GREY BUSCEMI

"My work started with a BA economics thesis on the garment industry in Southeast Asia. What I found was that sewing is skilled enough to resist automation, but the garments it produces cannot carry a price that pays the people making them fairly. I decided to design around it, and developed methods of garment construction that use no sewing at all. Looking back, I can trace the practice to my lineage, an Italian grandfather who was a bespoke tailor and a Korean grandfather who was an engineer with many patents of his own. I take my technical references from scenarios of invention, early aviation, broadcast and communication hardware, and the drawings and mechanisms that made them possible. The garments are assembled by the same logic as those references, through joints, fixings and tolerances rather than stitches, so the construction carries the history it came from."