Critical Fashion Practice (2022-2025)

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. 

Speculative Upcycling is a process of relating to material through wearable poetics. In contrast to strictly aesthetic or trend-based upcycling, I explore a realm of study called Critical Fashion Practice, which braids together the personal, the theoretical, and the playful through dress, adornment, and creation. In my own Critical Fashion Practice, which is heavily based in queer theory and somaesthetics, I acknowledge that garments are cultural scripts: they are imbued with coded meanings, creating semiotic conversations within ourselves and with each other. At the same time, the somaesthetics of a garment – points of pressure or looseness, texture, weight, etc. – impact our feelings of embodiment.

In this framing, I position speculative upcycling as more than a means of re-working post-consumer textiles; it is an act of collage that invites both imaginative destruction as well as reassembly, while paying attention to both the semiotic and somatic qualities of what we make. This type of fashion practice is intended to be diaristic and anti-commercial. It may or may not result in functionality, depending on the story that the upcycler wishes to tell.