Unlike many fashion designers who seek to create new worlds with their clothes, CJ Aslan seems to want to pull people into a unique point of view she earned through years of investment into the industry that have left her fundamentally changed—not jaded, per se, but less liable to indulge in the rituals of the sartorial set, like the tendency to treat garments as holy or describe them in affectionate ways that brush up against personification. Though she makes pieces that seem to draw from things as diverse as children’s ABC books and heavy metal bands, Aslan (founder of Aslan World) is very matter-of-fact about the realities of the objects she makes—so much so that until recently, the bodies that would wear them were more of a thought experiment than a limiting factor:

CJ Aslan: To be honest, only recently, like last season, did I start considering the body much. Before, it was like, I'm making objects, and they're patterned to the body, but I didn't initially look at them on a body. They existed in my brain like individual objects. I didn't think about who would be wearing them and who they were for. I feel like when most people make clothes, they think about, “who is this for?” For me, like that is an aspect of designing that I've been trying to learn and understand more now that we have a full blown brand.

Em Seely-Katz: When people started actually wearing your pieces, how did that change them for you?

C: I mean, they were always intended to be worn—not just sculptural pieces, but images in my mind—almost like dressing disembodied limbs. But then, I found that people would put on the pieces with clothing items from outside our brand and I would just be like, “Oh my god, this is not how this is supposed to be worn.” It wasn't until the pieces existed in such a fashion space, that I realized how much I needed to be in complete control over every single thing that the person is wearing if they're gonna wear an Aslan piece—which, obviously, is impossible, but it made me want to make whole looks and clothes, other pieces that weren't just, like, gloves.

I wanted to be able to curate the pieces and have them understood in a context I created.

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E: I'm really interested in this idea that seems to be very baked into your process, that the pieces are—and I don't mean this in a way that has negative judgment attached to it—more “present” than people (potential wearers) in your genesis of the brand. Almost like the wearer is the accessory to the piece instead of the other way around.

C: The whole fashion industry is based around literally selling your soul for an object to exist, so it makes sense that that idea of privileging the object would be present in my work—for me, it's just genuinely more honest.

Nothing lasts for ever—people change muses, ideas but I think it’s a very honest impulse to prioritize these objects, which we view as having more longevity.

E: I agree. I got really obsessed a couple years ago with this school of philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology, which is basically just a way of looking at the world that imagines that objects “exist” as legitimately as humans do, that they have realities not fully defined by human understanding. Have you ever noticed a piece of clothing really impacting you in the way that you hold yourself, or experience a day, or something like that?

C: Since beginning to make clothes, what I pay attention to has changed a lot. I remember when I was really young, seeing something and not being able to have it, a shoe or whatever, and just not being able to stop thinking about it for a long time, envisioning myself wearing it. You envision how this thing is going to enhance your life, or your mood, or affect your emotions, but I think once you understand how things are made and you have the ability to make anything you want (or put it into production somehow), nothing fashion-wise is really valuable. Now, those feelings are very rare.

Fashion designing alters your brain chemistry, because now I see a garment, and I'm like, oh, that seems badly made.

It's rare that I see something that doesn't exist in a fine art context that I feel any emotion attached to.

E: So as you've gotten more involved, more knowledgeable, and more experienced in fashion, it has degraded the ability of objects to create these alternate realities for you? When you were younger, it seems like you imagined these alternate lives you’d live if you could have that object, if you could have these shoes, and now it feels like those doors are closing as you get farther and farther into this industry, because your understanding undermines that potential—that's what I'm hearing, at least...

C: Not in such a morbid way, but there is the reality that none of these garments really hold value, not any more than one gives them. When a garment exists, its journey ends there, but an idea, thought, or value toward something that hasn't been tangibly developed yet is really valuable, because it can be changed and manipulated and added to and subtracted from.

Once something is fully physical, it's there, that's it. All that’s left is for us to project what we can do with it, how we’ll wear it. You want this new pair of shoes, and you're like, “I'm gonna wear them every single day,” and then in two months, they’re in the back of your closet and you want another pair of shoes you're never gonna wear again.

We think we can protect objects to protect our internal happiness, but we can't—they're not changing and we are.

E: But don't you think that objects change with use, become recontextualized, get worn down, change the way they look? They have different experiences that they share with you—

C: But that still exists in our brain, the garments don’t have, like, a conscience, you know? You could be like “I wore these shoes on my wedding day,” but the shoes are still the same shoes that likely someone else has bought and has in their closet. It’s all your knowledge and understanding being projected, not the shoes.

E: Oooh, I want to talk to you again soon about the tension between your conception of objects and this Object Oriented Ontology idea that humans don’t imbue all meaning into nonhuman things. This is so interesting.