Lianca Van der Merwe
Gossiping Garments
Gossiping Garments
The poem, Gossiping Garments, investigates the unseen and unknown impact of wearing/producing clothes and explores fashion’s physical (stains, DNA, microbiomes) as well as metaphysical (speculative negative affect from exploitation) dimensions. The poem is printed on pillows and read out loud during meditation workshops. When tied together the pillows form a book - a journal of personal ruminations and crowdsourced secrets.
Lianca van der Merwe (she/they) - aka Lala3xl - uses clothes as a subversive medium to break down the artificial barriers that distinguish between what is ‘us’ vs. ‘them’. She believes fashion has the restorative potential to undo the era of human exceptionalism it helped establish. Fashion can help us acknowledge the agentic world – our entanglement with other people, things, space, and time.
IG: @lala3xl
