Shiki Gu — BFA Fashion Design 2026

Collection

Bio

Shiki Gu is a New York-based fashion designer and visual artist. Her work begins in the tension between opulence and silence, sometimes carrying a quiet dignity that is also, unmistakably, a kind of grief. Her materials remember where they came from. Working through defamiliarization and material labor, she asks what it means when discarded things are seen again for the first time. In her practice, a garment is not a product but an argument.

SHII

Image: Farce List
*A farce is a type of comedy that uses highly improbable situations, exaggerated characters, and often physical humor (slapstick) to create laughter.

Farce List: Statement

This project is built entirely from salvaged materials like discarded objects, exhausted goods, things that have fallen out of the economy of attention. The collection begins from deliberate scarcity, as one might at the onset of an apocalypse. The work adopts a posture of studying unknowing. When inherited meaning is suspended, objects become available for reinvention. This estrangement is a response to a specific condition of contemporary consumption: overabundance has rendered desire frictionless, nearly imperceptible.

Through displacement and defamiliarization, the collection attempts to recover what that friction once produced as the involuntary tremor of genuinely seeing something for the first time. The absurd, the kitsch, with humours: not failures of taste, but symptoms of authentic encounter.