Jooyoung Shin wants a new answer to Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical question, what is a woman? If you ask anyone on the left today, you're likely to receive a question-begging mix of "depends on what you mean by 'woman'" and "by a person's performance of womanhood." In her fashion exhibition Alterity: The State of Being a Woman (2023), Shin boldly turns to the body for an answer, but not to sex's exterior. Instead, it’s the imagined sinews of womanhood--blood-filled threads, vessels, and tissues--that answer Beauvoir in Shin's virtuosic and original collection. If today's fairest answer to womanhood is a person's performance of gender, Shin's collection in Alterity asks if we need the person at all--if a garment itself, ingeniously designed and realized, can perform womanhood on its own.
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To focus this question, Shin's collection has only two colors, black and red, in a variety of sheer and perforated materials that she uses to disclose womanhood through radically reimagined evening gowns. I do mean through. Again, the human body in Shin's garments is not the model's, but the abstracted tissues of all women. It felt exciting for me, as a cis-het man, to recognize self and otherness intertwined in most of Shin’s collection. In "Woman as the Other," (see photo), one of Alterity’s most astonishing pieces, the model wears the black part of the outfit like choke-collared black dress plunge-cut to fang the breasts. But the evening gown--which is looking increasingly like a relic of twentieth-century femininity--is now only the background of Shin's whole garment. In the foreground, as it were, shines a blood-red network of striated metallic fabric that dynamically resolves into a crystalline layer of gorgeous, non-masculine musculature.
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Shin's black-and-red restraint is genius in this idea. It allows the viewer to sharpen their interpretations of Shin's synthesis of womanhood's varied material. Shin uses black mostly for structure, and red, for the most part, as cryptic or iconic ornament. Red does not always read as flesh, but when it does, the results can be overwhelmingly beautiful and philosophically challenging. It has become unfashionable to think that woman and womb are necessarily related, for good reason. But because wombs exist regardless of whether or not they are performed, they cannot be imagined away, or easily disassociated with womanhood. Shin is not afraid to confront the womb in her answer to Beauvoir. Her most profound piece, for me, might be "The Origin," a beautiful, shoulderless, chiffon black dress that possessed, red and deep beneath its sheer midsection, what felt like a nest. The red fabric nest felt irrefutably alien to my own body and identity. There is no performance of masculinity, femininity, or any non-binary gender identity that can remove the womb, or its association with woman, from the garment.
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Does this mean Shin is arguing that a womb makes a woman? No.She just leaves the womb in the dress, like the embryo of a fact waiting to be born again, leaving us to decide what to do with it in a world rightfully embracing gender fluidity. It's very beautiful, and it's not going anywhere, and the best way to think about that fact is through Shin's ingenious Alterity.
