OCDChinatown is pleased to present Studio Dress, the latest project by American artist K8 Hardy. The gallery, located on the second floor of a working Chinatown Mall and committed to showing non-orthodox and queer art statements since 2018, is a perfect setting for this project, which will showcase Hardy’s new wearable body of work and an installation collaboration with Andy Harman that plays with the aesthetics of a low-brow fashion retail venue.

K8 Hardy has designed the Studio Dress, a practical new wardrobe staple that doubles as an editioned artwork available to the masses. Prioritizing functionality in every detail, including pockets and a two-way zipper running down the center, the 100% cotton Studio Dress is at once wearable and conceptual. Its innovative design typology combines the pedestrian house dress favored by housekeepers and grandmothers with the ubiquitous workwear coveralls employed by plumbers and mechanics: feminine + masculine in one.


A butch dress with flexible use potential — wear it zipped or open, to the grocery store or for a selfie — its supreme functionality belies that the garment is also a provocation into the affective labor of the artist, the aesthetics of consumption, and the ever-present demand on the contemporary worker to always be producing. It’s the latest chapter in Hardy’s ongoing exploration of the politics of dress, but it’s also an investigation into the relationship between art, labor, and exchange. Retailing for $475, it’s accessible to a wider audience than the collector class.

Available in three sizes XS/S, M/L, and XL/XXL (accommodating waists up to 46 inches), the Studio Dress is set to debut in-person at OCDChinatown. The space will be transformed into a surreal retail experience. Hardy reimagines the shopping mall as a fever dream and the changing room as a stage, amalgamating elements of a grandmother’s living room, an auto parts store, and a Chinatown vendor’s stall. The pop-up store will recontextualize an earlier K8 Hardy sculpture, a lightbox originally conceived to subvert the language of advertising, reframing it with a new relationship to consumerism. One hundred pairs of K8 stockings and knee socks will also be available at the shop.

In conjunction with the release, Hardy modeled for an editorial with photographer Cass Bird, whose raw moody portraits have won her campaigns with fashion heavyweights like Dior and Calvin Klein. (Hardy and Bird are longtime friends, having attended Smith College together in the ‘90s.) Bird’s girlfriend Jenna Lyons also features in the photographs, mostly nude but sometimes wearing the Studio Dress. Lyons is a fashion designer and the first openly gay cast member of The Real Housewives franchise — a real housewife wearing Hardy’s house dress-inspired design.

K8 Hardy is a visual artist based in New York City and originally from Texas. Fashion has been a recurring subject and medium throughout her multidisciplinary practice. Hardy is known to reproduce and deconstruct many of the tropes of advertising, especially the marketing of garments, shoes, and fragrance, creating objects and images that resist easy consumption. Her photography, filmmaking, and zines have frequently employed self-portraiture, often treating her own body as an object and undermining preconceived notions of identity through performativity and humor. Upsetting conventions and easy interpretation, Hardy’s richly nuanced work probes the bounds of taste and the social and affective forces that influence aesthetic judgment.

 
Some iconic fashion moments in Hardy’s oeuvre:

    Fashionfashion (2003–08) the zine sensation that rocked the art world

    Untitled Runway Show (2012) a runway performance, part of the Whitney               Biennial

    Outfitmentary (2016) a documentary logging daily outfits for 10 years
“My fashion was a rebellion, a punk thing, you know, to change my identity and to rebel against what I should look like as a young girl. I was reading riot grrrl zines and stuff like that. Dressing for me was about upsetting ideas of taste in general. That’s how my aesthetic formed,”

    K8 Hardy in conversation with Johanna Fateman, 2022


The Studio Dress features three patches:

        8K: the artist’s name backwards, functioning as a kind of logo and evoking               her long-standing interest in brand lexicons

        Hertling (upside down): a riff on the family moving business in Berlin

        Studio: a callback to Hardy’s 2020 show A New Painting

K8 Hardy on house dresses:

“I collect them, I wear them, I look for them everywhere I travel. Grandmothers around the world wear them.”


Inspired by the pedestrian house dress your grandmother wore, K8 Hardy created The Studio Dress

“ AN ARTWORK AVAILABLE TO THE MASSES”

The dress is designed in collaboration with Andrew Harmon.