Read full press release HERE.

Please join SoRA for a fashion show and exhibition featuring work by Jianing Zhao, Nathalie San Fratello, Tanner Kok, Lexi Fujita, and Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, winning stylists from the School’s EYE-CATCH! open call. Each stylist will showcase four looks inspired by the aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of the Attention Economy, brought to life by twenty models on the runway at our Dumbo Sanctuary. The exhibition will feature one-of-a-kind accessories by guest artist Kajal Ramrup in addition to selected looks by the five stylists. 

Through their wearable pieces, the EYE-CATCH! stylists expose the infrastructures of the digital world that control, manage, and optimize human bodies, but they also reroute tactics of visibility towards alternative ends: high-visibility ("hi-vis") functions as a mode of coexistence across disability justice and ocean life, while wearable sculptures that respond to movements of the human body resist fast consumption and instant gratification. In the stylists' hands, garments act as tactile vessels of living memory extending beyond the scope of an individual lifetime. Bodies-as-landscapes mirror the deep connection between Black and Indigenous histories and their environments, and the Boro Boro art of mending and upcycling used fabrics materializes cultural hybridities between Hawaiian and Japanese American communities. With a majority of the pieces constructed from secondhand or upcycled materials, EYE-CATCH! reaffirms that resistance to the commodification of our attention begins with our most intimate surroundings — by attending to the deep pasts, and possible futures embedded in the ways we clothe ourselves.

Public Programs

• Fashion Show | Saturday September 19, 6-8pm

• Exhibition Opening | Thursday October 1, 6:30-8:30pm (Dumbo First Thursday)