costume design  |  dramaturgy  |  performance

Cut from the Same Cloth is a multimedia project exploring clothing as a performance, as a costume, a representation of identity, and a tool to convey personal expression. For thousands of years, clothing has been used as a signifier of social status, class, lineage, and gender. There is also a long history of clothing and garment production being women’s work, and intensive studies reframing fashion history through feminist lenses. These concepts intersect and engage with each other through family lineages, familial relationships, and how one’s upbringing not only influences their identity, but the others around them as well.

In this project, four people who identify as trans or genderqueer, all aged twenty-three, have shared their experiences with how their gender identities interact with their personal style. The first portrait in each person’s pairing shows them wearing their favorite outfit– one that makes them feel the most themselves, in both personality and gender expression. The second portrait shows them wearing clothing that they have inherited from a family member close to them. Audio tracks of oral interviews and accompanying written transcripts explore each person’s connection to the clothing that they’re wearing, their relationship to the family member the clothing is from, and how these distinctions between the outfits shape how they see and hold themselves. The interviews are recorded in monologue format, making the participants and the artist equal participants in their narratives and the project as a whole. The self-portraits are inspired by the format of costume fitting photos in theater, where actors, without hair or makeup done, pose in character costumes that are in the process of being built.

For more information, please feel free to reach out to sierrawypych@gmail.com.​