What’s left on the floor
I emptied my wardrobe onto the floor and didn’t touch it for a while.
Clothes look different when they are horizontal, they lose proportion and intention. What felt like separate decisions, a sweater bought one winter, jeans from another year, something kept just because it was expensive, became a single mass. Not abundance, not exactly excess just accumulation...
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. I mean, there is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the place. But I know that removal is rarely disappearance, things move elsewhere and they continue. Even donated textile remains materially persistent, cycling through systems rather than leaving them. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally dishonest, as if ownership alone were enough justification. Neither resolution was clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it. (Yunki 1.0, 2024)
The hesitation is always physical. The garment still holds together at that moment, it still knows what it is. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. The collar had stretched. It had already adapted once to my body.
What else can you hold?
This is where the question begins, not in theory but in touch. What the hand finds in a worn garment is not just material but encoded history: the stress in the seams, tension in the weave, time written into the cloth for the hand to receive.
To dismantle such an object into neutral yardage would repeat the abstraction that commodity culture already performed on it when it first appeared on a shelf, sealed and complete. It is usually asked to forget, a garment arrives appearing self-evident, resolved and detached from its own making. The wardrobe accumulates this detachment. I was not interested in that repetition.
But when you alter something you already own, that logic collapses. The object refuses to feel entirely new. It carries evidence and resists smoothness. Though sometimes I catch myself wanting that smoothness. The sleeve still reads as sleeve even as it becomes something else. I like that resistance. I think that is the point.
In school, I hated watching a sheet of board get discarded when there was still space left on it. I would rotate pieces obsessively, trying to use every corner. Not out of virtue but because I did not want to buy another sheet if I did not have to. Waste felt like carelessness I couldn’t afford.
That habit lives in my hands now. It wasn’t ideological at first, it was practical. But over time it hardened into instinct and if you follow it long enough, it becomes a position.
“Constraint is not solely scarcity but ethical hesitation in the face of abundance.” I wrote that down somewhere and cannot remember where it came from, but it has stayed with me because it names something I had been circling without being able to say directly. The constraint I work within is not poverty in the traditional sense. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else. The wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that participation. What I am trying to do is not escape that condition but operate inside it differently, to reorganize and extend rather than to replace.
Making from what is here is slower, the sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is whatever is left on the spool though sometime not really, I try to compliment the fabric that I am working on. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and surrenders. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust, I have to accept what the material allows.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It does not begin with a blank surface. It begins with compromise, with negotiation and with the recognition that what exists is already more than enough.
The pieces I make are not refined, they are adequate and they hold what they need to hold. They still resemble what they were. I like that they don’t fully escape themselves.
There are still clothes waiting.
For now, I am trying to stay with them.
Clothes look different when they are horizontal, they lose proportion and intention. What felt like separate decisions, a sweater bought one winter, jeans from another year, something kept just because it was expensive, became a single mass. Not abundance, not exactly excess just accumulation...
I sat with the discomfort of it.
Getting rid of everything would have been efficient. I mean, there is a feeling of virtue in clearing space, as if the problem dissolves when the object leaves the place. But I know that removal is rarely disappearance, things move elsewhere and they continue. Even donated textile remains materially persistent, cycling through systems rather than leaving them. Keeping everything unchanged felt equally dishonest, as if ownership alone were enough justification. Neither resolution was clean.
So I chose one piece and cut into it. (Yunki 1.0, 2024)
The hesitation is always physical. The garment still holds together at that moment, it still knows what it is. I turned a long-sleeve T-shirt inside out and traced the seams with my fingers. The fabric had thinned at the elbows. The collar had stretched. It had already adapted once to my body.
What else can you hold?
This is where the question begins, not in theory but in touch. What the hand finds in a worn garment is not just material but encoded history: the stress in the seams, tension in the weave, time written into the cloth for the hand to receive.
To dismantle such an object into neutral yardage would repeat the abstraction that commodity culture already performed on it when it first appeared on a shelf, sealed and complete. It is usually asked to forget, a garment arrives appearing self-evident, resolved and detached from its own making. The wardrobe accumulates this detachment. I was not interested in that repetition.
But when you alter something you already own, that logic collapses. The object refuses to feel entirely new. It carries evidence and resists smoothness. Though sometimes I catch myself wanting that smoothness. The sleeve still reads as sleeve even as it becomes something else. I like that resistance. I think that is the point.
In school, I hated watching a sheet of board get discarded when there was still space left on it. I would rotate pieces obsessively, trying to use every corner. Not out of virtue but because I did not want to buy another sheet if I did not have to. Waste felt like carelessness I couldn’t afford.
That habit lives in my hands now. It wasn’t ideological at first, it was practical. But over time it hardened into instinct and if you follow it long enough, it becomes a position.
“Constraint is not solely scarcity but ethical hesitation in the face of abundance.” I wrote that down somewhere and cannot remember where it came from, but it has stayed with me because it names something I had been circling without being able to say directly. The constraint I work within is not poverty in the traditional sense. I live inside the same system of overproduction as everyone else. The wardrobe on the floor was evidence of that participation. What I am trying to do is not escape that condition but operate inside it differently, to reorganize and extend rather than to replace.
Making from what is here is slower, the sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat, draw and mix. The thread is whatever is left on the spool though sometime not really, I try to compliment the fabric that I am working on. Denim resists and holds its shape; jersey stretches and surrenders. I cannot force one to behave like the other. I have to adjust, I have to accept what the material allows.
Construction after surplus is quieter than construction before it. It does not begin with a blank surface. It begins with compromise, with negotiation and with the recognition that what exists is already more than enough.
The pieces I make are not refined, they are adequate and they hold what they need to hold. They still resemble what they were. I like that they don’t fully escape themselves.
There are still clothes waiting.
For now, I am trying to stay with them.
