Uyen Nguyen

This look, entitled Bubble, is an exploration of queer visibility and erasure. The model for this look selected the iridescent fabric to be reminiscent of a bubble. Bubbles are only visible from certain angles, similar to how many queer people are only visible either within their community or to themselves. We see this throughout history, as romantic relationships and the identities of prominent figures are erased by scholars, contributing to memes like “And they were roommates” which often serves as queer people taking back the ancestors whose existence is denied. This also connects to contemporary erasure, whether it be by those outside of the community having a singular idea of what “queer” looks like or infighting within the community over labels and validity of identity. Even queerness found in the natural world, such as the behavior of seagulls and penguins or the fluid nature of gender in a variety of animals, is erased by the scientific community with the excuses that create a heteronormative understanding. The structure of the skirt is a flat foldable design based on the Fibonacci Sequence, named after an Italian mathematician, but the reality is that this sequence was first proposed by Indian poet Virahanka as a way of describing a unique verse structure. The sequence itself draws a line between multiple societal structures that serve to maintain power through the erasure of those who do not fit the narrative of history and is a call for solidarity in the face of oppression. Bubble (skirt) was created from a series of concentric 32-gons where the distance between adjacent polygons follows the Virahanka/Fibonacci Sequence. The top uses a flat-foldable pattern that represents the cosine function. The algorithm for generating such patterns is described the 2019 Bridges paper by Uyen Nguyen, Be Fritzson, and Marcus Michelen.