Peripheral Forms explores clothing as a tool for resisting contemporary border regimes. Drawing on traditional nomadic pastoralist dress, the project examines outerwear as a site of critical refusal against state systems that demand permanence, registration and surveillance.

Nomadic pastoralists traversed landscapes predating the modern nation state, and seasonal movement traced climate, altitude and pasture rather than fixed territorial boundaries. Today these landscapes have been fragmented into surveillable grids. Since the 16th-Century, sedentarisation policies have suppressed nomadic behaviours and embedded settlement into governance and cultural memory. Today, these policies are intensified through modern surveillance technologies such as thermal imaging drones. Sedentarisation enables total visibility: settled bodies can be counted, tracked and extracted into data. Nomadic, intermittently visible bodies create gaps in this data and undermine these systems.

Peripheral Forms positions clothing as a means to occupy this subversion. The project takes the form of a jacket, its conceptual foundation drawing from the Kurdish kepenek. Designed for prolonged travel and protection from harsh outdoor conditions, the kepenek embodies a mobile relationship between body and land. Additional reference is drawn from the armour-like forms seen in Lee Alexander McQueen’s Scanners collection (A/W 2003).

Using upcycled ripstop nylon, the garment adapts a material associated with migration and temporary shelter. The lining transforms a foil emergency blanket into a textile that traps and obscures body heat, disrupting thermal surveillance technology. The material enacts a refusal of containment and victimhood, proposing an instrument of agency and resistance instead.