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, they lose intention. What felt like separate decisions — a shirt bought one winter, jeans from another year, something kept 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. Clearing space feels virtuous. But I know that removal is rarely disappearance. Things move elsewhere, they continue and they don’t dissolve. Keeping everything unchanged felt worse, as if ownership alone were enough justification.

So I chose one piece and cut into it (Yunki 1.0)

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?

I tried not to dismantle it completely. I didn’t want to reduce it to plain fabric. The sleeves became a strap. The torso folded into a pouch. The hem stayed visible. When it was finished, it still looked faintly like a shirt, not convincingly transformed, not disguised.

There is something unsettling about that partial shift. We are used to objects arriving resolved, sealed off from their previous lives. When a sleeve still reads as sleeve even as it carries weight differently, the illusion breaks slightly. It shows how little was required to redirect it.

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 because it was virtuous — because I didn’t want to buy another sheet if I didn’t have to. Money was tight, materials cost something. 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. I rotate garments the same way. Waistbands become reinforcement. Cuffs become tension points. I delay cutting for as long as I can. Even then, small scraps collect on the table. Remainder is unavoidable and I keep them.

“Constraint is not solely scarcity but ethical hesitation in the face of abundance.” I forgot where I jot this down from but i fking agree.

I’ve been thinking about what some have called a newer brutalism — not a return to severity, but to a kind of clarity. A way of working that doesn’t hide its conditions, not polishing away the seams, not pretending materials arrived without history. I don’t think about buildings while I sew, but I do think about that insistence: let structure remain legible. Let the process show.

Clothing is usually asked to forget. Each new purchase arrives without visible memory of fiber, labor, transit. It appears complete yet detached. When I alter something I already own, that detachment collapses. The object refuses to feel entirely new. It carries evidence and resists smoothness.

Though sometimes I catch myself wanting that smoothness.

It would be easier to replace, easier to select something already finished, already proportioned, already convinced. Making from what is here is slower. The sewing machine sits on the same table where I eat and draw. 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.

There is a tension in working this way. I am still surrounded by accumulation. I am not outside of it. Each garment I cut carries a previous decision — something I once desired, something I once justified. Altering it does not erase that participation.

But it does interrupt the rhythm.

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.