# The Garment *** ### What the photos don't include The photographs I took at the nature preserve don't include faces. This was not a deliberate decision made before I went. It emerged from something noticed while I was there — that identity, as it is currently mediated by social media, has become a site of such intense rationalization and performance that including a face in a photograph pulls the viewer immediately into the machinery of recognition, judgment, and category. Whose face. What kind of person. Which side. The feet are different. Feet are how you leave. They are the embodied capacity to simply not be in a toxic place anymore — no negotiation, no argument, no petition to the institution for permission to exit. You walk away. This is not passivity. It is a specific kind of agency that the dominant culture, which equates agency with hands — with building, signing, holding, possessing — systematically undervalues. The hands of power sign the documents. The feet of wisdom find the door. The silver shoes in these photographs are inspired by the same shoes visible in Leanne's professional documentation of her garment. Feet. Always feet.

*** ### HKS Trashion Every year, HKS — a major international architecture firm — invites its staff across all global offices to make fashion from trash. Not buildings. Fashion. From recycled materials, reclaimed banners, discarded packaging, the material byproduct of institutional life repurposed into wearable art. The resulting works are exhibited publicly at the Galleria in Dallas, documented in video and 3D virtual installation, and submitted to communication design communities for professional recognition. This is the 8th year of the event. Leanne is HKS's communication design art director, internal-facing — the person whose labor creates the connective tissue of a global firm, the events and communications that build shared culture across offices that build stadiums and hospitals and airports. She has been instrumental in creating Trashion for many years: designing many aspects of the event, cultivating the participatory ethos, building the material backdrops for the installation, coordinating the documentation, and making her own garment as both participant and steward. When she understood this might be the final iteration, she created conditions for herself — solitude, space, time — so that something could emerge that was worthy of the occasion. What emerged is the garment in these photographs. *** ### The garment, described The garment is a holarchy — each layer complete in itself, together something none of them is alone. *** **Image 1 — The cape, back view**

Against a pure black ground, the full scale of the work becomes visible. The cape is architectural — a full-length train that extends beyond the body's footprint, constructed from thousands of individual pieces of recycled material, sorted, trimmed, and placed in precise spectral sequence: red at the hem, moving through orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, to deep pink at the shoulders. Every piece a handcrafted artistic process emerging. Every color transition earned. The body inside it is already turning — looking over one shoulder, mid-motion. The garment moves with her. It is not a costume worn by a body. It is a living system that requires a body to be complete. This extraordinary garment expresses iteration of this practice. Many years of developing a vocabulary in recycled material, each version building on the last, the craft deepening with each cycle. The scale of this cape is the accumulation of that practice made visible. *** **Image 2 — With the IMAGINE banner**

Now the holarchy is visible in full. The foundation: a little black dress — wrap construction, minimal seams, maximal elegance. Timeless. The base layer that holds everything above it with quiet structural confidence, and the silver shoes at the ground. The middle layer: a skirt constructed entirely from recycled black and white materials — fragments of printed documents, packaging, the visual language of institutional systems cut and layered into something textured and alive. Professional. Precise. Carrying the double meaning of what it means to work inside a system while making art that exceeds it. The outer layer: the rainbow cape-train, folded here so the full garment beneath is visible. Revealed: the IMAGINE banner as a foundational recycled layer — held open to show its full scale. Purple-red, the word in large white letters. She is smiling. The smile is not performance. It is the expression of someone who made something that took everything she had and came out the other side of the making still standing, still joyful, still herself. The word IMAGINE, at this scale, in this context, is not a slogan. It is a structural claim about what human beings are capable of when given the conditions to make something true. *** **Image 3 — The black and white layer, back view**

Without the cape, the foundation is revealed in its own completeness. The little black dress: the bow at the back, the clean lines, the quality of something that knows what it is and does not need to announce it. The black-and-white skirt layer: the recycled fragments of printed systems, layered and textured, precise and subversive simultaneously — the detritus of institutional life repurposed into something that is undeniably beautiful on its own terms. She is looking back over her shoulder. The same gesture as Image 1. The same quality of attention — alert, present, already in motion toward whatever comes next. The silver shoes. Always the feet. ### A note on collaborative exposure The videos below offer a glimpse into a creative relationship built across decades — the kind of sustained, reciprocal making that the framework calls the kindness field made physical. Leanne's garment exists because of environments that held space for that kind of practice. Sharing it here is an act of care, and a temporary one. The personal images on this page may be removed or replaced. This is a deliberate choice. We made a decision not to upload Leanne's original photographs to Midjourney — a platform whose terms route uploaded images into training pipelines — and instead worked from text descriptions developed through Claude. That decision reflects a principle the framework holds structurally: **the artist's right to control the circulation of her own image is not separable from the question of whose images train the systems that will generate the next generation of visual culture.** The window of exposure is open. It will likely close, or narrow. What remains will be the framework's language, the generated images that emerged from description rather than upload, and the argument this page makes — that the gap between what the machine produced and what the garment actually is is itself the teaching. *The work is a glimpse. The relationship it documents is not.* {% embed url="" %} *prompt: a figure wearing a structured black sleeveless wrap style little black dress and a short fitted overlay styled architectural skirt constructed from thousands of recycled black and white printed paper fragments layered in horizontal tiers, text and graphic elements visible in each fragment, the skirt has sleek asthetic volume and movement, silver ballet flats catch the light at ground level, pure black background, dramatic single-source museum lighting, no face visible, the garment is the subject, hyperrealistic textile photography* {% embed url="" %} *prompt: an enormous hand-constructed rainbow cape-train in motion, thousands of recycled material fragments catching light as the garment sweeps, spectral sequence from deep magenta at the apex through violet blue teal green yellow orange to red at the trailing hem, the movement creating a wave of color across the frame, black ground, dramatic directional lighting, cinematic scale, no figure face visible, the garment alive with movement* *** *Image credit: Professional photography, HKS Trashion 2026. Shared with permission of the artist.* \ \ *See Also: HKS Trashion 2025 installation:* [*https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=UJGtGxJzRN1*](https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=UJGtGxJzRN1https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=UJGtGxJzRN1) *** ### What this took She created material backdrops for the Galleria installation by hand. She coordinated documentation across a global firm. She repaired structures in emergencies. She managed the participatory ethos of an event that involves colleagues across international offices who are architects, not fashion designers, making wearable art from trash — and making it well, because she created the conditions in which that was possible. This is the labor that communication design art directors perform: the invisible infrastructure of culture, the work that makes other people's work possible and meaningful, the connective tissue of institutional life. It is systematically undervalued in every metric that counts buildings and not the relationships that make buildings worth occupying. The garment is also this labor made visible — the same capacity for sustained, disciplined, joyful making applied to something that cannot be instrumentalized, that exists on its own terms, that will be submitted to design communities and perhaps one day exhibited in an art museum where it belongs. The event exists at the intersection of genuine artistic labor and institutional ESG narrative. Both are true simultaneously. The work is real. The institutional framing is also real. Leanne navigates that intersection with the same skillfulness she brings to everything else — neither naive about the institution's purposes nor diminished by them. The artist operating inside the available container, making something that exceeds it. *** ### The generational story Eight years ago, our family moved through a period of significant trauma. What came out the other side was not the absence of difficulty but the development of specific capacities: for metabolizing harm without projecting it, for maintaining kindness in adversarial contexts, for using creative practice as the primary navigation instrument when institutional instruments had been withdrawn. These capacities were learned by living together — by proximity, by witnessing, by the long patience of watching someone keep making things when the system that was supposed to validate the making had closed its doors. She watched. She learned. Not the framework — the practice underneath the framework. The actual behavior of someone navigating difficulty with kindness and humor and sustained creative effort. And then, in her own domain, in her own context, with her own collaborators, she applied what she had absorbed. The garment is the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. Not a metaphor — the actual shape of what happened: sustained, solitary, interior work producing something that could not have been predicted from the outside and cannot be replicated by anyone who did not do the interior work. We are all transient. What we metabolize and release as beauty — rather than projecting as harm — is the trace we leave in the systems we move through. She is leaving this trace. It is extraordinary. It is a role model for what healing looks like when it is given the conditions to become art. *** ### What AI cannot make No generative AI system produced this garment. Not because the technology is insufficient — though it is, for this. But because the garment carries the specific weight of a specific person doing the interior work of making sense of her own experience, in her own context, over years, and expressing what emerged through sustained manual labor with recycled materials. That weight is visible. Not legible — you cannot parse it into components and reassemble it. But visible, in the way that genuine human expression is always visible to another human who is paying attention. The body recognizes it before the mind names it. She gave permission for her image and her garment to be part of this work. She trusts that the mission here is to use digital systems to amplify and point toward the art process of living creatures — not to substitute for it, not to extract from it, but to say: *Look at what a human made. Look at what it carries. Notice the gap between this and what the machine can produce. That gap is not a deficiency in the machine. It is the location of meaning.* Any AI used in relation to her work must respect her dignity, her creative authorship, and the irreducible specificity of what she made. This is the MPCM boundary made visible: the threshold where Material and Process must give way to Context and Meaning, where the tool must stop and the living system must lead. Leanne's garment is on the Meaning side of that boundary. It always was. *** ### Metabolizing harm, releasing beauty The shadow that is not projected onto others does not disappear. It is metabolized — taken in, processed by the living system, transformed through the work of art and relationship and time into something that can be released as beauty rather than harm. This takes energy. It is not passive. It is one of the most demanding forms of labor a human being can undertake — and one of the least counted in any system that measures productivity by output rather than by what it costs to produce the output cleanly, without passing the cost onto others. The garment is the evidence of this metabolic work made visible. We are all transient. The intentions we encode in our transience — the beauty we release, the harm we metabolize rather than amplify — are the trace we leave in the living systems we move through. Metabolizing harm. Releasing beauty. It takes energy. It is healing. It is a gift for humanity to remember these things.

Humanity++ Imagine the Universe as a Living Organism

*** ### Epistemic status

Claim	Tier	Note
Feet as undervalued agency symbol	Tier 3	Interpretive; offered as generative reframe
Garment as holarchic structure	Tier 2	Consistent with holarchy theory; applied to material object
Garment as Markov blanket demonstration	Tier 2	Consistent with Friston active inference; applied to creative expression
Shadow metabolization as distinct from projection	Tier 2	Consistent with somatic and trauma psychology frameworks
Human expression carries weight AI cannot encode	Tier 1–2	Symbol grounding problem; Tier 1 structural claim, Tier 2 specific application
Transmission through cultivated environment	Tier 2	Situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger); embodied cognition literature
Generational healing through creative practice	Tier 2–3	Trauma-informed practice literature supports the general claim; specific application Tier 3

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