As luck would have it, Ashley Smith was already booking acting auditions when photographer-director Marissa Kaiser and creative director Aura Friedman came calling and asked her to star in Screen Tests. Premiering a director’s cut on NOWNESS today, following yesterday’s preview on T Magazine, the collaborators describe the labor of love as a declaration of how fashion and beauty can redefine our identity. 

“People say don’t judge a book by its cover, but we are all guilty of doing so,” notes Kaiser, who captured the five instantly-recognizable archetypes created by Friedman, from a repressed 50s housewife to a 90s raver. 

“I love when a beautiful woman is not scared to become broken, dropping the value of being pretty and becoming much more vulnerable, playing with different ways of being,” says Kaiser of the melodramatic script, aptly penned on the occasion of Independence Day.