Zoe Green created a garment about self-destruction. Making it became an exercise in the opposite.
For the Shenkar fashion design student, whose work is rooted in personal experience, the project began as an exploration of self-criticism: the quiet, internal kind that can disguise itself as protection. But somewhere between research, leather, snakeskin, and the technical challenges of bringing the piece to life, the project also became a way of confronting the very pattern it was designed to explore.
From the front, Green’s garment looks composed. Leather wraps the body in a structured silhouette and nothing appears out of place. Then there are the sleeves, long and fluid, slipping out of that structure and spilling outward.
That contrast is the whole idea. Green, a fashion design student at Shenkar in Israel, made the piece as a study of self-destruction, though not the loud kind. Her focus is self-criticism, which she sees as quiet, controlled and almost invisible, showing itself only through subtle signs on the surface.
The project began with a city. Green chose Pripyat, the town near Chernobyl that was evacuated after the nuclear disaster, its residents believing they would be back within days. They never returned. She was drawn to its abandoned buildings, its decay and the way it became a ghost town from a disaster that began elsewhere. “I have always been drawn to the concept of destruction, both visually and conceptually,” she says. As she researched, that interest shifted from physical destruction to the internal kind.
The move to self-criticism came from her own experience. “Everything I have created since the beginning of my studies has been personal,” Green says. She describes a tendency to push herself into an all-or-nothing mindset, where her own expectations become the thing that holds her back. It isn’t necessarily about what others think of her: “often, I’m the one who stops myself.”
Her early experiments pointed the other way. She developed chaotic textures and fabrics that expressed destruction directly, and found them visually interesting but “too literal.” Through more research and conversations with her mentors, the direction changed. “I wanted to create something structured and controlled on the outside, while allowing the internal struggle to reveal itself through more subtle details,” she explains. She had brought leather samples into the project from the start, and the garment became predominantly leather.
Green came to see self-criticism as a kind of armour. Holding herself back creates a sense of protection against not meeting her own expectations, but the same protection becomes restrictive. Technical exercises in boning and foam helped her find the silhouette and understand why she was drawn to it. The result is an exterior that looks protective and controlled while also standing for the limits people place on themselves.
The material choices carry the same logic. Leather, she says, matters because of its connection to the body: “we live in our own skin, and we cannot escape ourselves.” Most of the jacket and skirt are cowhide, placed according to colour, texture and how each piece behaves against the silhouette. The skirt’s length and proportions were set to contrast with the jacket and let its structure stand out. The corset is snakeskin, which adds another layer to the concept. Just as a snake sheds its skin, it suggests the possibility of shedding patterns of self-criticism.
The corset took the most learning. Snakeskin had been on one of her research boards from the beginning, and Green ordered a large amount, then found it thinner and more delicate than she expected. Once she understood how to handle it, she says, it wasn’t particularly complicated, but building the corset involved many stages.
The sleeves came later. After moving away from chaotic materials and settling on leather, Green felt something was missing. She looked for fluid fabrics and brought several options to her mentors. One fabric stood out to her, and when they saw it, they encouraged her to use it straight away. She tried it in different positions, weighing how each would change both the silhouette and the meaning, and settled on the sleeves. Getting them right took two revisions of the pattern, along with some difficulty sewing the lining. For Green, the sleeves stand for “the tension between the control we project outwardly and the internal struggles that gradually find their way to the surface.”
Making the garment was a lesson in itself. Green had very little experience with leather before this project and had to work out which tools and techniques she needed before she could begin cutting. The jacket was the most technically complex piece. “I was creating a garment about the ways I hold myself back, while learning to push through the difficulties of making it,” she says.
What changed, she says, was not her understanding of the concept but her relationship with herself while making it. “For once, I felt that I wasn’t fighting against myself.” She calls the project her first real success since starting at Shenkar, and after the final critique she realised the ideas she wanted to communicate had also been understood by others.
For readers, she hopes the garment first reads as strong and present, then reveals the vulnerability beneath the structure. Looking ahead, Green wants to establish her own fashion brand and keep working with leather, a material she says she wants to continue exploring. “Ultimately, I want to create clothes that allow people to dress as the person they want to be.”
