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SURRENDER: TO GIVE UP POWERFULLY
Over the past years, I experienced a profound sense of uncertainty.
What initially felt personal soon happened to be something collective and shared.
I come from south-eastern Poland, not that far away from the Ukrainian border. The only reason I am not directly affected by the war is a completely arbitrary fact that I was born on one side of an imaginary line.
This awareness made the idea of borders feel extremely fragile to me: I thought about the contradictory of human beings trying to invade the earth by desperately dividing oneself from it.
I decided to destabilise a compact form. I reference survival and military clothing as they are solid, protective garments and leather as the primal material. I rebuild the trenchcoat structure piece by piece with my own hand. Thanks to Elmo Leather and Zadora, who donated me their production waste to work with.
I ended up with the chaos of patterns, colours, and textures. A chaos of waste, and I decided to let it lead me.
The artwork is part of Fashion Frontier Program 2025, a Japanese initiative recognizing and nurturing designers who create artistic fashion with strong focus on sustainability and social responsibility. SURRENDER is one of the 8 selected final projects and has been exhibited during the FFP Award Ceremony at Tokyo Node Hall.
The project has been created and presented with support of Adam Mickiewicz Institute and culture.pl within NetWorks and ReSide programs held by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland and also with support of the Polish Institute in Tokyo.