Pleasure 41(2019), Am,Is,Are(2021) at Central Saint Martins & London Fashion Week
Pleasure 41:
Pleasure 41 is a conceptual fashion project exploring the tense and erotic relationship between people and dress. Drawing from BDSM structures of dominance and submission, the collection examines how clothing can restrict, discipline, and sexualise the body. The project began from my personal and cultural relationship to rules, propriety, and bodily control. I was interested in the historical norms of “proper dress” and how garments such as uniforms, Victorian silhouettes, and socially coded materials could carry hidden relations of obedience, power, and desire. Through weight, flatness, material tension, and the relationship between garment and wearer, Pleasure 41 reveals the obscure pleasure embedded within discipline.
Details
Am, Is, Are:
Developed during the Covid-19 lockdown, this MA collection emerged from a period of limited studio access and reduced physical encounter. Responding to this condition, I started to think through the instability of human presence, digital identity, and the possibility of virtual multiplicities. The work reflects on how identity is formed when the body is absent, unseen, or mediated through image.
At a time when social life was increasingly experienced through screens, I became interested in how fashion could move beyond the physical body and enter a more speculative space: one visualises states of uncertainty, projection, and transformation.
My practice examines how identity is produced, performed and made legible through space, appearance and social relations. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture, sound, performance and digital media, I explore questions of being, belonging and individual agency as shaped by systems of regulation, projection and perception that often sit beyond one’s control. Informed by lived discomfort, my work moves between public space, subcultural environments, domestic interiors and speculative worlds, often unfolding through aesthetics of pressure, extremity and pain. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from BDSM, rave and club subcultures, as well as DJ mixing, I explore how established structures of power can be disrupted and reconfigured through pleasure, consent and intensity.
In 2025, Chaney was selected as an awardee of the third edition of LOEWE FOUNDATION/Studio Voltaire award. Selected exhibitions and performances include Back of House/Front of House, Piccalilli Gallery, London (2026), FAN の BLOG 迷妹の部屋, Asymmetry Art Foundation, London (2024), How to Destroy Angels (curated by Tai Shani & Anne Duffau), Horse Hospital, London (2024), Acal Festival 3 (curated by Studio/Chapple and SON OF CRAFT), Staffordshire St Gallery, London (2023), if splash has your whistle, IKLECTIK, London, (2023) and Kaugummi im Motherboard, gr_und Gallery, Berlin, (2024).