For Peilin Chen, this question began with something very ordinary: three suitcases. For the past seven years, Chen has moved between China and the United States every few months, carrying her life back and forth between two places, two languages, and different cultural expectations. Over time, packing and unpacking became more than a practical routine. It became a way of thinking about what it means to carry a sense of home, and what happens to identity when the body is constantly moving.
Her MFA thesis collection at Pratt Institute, Between Departures, grows directly from this experience. It is a gender-fluid collection that brings together fashion, installation, film, and performance, using clothing and luggage to explore migration, identity, memory, and movement. Instead of simply depicting the experience of migration, Chen builds it into the garments themselves. Suitcase patterns become garment patterns. Clothes can become bags. Bags become tops. Pieces can be attached, detached, folded, exchanged, and transformed.
Chen’s relationship with fashion has always been rooted in questions rather than trends. Before studying Fashion Collection + Communication at Pratt, she studied communication and art history at the University of Southern California. She became interested in fashion because of its ability to exist in several worlds at once: as an object, something worn against the body, a commodity, and a form of social language.
“I rarely begin a project with a silhouette or a visual trend,” she says. “I usually begin with a question, an object, or a repeated bodily gesture.”
For Between Departures, the question was how to pack a home into something as limited as a suitcase. Chen describes packing as a “ritual of translation”: folding clothes into the dimensions allowed by airline rules, compressing personal belongings into weight limits, and deciding what is essential enough to take along.
The suitcase became a natural starting point. Chen studied the dimensions of carry-on and checked luggage and began translating their geometry into clothing. In one dress, the geometric structure of a suitcase is cut in sheer silk organza and combined with delicate layers of lingerie. The result brings together something rigid and regulated with something intimate and usually hidden. In another piece, suitcase patterns are merged with the structure of a pleated skirt, with a modular snap system allowing garments to be attached and detached. The act of wearing becomes another version of packing and unpacking.
The same idea appears in a second-hand leather bag that Chen deconstructed and rebuilt into a top. Its lining becomes a hood, while the garment can still fully enclose itself and return to its original function as a bag. The object changes, but its previous life remains visible.
That sense of transformation is important to Chen. She is interested in what happens when an object is given a new function without completely losing its history. More than 30 percent of the collection incorporates recycled and second-hand materials, including shirts, trousers, a leather bag, and discarded bicycle inner tubes. Rather than treating sustainability as something added to the collection afterward, Chen sees the previous lives of these materials as part of their meaning.
“I am interested in working with materials that already have a history and allowing that previous life to remain legible after transformation,” she explains.
There is a quiet parallel between this approach to materials and Chen’s understanding of migration. A person can move from one place to another without leaving everything behind. Previous experiences remain present, even as identity changes. The same can be true of an object. A used leather bag can become a garment, but its hardware, lining, seams, and traces of use can still tell us what it once was.
As the collection developed, Chen became less interested in the suitcase as an object and more interested in the body in motion. The gestures that had shaped her own life, folding, carrying, compressing, dressing, undressing, unpacking, became ways of designing.
White button-down shirts were repeatedly folded and unfolded before being permanently stitched into place. Their creases and distortions preserve traces of movement, but the garments can no longer return to their original form. A dress made from wire hangers takes another everyday object associated with temporary storage and turns it into something that directly supports the body.
For Chen, these gestures speak to the way migration changes us physically as well as emotionally.
“A person may move back to the same geographic place,” she says, “but the body and identity that return have already been altered.”
This idea of movement extends naturally into Chen’s exploration of gender. As a queer, nonbinary person, she describes gender itself as a form of movement, between ways of presenting, being perceived, and understanding the body. In the collection, masculine and feminine codes are not treated as fixed opposites. Instead, they are taken apart and recombined.
Men’s tailored suit pants are combined with lingerie construction to create a multifunctional piece that can be worn as either a top or a bottom. In another look, men’s trousers are turned inside out, exposing their internal construction, and combined with part of a skirt pattern and a suitcase form in delicate silk organza.
One jacket replaces conventional shoulder pads with bra pads, turning a component associated with feminine body shaping into part of a traditionally masculine tailoring structure. The result is an exaggerated silhouette that carries both references at once.
For Chen, these experiments are not simply about creating unusual clothes. They are a way of questioning the categories attached to clothing and the body.
“I am interested in how [masculine and feminine codes] can coexist, shift, and be reconfigured on the body,” she says.
Eventually, Between Departures moved beyond the collection itself. For her MFA thesis exhibition, Chen brought the garments into an environment of installation, video, and live performance. The pieces were initially suspended in the gallery alongside suitcase structures, somewhere between clothes, sculpture, and objects waiting to be packed.
Then they began to move.
During the performance, garments were taken from the walls, worn, exchanged, transformed, and packed away. A wire hanger dress that had been displayed as a sculpture became something worn on the body. Shirts became skirts. Dresses changed through layering and movement. The garments became active rather than static, allowing the gestures that inspired the collection to happen in real time.
Chen worked with performers Ziyun Yma Ma, Rika Yong, and Ray Wu, giving them space to respond to the garments through their own movements and embodied experiences. She also collaborated with filmmaker Boyi Xu, who interviewed the performers about their experiences of migration, displacement, and cultural transition. Their stories became part of the video component of the exhibition.
This collaborative process is important to Chen because she does not see the performers simply as bodies presenting a finished collection. Their experiences and responses became part of the work itself.
“The performers in my thesis presentation were not passive bodies on display; they were co-authors of the experience,” she says.
In the final act of the performance, a skirt derived from a suitcase pattern is peeled from a suitcase frame and put onto the body. The performer then leaves carrying the suitcase, while the exhibition space is gradually emptied.
It is a simple image, but one that brings the entire project back to its starting point. Packing. Leaving. Carrying. Beginning again.
Between Departures ultimately feels less like a collection about travel than a collection about what movement does to us. Chen looks at migration not only as the crossing of a geographic border, but as movement between identities, cultures, gendered expectations, and material forms.
The garments carry traces of where they have been, just as people do.
A shirt can be folded until its shape changes. A suitcase can become part of a dress. A bag can become a top and then become a bag again. Masculine tailoring can hold feminine forms. A garment can move from one body to another.
Nothing stays entirely the same, but nothing has to disappear either.
For Chen, that uncertainty is part of what makes movement meaningful. She hopes the work allows people to think about migration through experiences that feel familiar, packing, carrying, leaving, storing, deciding what to take with you, before opening into larger questions about displacement and belonging.
“Ultimately, I hope it creates a feeling of recognition mixed with instability,” she says, “the sense that home, identity, and even the boundaries of the body are less fixed than they first appear.”
