Walks of life - AW'24

About

Drawing inspiration from Kimsooja’s multidisciplinary practice, Mai Gidah develops an innovative approach to construction, playful textural contrasts, and layered volumes in the deeply personal collection Walks of Life. Here, along with utilitarian pocket-bags, geometric style-lines, and abstract motifs, are indistinct figures in silhouette (rendered as prints, hand painted, or as tufted patterns in intarsia). The recurring images speak of a Ghanaian childhood representing “my mum and my sister carrying goods in a traditional way, as parcels on their heads”. As the son of a fabric trader, the bunched gathering at the backs of shirts and T-shirts obliquely reference the large bolts of cloth redolent of his childhood.   

​

Clothing is at once personal and social – it speaks both of our own sensibility and of our affinity to particular communities. Walks of Life articulates this duality – idiomatically, people hail from ‘different walks of life’ but each of us must pursue our own journey or path.