Despite an ethnic’s journey of ‘who am I?’ is continuously ongoing, for VINN PATARARIN (a multi-disciplinary fashion design by Vinn Chokkhatiwat and Patararin Pongprast), an ‘identity’ is not only a corporeal appearance. Preliminary from an identified internal self, an enquiry is deeply extracted from self-experiences and interests which architecture and textile are used as manifest tools to explore a further curiosity about meanings and influences of identity in the post-modern era. This time, honorably collaborated with an internationally renowned Thai photographer, Lek Kiatsirikajorn, this series of self-contradictory portraits captures depictions of androgynous figures after emphasizing by VINN PATARARIN’s first collection as an apparatus of identity indicators.

Through the main key words of universal gridlines, self-expression and organic, the ‘as claimed’ contemporary  motif of identity  is rationally mass-produced by laser-cutting and humanely finished up by hands which superficially offers a self-manipulation to meet a customization of an individuality. Alike a construction of a surplus skin, an architecture of transparent and translucent materials blends the atmosphere of an in-situ environment into the garment, and finally overlays onto the present body parts. Eventually, the outer self is fading. From feminine typecasts into masculine physiques, as well as, the customer’s to hold the key of the designer’s, this blurred border breaks the rule of own identity, fuses, dissolves upon ambiguous rations of another person to abscond terrified social laws which set certain desperate requirements that we be in what we seem to be. Once letting these ‘images’ go, in fact everything is just in-between and never existed…

By Yanisa Niennattrakul