Fashion has always been a radical form of self-expression for K8 Hardy. Her proclivity for documenting, she tells Emilia Petrarca, means the visual artist’s outfits stay extant long after she takes them off.
Image courtesy of K8 Hardy.
“This is probably the least dressed up you’ll ever see me,” says K8 Hardy. The bleach-blonde artist, filmmaker, and co-founder of genderqueer feminist art collective LTTR is sitting across from me at Silk Road Cafe on Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown, wearing what looks like a full motorcycle suit. She tells me it’s actually German workwear, and that her cat-eye sunglasses, which are blue and curl upward like a handlebar mustache, are Marni. On her feet are all-black Nike Air Monarchs, and she carries a colorful striped Balenciaga bag designed to look like something you might buy for cheap at the market. She was running late and the outfit was thrown on quickly to meet me. Who knows what she would have worn had she had more time?
Based on Hardy’s best-known work, Outfitumentary, I know she knows how to “get a ‘fit off,” as the kids say. Filmed almost every day over the course of a decade, the documentary, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art and at the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam, captures hundreds of Hardy’s outfits, from the boyish, more masculine ones of her youth to the more “womanly” ones of adulthood, as she describes them.
“When I started it, I was like, This is for when I die,” she tells me. “I was obsessed with archives. At the time, one of the only ways you could see people who came before you was to go to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, or something like that. You couldn’t just Google: ‘What did gay people look like before me?’” With a degree in women’s studies and film from Smith College under her belt, she took a formalist approach to documenting her outfits, doing so almost every day until around 2011. “And then around 2012 or 2013, Instagram started to take off,” she says. “I watched it for a year or two, and I was like, Fuck, I did this.” So she started to go through and edit her own footage—an emotional process that took about two years.
Image courtesyf of K8 Hardy.
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Hardy, 47, who is easygoing with a good sense of humor, comes from a place where it’s normal to dress up. But when she was filming Outfitumentary, she says, what she was doing felt extreme—beyond just the outfits themselves. “When you watch it, you can hear my roommates making fun of me and laughing,” she reflects. “I’d be like, I’m shooting my outfits—but you just didn’t do that. You also didn’t take photos of yourself in public.”
Now, of course, ‘fit pics and outfits of the day are everywhere; Hardy was just ahead of her time, as most great artists are. “I love that social media has enabled more eccentricism and creativity,” she shares. “I love seeing what young people are doing.” And she sees it all—every little detail that goes into a successful shot. “I used to do this thing, and you see it in Outfitumentary, where in order to see if I’d gotten my full body in the frame, I would sometimes lift up a leg or a shoe,” she recalls, “and I started seeing that on social media. I was like: Oh my god, I did this, too.”
Hardy hopes it’s helpful for younger people to see someone like her making a record of themselves without any commercial trappings. “I think sometimes you’re doing it for these platforms that are monetized and commercialized with algorithmic shit, and you get lost in the sauce,” she says. “You don’t know why you’re doing it. You’re like, Am I just a shill for this company?”
Currently, Hardy is working on a limited run of about 100 house dresses, the first of which debuted in September, intended to be pieces of wearable art. “I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s utilitarian, has a bit of a gas station-uniform vibe mixed with a dress, and it zips up and down,” she says. “So, either way, it’s very intriguing.”
In her spare time, Hardy hosts closet sales and, of course, continues to fill her own with great pieces. “I’m on eBay a lot and go to any thrift store I can find,” she says. Her keyword searches include the Givenchy men’s plus-size line that she recently discovered. “I would also love a weird, cool prom dress,” she tells me. She also carries a small video camera around with her. After Outfitumentary screened at Metrograph in 2022, drumming up another round of interest from press and viewers, “I was like, I guess I need to do it again,” says Hardy. “I’m more aware of what I’m doing, and I’m more aware that people are gonna see it. Maybe this one will be over 20 years, I don’t know. I’m very much a slow cooker.”
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