Dog Hair High, an art project created by Peter Helenek, features dogs posing as high school students in the '80s.
Complete with the voluminous hairstyles and fluorescent clothes of the day, set against a plain school portrait background, the photo series (now an emerging social media brand) has raised thousands of dollars for charity and given the internet something to smile about.
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INSIDER spoke with Dog Hair High creator Peter Helenek to find out how this wacky, delightful concept came to be.
Dog Hair High creator Peter Helenek works in toy design and packaging.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
After working at Mattel for 17 years, he started his own consulting company.
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It was through testing toys at Mattel that he discovered the power of dogs to bring joy to people.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"If you tested a toy with a group of kids and it didn't test well, there was kind of this unwritten rule of 'throw in a puppy,'" he said about the design. "If you throw in a puppy and test it again, you got a winner."
The idea for Dog Hair High came about in January 2017, when Helenek found inspiration in the late Carrie Fishers directive to "Take your broken heart, make it into art."
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"I was feeling really down in January because there was an inauguration coming up that I wasn't really happy about, and Carrie Fisher had just died," said Helenek.
When a friend sent him an article featuring outrageous high school yearbook portraits from the 1980s, he was inspired to throw in a puppy the way he did designing toys at Mattel.
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"I'm a child of the '80s, so the more I scrolled through these portraits — these kids had huge hair, incredible makeup, just unapologetic style," he said. "And as I looked through them, they resonated with me and they brought me joy, and every one I looked at brought a bigger smile on my face. So I had the insight of 'throw in a puppy.' What if I did portraits of dogs? What would that look like?"
Inspired by the yearbook portraits, Helenek went thrift shopping for vintage 80s clothes and began curating them into looks for canine characters.
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
Helenek also has experience as a wardrobe stylist.
"The idea was that we wanted to create different archetypes within high school that would be really visually easy to read," he said.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
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"What would the punk dog look like?" he said. "What would the popular dog look like? What would the nerd look like? What would the outcast look like?"
He then began recruiting dog models in his neighborhood to pose as Dog Hair High students and faculty, setting up a photo studio in his backyard.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"That was a real journey because dogs don't act like people when you photograph them," he said. "They have their own mind and their own agenda. Some dogs were great models and some dogs were not. We took photographs of dogs and let their personalities speak to us."
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The dogs werent dressed up for the photos — its all Photoshop.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"We photographed wigs, and then we photographed outfits on a mannequin, and then we composited them all together in Photoshop," he said.
"We wanted to do it so skillfully that when the viewer looked at it they didnt know whether it was real or it was Photoshopped."
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
To officially launch Dog Hair High, the photos were displayed at a gallery event as a fundraiser for Michelson Found Animals.
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
The dog models and their owners walked the green carpet and posed next to their portraits. The event raised over $3,000.
"When we opened the gallery, I had people come up to me and say, I was that dog. I dated that dog. I hated that dog," Helenek said.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
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"People saw themselves as these characters and that really meant a lot to me."
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
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Helenek hopes to create more classes of Dog Hair High in the future.
Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"We're working on ways moving forward to do private photoshoots to style people's dogs, or develop an app where you could do this to your dog yourself," he said.
More importantly, he hopes that the comical, over-the-top photos make people happy.
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Courtesy of Dog Hair High
"Ultimately, the goal of all of these images was to bring joy to anyone who saw them in a similar way that I was inspired by the images that I had seen originally," he said.
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