Briah Taubman

My collection BROKEN/OPEN is inspired by a beautiful yet at times suffocating relationship that came to an end. I found a deep comfort in that suffocating environment and was convinced that I should stay. When I finally broke free, I felt more myself but was still figuring out my uncertain emotions. In this project, I have used optical illusion and cocoonlike constraints to capture the emotions I felt during the past few months. In this collection, I explored the possibilities of knitwear; my goal was to invoke an emotion with every piece. The piece I feel truly captures the spirit of this collection is the "anxiety shirt," a black-and-red top with a cutout/spiral in the body. It represents the constant anxiety I was feeling when deciding whether to stay in that relationship—evoking the twisting and turning in my stomach, the newfound freedom and foreign loneliness, that felt so intense that at times I thought they would burst out for the world to see.