As a capsule of six looks, 2 x Self is named after the language of clothing manufacturing. “Self” denotes a garment’s primary fabric, while “2 x self” instructs the maker to cut a pattern piece twice from that material. Here, the phrase takes on another meaning: two designers, two entities, and the meeting of two worlds — fashion and art.

Made from a studio within our home, the collection takes cues from the domestic life of clothing, from the way garments are worn, discarded, piled, and turned inside out. Silhouettes sit away from the body, low-slung and streamlined, retaining something of the ease that inspired them. Seams turn outward. Heavy volumes collapse through godets. Pattern pieces overlap and twist. Lengths of fabric are caught up and suspended into bustles. Familiar gestures of dressing and undressing become mechanisms for making clothes. These pieces reveal the hidden engineering that structures silhouettes. Intimate details of construction – a twist, a bustle, and inside-out seaming – take center stage.

At FRISSON, the collection is taken apart and presented through its constituent pieces. Garments are installed individually, alongside pattern drafts, construction detail pages, sketches, and other related ephemera from their making. Within the fashion industry, these materials are typically intermediary: tools toward a finished product, rarely seen once their purpose has been fulfilled. Patterns, the physical blueprints used to cut and construct a garment, are shown after passing through many hands. Developed in our studio, they begin as a record of our design intention, full of information and coded instruction about what a garment is expected to become. From our hands, they pass through cutting rooms, local ateliers, and graders, whose skilled work brings the final garments to life.

Marks, corrections, taped additions, cut edges, handwritten instructions, and other evidence of their use remain visible, revealing a craft and network of labor ordinarily concealed within the finished object. With 2 x Self we present clothing in its totality. Tactile markings indicate the multi-stepped process of creation, reveal the unseen architecture that shapes looks, and allude to the wearer’s relationship with the garment. Each piece is not a mere commodity hanging on a rack or a page in a catalogue. Each garment carries a story that begins long before it enters a boutique and continues long after it leaves it. The collection and the materials of its making occupy the gallery together, allowing process and product to be encountered as parts of the same work.

- Noah & Paul