The graduation collection constitutes an investigation into the entangled relations of fashion, space, and the body(-space), exploring physical and virtual spatialities. Conceptually grounded in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and Baroque, the project approaches fashion as a site in which spatial, corporeal, and virtual conditions are inherently interconnected and continuously negotiated.

In contemporary discourse, virtuality is frequently positioned as the antithesis of reality and primarily understood as technologically produced. Deleuze, however, conceptualizes virtuality as a real but non-actualized multiplicity, although intangible, verbalizing its potential to occupy both physical and non-physical spaces, making it real insofar as it has the ability to actively shape processes in the material world.

Drawing on Deleuze’s use of the fold as an analogy for virtuality, folding and pleating function as the primary design element throughout the collection as an intrinsically space-producing structure, enabling explorations of continuity between interior and exterior, body and space, actuality and virtuality. Design processes were partially shaped by algorithmic decision-making using image-to-image generative AI, to produce speculative mappings that informed subsequent garment development and realization of the collection with the 3D fashion software CLO, prior to its translation back into material form. The collection thus unfolds as a twofold assemblage, existing simultaneously across physical and virtual spaces, neither preceding nor representing the other, instead both affecting each other in their production.

Ultimately, the project affirms that physical and virtual spaces, in conjunction with the body, remain fundamentally interconnected. Contrary to narratives that render the human body superfluous in an increasingly digitized culture, fashion theory continues to negotiate fashion’s ontological dependence on the body. Without bodily presence, fashion loses its vestibular and spatial articulation. Moreover, engagement with virtual spaces is contingent upon physical localization – both through material infrastructures and through the body itself, which operates as an indispensable interface and active participant in the actualization of virtual potential.