This research project investigates reflective workwear as a material and cultural object at the intersection of contemporary art, fetish, queercoding, and class politics.

Reflective workwear has long been a fascination within my artistic practice. Through this research, I examine how clothing associated with manual labour and working-class identity is coded, appropriated, and transformed into a symbolic, aesthetic, or political object. How does reflective workwear function within contemporary art and society? And what responsibilities arise when artists appropriate working-class clothing and practices?

Through field research, interviews with artists, curators, and researchers, and the analysis of artistic practices and written sources, I explore how workwear is mobilised by queer and fetish communities, as well as by right-wing political movements. The research considers the tensions between desire, identity, class, and political symbolism.

Alongside this critical investigation, I continue to experiment at the screen-printing table. Through personal and associative collage techniques, reflective inks, and different printing surfaces, I translate research findings into artistic experiments. The material process becomes a way of thinking through the questions raised by the research, exploring how reflective workwear can generate new visual and conceptual possibilities.

By bringing together cultural analysis and artistic experimentation, the project aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of reflective workwear as a site where class, desire, identity, and political meaning intersect.