Ruth Yoojean started her final collection at Parsons in the middle of falling out of love with fashion. Instead of pushing past that, she built the collection around it, letting two questions guide the process: “Why do I create, and who am I creating for?”
The result is How to Play?!, a collection that treats performance, expectation, and instinct as the real subject matter, with the garments as evidence. “In many ways, life itself is a performance,” Yoojean says. “We are constantly aware of how we are perceived, and that inevitably affects how we move through the world.” She became interested in what creation looks like when it isn’t shaped by that awareness, and in why something as basic as play becomes so hard to access as an adult.
Yoojean, based in New York, is a recent Parsons graduate whose work leans conceptual and stays close to fine art. For How to Play?!, she worked toward a state she calls “naïve creation”, not unconsidered, but built without the pressure of a predetermined outcome. “We live in a time where we are constantly expected to evolve, keep up with fast-moving trends, and present ourselves through social media,” she says. “I think the pressure for perfection has become stronger than ever.” Her response was to make room for mistakes on purpose, treating a wrong turn as raw material rather than a failure to correct. “I began to understand failure as redirection,” she says. “It made the process feel fun again and allowed me to see almost anything as a possible starting point for art.”
That philosophy played out physically. Yoojean used her own body as the starting surface for the collection, taping paper and fabric directly onto herself and building forms through collage rather than a fixed pattern. “I would print out images, tape paper and fabric directly onto myself, and collage intuitively on the body to see where it would lead,” she says. Working this way meant she was constantly adding, removing, and repositioning, closer to assembling a puzzle than drafting a silhouette. A leftover cutting scrap might become a ruffle; another scrap might become the pattern piece that decided an entire shape. Without a predetermined silhouette to follow, proportion became something she could exaggerate or misplace on purpose.
Those choices are most visible in the collection’s large taffeta pieces, which reference doll-like dresses pushed slightly off. Yoojean looked to clowns and their intentionally oversized, misfitted clothing as a reference point for how exaggerated proportions can feel playful, humorous, and slightly unsettling at the same time. “I wanted them to feel beautiful, soft, and doll-like, but also slightly eerie or uncomfortable,” she says, “almost like a doll that has been sitting inside an old box for too long.” It’s a specific, slightly unsettling image, and it captures what the collection is doing throughout: holding beauty and awkwardness in the same silhouette instead of resolving the tension between them.
The textiles followed a matching process. Instead of treating fabric as a finished surface, Yoojean pushed it through repeated stages of alteration. One piece began as a secondhand curtain, spray-painted, hand-washed, and then built up further with acrylic paint, glitter, and marker. For another, she made watercolor drawings, edited them digitally, and transferred the imagery using glue and water, a technique more commonly associated with fine art than garment-making. Scraps, secondhand fabric, and deadstock worked their way into the collection through this same instinct: rather than treating leftover material as waste, she kept asking what it could still become.
Yoojean traces her conceptual approach to her time at Parsons, which she says encouraged her to question traditional methods of construction and made her more conscious of the responsibility built into the design process. Sustainability entered How to Play?! through that lens, less as a stated principle than as a natural outcome of working with what already existed.
Now that she’s graduated, Yoojean is planning to keep working in the space between fashion and art while developing her own label. “I’m nervous about what’s ahead,” she says, “but more than anything, I hope to stay true to myself and my creative voice throughout the process.”
To see more of her work, visit her website here.
