Fashion Hacks 2022-2023

Garments are cultural scripts, semiotic conversations with ourselves and each other. 

I’m in the weeds of my gender transition, moving deeper into non-binary wilderness. I mezzo-dose T while continuing to disidentify with masculinity. Out here, traditionally masculinized garments have become an arena for argument, augmentation, and arrival.

I follow a design process that requires unlearning my patented, industry-focused fashion education. It is an invitation to ask “what if” in varying degrees of messiness. The process is guided by intuitions towards embodiment. I don’t second-guess it. I alter the garments into new silhouettes that allow me to land in my skin. The effect is sometimes soothing, sometimes challenging, usually interesting. Hacking clothes brings me into dialogue with my body; it bridges the estrangement that’s been mounting these past few years. 

These upcycles and hacks tell my embodiment odyssey, marking islands of thought and feeling that I pass through. One of the greatest joys of living in Berlin is the culture of give-and-take boxes on the sidewalks. On every street, doorways to apartment buildings will have items zu verschenken (to give away), mostly comprising of used garments.

Upcycling has become a core creative process for me, because it lets me digest parallel streams of thought through handwork therapy as well as occupying the body as a discusursive ground. Used garments become material puzzles, both in the patterning and piecing together of elements, as well as the puzzle of eliciting gender euphoria. These dual games simultaneously awaken both spacial/mathmatical and intuitive/emotional modes of thought and decicion making.

My hacks are little experiments, which I test drive in daily life to see what feels right, which hem lines resonate with my gender on any given week, which alterations add value or render the material less desirable (not all hacks work out the way I like).

If you are interested in purchasing a hacked garment or commissioning an upcycle, you know what to do.