A feminised shell.
Stitched from debris—cheap gems, plastic pearls, ripped fur, broken nail charms.
Fallouts of desire, riveted into a body that can’t be worn.
Amour Armor expresses the fatigue of false freedoms and traces the quiet contours of what is “permitted”—a satirical reconstruction of femininities that are encouraged, applauded, and mimicked. It uses familiar lustres to expose silent fractures within aesthetic codes. What once served as accessory now composes the body’s structure: polished, mute, compliant. Not built for movement, but trained for the gaze.
Its defense lies not in force, but in repetition—how to shine, how to yield, how to disappear.
As Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “To reject the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’ is not to deny woman’s existence, but to refuse the false liberation born of essentialised femininity.” Here, that liberation crystallizes into glamour as bind. Adornment no longer expresses—it instructs.
These things were never made to belong—
A plastic pearl rolls beneath a wedding table.
A sequin flickers at the stage’s edge.
A rhinestone breaks from a fingertip, swallowed by the drain.
In Yiwu’s night markets, brooches await wear—and forgetting.
Not all bodies fit them,
but all of us have, at some point, worn something not ours.
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