Over seven years, designer Toni Maticevski turned his lens toward an exploration he felt compelled to express. What began as a series of intimate portraits shared on Instagram and met with both admiration and backlash quickly revealed a deeper conversation around vulnerability, discomfort, and beauty. Rather than retreat, Maticevski expanded the project into a powerful body of work, inviting artists, dancers, and collaborators to explore the male form through sensitivity and trust. The result is The Way I See You, a limited-edition volume that challenges perception and asks an essential question: can beauty exist where comfort does not?

1. What did losing thousands of followers teach you about vulnerability?
It was a strange thing; it somehow felt very personal. Or maybe because I take things personally, it was disappointing that people found how I positioned myself and expressed myself directly in response to me as a person. Being vulnerable is something I never shy away from, but it was the first time it really was about me and not my ideas and imagination. It taught me, or more so, highlighted that people choose to be small. And that is sad for them.

2. Why did discomfort become essential to this work?
There was a real power and purpose for me after this realisation. What a person perceives or projects onto another is all in their making. So, anything to challenge their ideal and perception and destabilise it felt like the right purpose. If something as inoffensive as me sitting between a man’s legs could stir discomfort felt like the fuse had been lit… and I now had discover where it would lead.

3. When did this project shift from reaction to truth?
For me the purpose shifted. I didn't intend for it to be received that way. I was choosing my ideas outside of my fashion practice as a way to express ideals of beauty that I felt in myself and in men. That it re-directed me to look deeper was something in which I felt compelled to discover. It was and is me discovering in myself what I chose to hide, suppress, and disguise.  

4. How do you build trust when asking someone to be fully seen?
It’s a conversation I have often, and always it comes back to what is seen in the picture is a mirror to myself. And so, when I ask someone to let their guard down, to dive in with me, how I find them, see their beauty, see them is more of a highlight and reflection about me. Sounds vain but I ask each person to allow me to divulge something I see in them. It may not be what they feel or view in themselves and that is the magic. That we can’t dictate how someone sees, us, perceives us, projects onto us.

5. What did photography reveal that fashion could not?
Photographs leave little if no space to hide. It can be manufactured but that’s not what I wanted here. Fashion is the shield, the armour I create. It helps build, construct and manifest a version of a person. Making pictures is the unravelling of that. My view of a person says

more in that it makes each person search their own feelings in response to it. Not like fashion where it’s their taste that they respond with.

6. Has this project changed your understanding of beauty?
I think it has highlighted to me more-so what and who and how I find beauty in things, people, objects and subjects. It’s given me a magnify glass of focus on the littlest nuances of the body, of a lip, or and gesture, expression, position all arousing a narrative- if only visible to myself. And knowing that some of these may make people uncomfortable... because it’s confronting to see someone in a personal intimate moment. It’s disarming and we approach it a little unsure of how to read, respond.  

7. How do you now view visibility and validation?
I have been in two minds about the visibility of this work. Yes, I am glad to share it now but to be honest it’s not for everyone. They will see something in it that the think is truth or dismiss it as a vanity project. I think my main validation comes from the people I have been able to create the work with. We share and understand the intention. It’s something that I think will continue to evolve in the narrative of the experience as the images grow over time and how they are remembered by those in the pictures. I felt early on that these images needed to be made, how they would live, exist is always unknown, but it was important to me that this narrative exists.  

8. Why did you choose to keep these images private for seven years?
I wasn't sure I wanted to share them because there was so much connected to them. Each person and I shared so much in their creation, conversation, time, energy, vulnerability and connection. It wasn’t just about the image; I wanted to protect them and myself. The world is leaning into conservatism more and more and diminishing change and people’s existence, especially in the arts. But I am reminded that art needs to be the rebel in these moments and fight back by its existence. I am in a truly privileged position where I don't need to sell any of this work or make money from it, which I feel has given me more fuel and maybe the feeling, if like nothing else, there is nothing to lose anymore. I am fulfilling my purpose of filling the world with beauty and magic. If it makes you think, respond, check yourself - the better.

9. Would this work exist without the backlash?

I think it would have maybe looked different, and maybe I wouldn’t have dove as deep into it. But like most things that need to happen in my life, I don't do them with the intention of understanding why I take a path. It finds me and I fill it with my energy and my vision and every fibre of my desire to create something. It finds its purpose and its place. 

10. What does it mean, to you, to truly see someone?

I am not sure if we ever really do. And that’s the wonderful thing about it. It’s my interpretation of seeing someone. It my way of seeing them, and what I wish was there in them. None of us are ever fully seen, and I think that’s good. Some things need to be private, some things/people need to make us imagine. It’s ok not to have all the answers figured out -have everything explained. Hold tight to what makes us magic.

Interview by Sleiman Dayaa