02
Before ← the Future,
After → the Origin
Rationale
Before the Future, After the Origin explores humanity's recurring transformation through time, where evolution is not linear progress but a cyclical return to origin.
Throughout history, humans have defined identity through the bodies of other living beings - wearing fur, feathers, bones, and natural materials as extensions of self. Fashion becomes a narrative device that records this shifting relationship between humans, nature, and biological heritage.
Referencing marine organisms - among Earth's earliest life forms - the project acknowledges the ocean as the cradle of evolution, suggesting that the human body remains biologically and symbolically connected to its primordial origins.
Throughout human history, identity has been shaped through relationships with mythology, ritual, and the natural world. Before the emergence of modern systems and technologies, humans understood existence through symbolic creatures, ancestral storytelling, and spiritual interpretations of nature. Before the Future, After the Origin revisits these connections by imagining a speculative future still deeply rooted in biological memory and mythological imagination.
Influenced by marine life, ceremonial dress, and Eastern symbolic traditions, the project explores transformation as both physical and psychological. Water becomes a recurring metaphor for origin, mutation, and emotional depth, while the dragon functions as a fluid symbol of evolution, spirituality, and power.
Oceanic Space
Water functions as both origin and transition.
It reflects the earliest beginnings of life while simultaneously suggesting transformation into future states of being.
Rather than presenting fashion purely as aesthetic surface, the garments operate as transformative structures that extend the body into unfamiliar states of existence. Organic textures, translucent materials, and ritualistic forms blur distinctions between humanity and creature, ancestry and futurity, reality and mythology.
The project questions the assumption that progress requires separation from the past. Instead, it proposes that the future may emerge through continuous reinterpretation of origin - where mythology, instinct, and ancestral imagination remain inseparable from contemporary identity.
Before technology, there were myths.
Before progress, there were rituals.
The project imagines the future not as separation from ancestry, but as a return toward symbolic origins.
Q:
Why introduce mythological imagery into the project?
A:
Because myths survive longer than technology.
They continue to shape emotional memory, identity, and collective imagination.