This textile project is meant to explore restrictive beauty standards. This is why I decided to create a “beautiful” straight jacket, which is meant to restrain an individual so they cannot harm themselves or others. In the context of beauty standards, what a straight jacket means is keeping people from choosing how they want to express their own individual beauty because a person not following all culturally acceptable expressions of beauty is seen as harming themselves. This ranges from feeling immense pressure to be a certain weight, have flawless skin, having a specific body type, constantly keeping up with fashion trends, maintaining a perfect social media, and more. The goal of this sculpture is to show that men, women, and gender-nonconforming individuals should feel the freedom to be beautiful in whatever way that means to them.

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Beautiful Straight Jacket