Collaboration with Fashion Brand Enclothed Cognition
I’m proud to announce my recent collaboration with the fashion and design brand Enclothed Cognition on a limited-edition reversible kimono, created for their 2018/19 season. The piece is a fusion of visual language, pattern, and form, and is now touring design museums across the Netherlands.
The Enclothed Cognition reversible kimono is now on display at the Cube Museum in The Netherlands.
Enclothed Cognition is the creative partnership of Barbados-based visual artist Mark King and Brussels-based fashion designer Bregje Cox. The brand draws its name and conceptual focus from the theory of “enclothed cognition,” which explores how the symbolic meaning of clothing, combined with the experience of wearing it, can shape behavior and self-perception. The garments are intended to do more than clothe the body. They are designed to impact how the wearer feels and moves through the world.
The collaboration began with a series of collages I created using the visual approach developed through my My Girls series. These intimate, abstracted portraits of women of color are built from fragments of painted paper and earlier works. For this project, I layered that vocabulary with Mark King’s signature graphic line patterns. Our styles met at the intersection of embodied gesture and emotional structure, and the resulting collages became the base material for designing the kimono.
Working with Mark on the collage phase of the project was a focused and energizing process. We passed ideas back and forth, testing compositions and refining how our visual styles interacted. Once we finalized the core designs, Bregje stepped in with her keen eye for textile translation. She gave feedback on how the collages could be tiled and arranged into repeating patterns that would remain strong and dynamic once worn. The Enclothed Cognition team then took those visual elements and designed a kimono that is unlike anything I’ve seen before. It doesn’t follow traditional silhouettes. Instead, it becomes a sculptural garment, one that moves with boldness, complexity, and intent.
This is my first time contributing to the fashion and design world in this way, and I loved every part of it. I’ve always admired fashion as an artistic medium, and being immersed in this kind of pattern-making gave me a new appreciation for how artwork can live on the body. The garment itself feels like an extension of our philosophies. It is expressive and individualistic.
I created a series of collages utilizing hi-res prints of Mark’s unique patterns and my handmade paintings.
The theory behind Enclothed Cognition absolutely influenced the direction of this kimono's design. That idea of how we dress shaping how we feel is embedded in the textures, the palette, and the structure of the final piece. As an artist who works with abstraction and interiority, the connection between what is worn and what is felt resonates deeply.
The kimono is currently on display at Cube Design Museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands, and will be part of additional exhibitions this summer, including Koorkappen en designs at FASHIONCLASH and Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. Seeing my collage work move into these international design spaces is a reminder of how adaptable visual art can be. It matters to me that this work reaches audiences outside of traditional museum contexts. Fashion is another form of storytelling, and I’m excited that my work can now contribute to that conversation.
