Simpson transforms clothing into an architectural problem: pattern becomes plan, seam becomes joint, drape becomes geometry. By rebuilding garments in rigid materials—wood, metal, industrial textiles—she extracts the body’s absent outline and leaves behind a hollow discipline. The result is uncanny: forms that feel immediately familiar yet refuse softness, refusing the comfort we associate with clothing. Her work exposes an often-overlooked truth: garments are technologies that shape bodies socially. They train posture, declare role, regulate visibility, suggest gender, class, labor, propriety. By removing the wearer, Simpson makes that regulation explicit. The sculptures become exoskeletons of etiquette and utility: protective and constraining at once. This duality is central. Clothing shelters, but it also scripts. Simpson’s precision is not neutral; it is critical. Each fold translated into a plane, each curve tightened into an angle, reads like an analysis of how daily life disciplines the body through design. The work is quietly feminist without slogan: it shows how structures touch us before ideas do. Constructed Clothing, then, is not about fashion—it is about form as governance. Simpson turns the banal into a forensic object, revealing the politics embedded in patterns. She makes you see that what we “wear” is also what wears us: a social architecture wrapped around flesh, reified into sculpture so its power can no longer hide in softness.
