Oori apparel 25

Labour Couture

Kyungmi’s practice explores contemporary labor and the shifting boundary between passivity and agency. Growing up in a garment production environment, she witnessed the repetition and alienation produced by mass production, while her couture training revealed how clothing can embody both labor and beauty. Today, her experience in fast fashion retail where folding, hanging, and displaying garments are endlessly repeated has become a sculptural language in her work.

For her, clothing is a medium where labor, beauty, time, and memory intertwine. From this perspective, she developed the conceptual framework of Labour Couture, reimagining garments as sculptural language. Once detached from the body, garments remain incomplete yet free, constantly moving between passivity and agency.

Her installations disable the function of wearing, deconstructing and reassembling garments while combining them with repetitive gestures folding, hanging, fastening, and displaying to form landscapes of labor. In this project, shirts and trousers are dismantled into structural elements such as pleats, button lines, and lapels, then recomposed into showroom-like installations that expand from XS to XL.

Reframing

Cleo approaches textiles through the lens of photography, guided by her fascination with balance, harmony, and repetition. Moving between documentary, still life, and fashion, she continually returns to the tactile and visual qualities of fabric: the shadows cast across its surface, the rhythm of folds, the way light is absorbed. In this project, she isolates fragments of fabric and gesture, revealing their quiet strength and aesthetic resonance.

Her photographs are not mere documents but her sophisticated artistic interpretations that translate labor gestures into another visual language.Through her lens, Cleo captures the aesthetic dimension of these acts, reframing repetition and form within the photographic image.