, he explores daily urban life, capturing light, chance encounters, and the human condition within the city environment.
He transforms chance scenes, light, crowds, pauses, and gestures into a documentary narrative about people’s lives in Moscow. His work is often perceived not as a «report on an event, ” but as a careful observation of the individual within the city and time.
Concept
The collaboration concept is built around the idea of an in-between state—a particular internal mode into which a person slips when they go out, run errands, and become part of the general flow. This state is difficult to define definitively: it blends fatigue and foreboding, distraction and attentiveness, anxiety and a sudden sensitivity to the light, air, and faces around them. In the crowd, a person is simultaneously present and ephemeral; they remain themselves while dissolving into the city’s rhythm. This state becomes the central theme of the project: not an event, not a hero, and not a plot, but the barely perceptible inner experience of everyday movement through a big city.
For me, collaborating specifically with a photographer was important because this project is also a statement about the value of photography as an artistic object. In the digital environment, images have become too fast—we look, swipe, lose attention, and reduce our time of engagement with a visual image to mere fractions of a second. Because of this, the art of looking is gradually being devalued. Collaborating with Artyom Zhitenev restores weight and duration to photography: his frames cannot be consumed instantaneously; they demand a pause, a deep gaze, and presence. In this sense, the project becomes not just a trendy collaboration, but a gesture in defense of photography as an independent artistic medium.
Attention, user! You have entered an intermediate state. Remain calm. Do not jump to conclusions or try to explain everything immediately. A mild feeling of disorientation, fatigue, detachment, or inexplicable melancholy is acceptable. When the sun appears, it is recommended that you pause for at least a few seconds. Turn your face toward the warmth. Take off your glasses if they are interfering. Observe how picturesque the city is in this moment, even if it doesn’t usually seem that way.
Pay attention to the people around you—their gait, their silence, their patience, their weariness, any fleeting kindness. Perhaps they are in a similar state.
