discomfort

November 2024

Deadstock velvet and lurex upholstery fabrics, copper wire, mohair, secondhand ribbon.

Menswear is the state of not having to think about what is on your body, how it’s laying, or how it affects your movement. It revolves in recent history around tailoring, though the body is straight - or maybe because the body is straight. Menswear has also been shaped historically by war - whether a knight’s armor or the trickle-down of his underclothes to commoners’ popular clothing (think of the jerkin) or the standardization of mens’ pants sizes as a result of WWII. Certain motifs in this collection include the structures of armor, particularly lame, which provides flex and articulation through overlapping, sliding plates of metal at joints on the body. A technology that provides comfort and ease of movement though it is heavy and cumbersome.

In contrast, womenswear isn’t about discomfort, but does almost nothing to consider comfort or ease when there are other, more important and aesthetic considerations to a garment. Discomfort is practically a tenet of womenswear.

My goal with these pants was to put men into clothes they are aware of with every step. Both a social awareness, that they are out of place in what is both pants and a skirt, and a physical awareness, with the minor hindrance to their stride and corset lacing to bind the legs together. A restriction that takes place both at home and outside - the inconvenience and time of lacing up one’s clothes and then the restriction of wearing these clothes. This is really just a taste of what it is to wear women’s clothes, have them drag and pull and come undone, and bind and distract and bother.

My collection is about women being placed in the background, ignored and obscured. It is about how men don’t see this or realize their bias even when they think they do, and how incredible scrutiny (of the self and the world) are needed for them to realize their implicity. Each piece of clothing is an exercise in male attention.