PIEDMONT CAMO
Fashion, Plant Communities, and the Politics of Place
Piedmont Camo asks how fashion can not only be a practice of expression, but one intimately grounded in and of place, reframing your fit as a way to learn to see, know, and live with plant communities. Grounded in the Piedmont ecoregion of Central Virginia—a landscape shaped by Indigenous displacement, plantation agriculture, logging, and industrialized monoculture—the project probes how garments and textiles might function as vehicles of ecological attunement rather than as inert commodities.
Created in collaboration with Catelyn Southwell.
Historically, camouflage emerges at the intersection of plants, perception, and power. Long before its militarization in the twentieth century, camouflage was cultivated through intimate knowledge of local ecologies: hunters, maroons, and Indigenous communities learned to read understory textures, seasonal color shifts, and plant architectures in order to move, survive, and resist within contested landscapes. Later, military camouflage patterns abstracted these relationships into generalized, portable prints, often severed from the plant communities they referenced and redeployed in the service of territorial control. In the Piedmont ecoregion, these abstractions parallel broader settler-colonial logics that transformed diverse forests and agroecological systems into simplified regimes of tobacco, cotton, pine, and pasture, landscapes disciplined for extraction and profit.
What might it mean to re-cultivate camouflage as a place-based practice rooted in living plant communities? Through textile and fashion design informed by local plant ecologies and communities, the work positions garments as mediators between bodies and landscapes. Camouflage here does not aim to erase the wearer but to situate them within a specific ecological field, requiring sustained attention to plant life cycles, growth habits, and seasonal rhythms.
