WHAT IS A MAN

Official Rebrand (OR?!) revives discarded clothing, breathing new life into what some consider waste. Through painting and other alterations, non-binary artist MI Leggett’s “rebranding” process proposes a sustainable alternative to the competitive consumption encouraged by social and industrial norms. OR?!’s transformative process also celebrates the fluidity of identity, dissociating garments from gendered categories and reintroducing them without arbitrary social constraints.

Since launching Official Rebrand in 2017, MI Leggett has shown work at independent shows in Berlin and New York Fashion Weeks, and at New Art Dealers Alliance, Miami. Their words and work have been featured in The New York Times, WWD, Bloomberg, i-D, Teen Vogue, Paper, Vogue Italia, Hunger, Antidote, Milk and other outlets.

“Inspired by my own gender queerness and the fallacy of a fixed masculinity, WHAT IS A MAN challenges the mandate that masculinity be standard, default, and inherent. The collection is created exclusively from upcycled materials and therefore antagonizes the patriarchal treatment of the Earth’s natural abundance as resources to be extracted for profit and aims to instead express fluidity through nonviolent material transformation.” - MI LEGGETT