MI Leggett Dreams of Chaos
On how queer liberation and fighting climate change are intertwined.
Dreams of Chaos is a series of Q&As with folks who are engaging with chaos in their work. Sometimes that means they love the chaos and use it as an engine for creativity. Sometimes it means they struggle with the chaos and are trying to harness it in whatever way they can. I’m interested in the ways in which we, as people, acknowledge the messiness of living in the world. And I’m excited to share conversations with those are thinking about this as well.
Every once in a while, I get a journalistic assignment that’s just the bees knees. Fun to research, leads me to conversations with interesting folks, and a joy to put together. Last June, Real Simple gave me that assignment when my editor asked me to write about some innovative queer fashion designers making waves in their industry. I mean, what a delight!
That piece, which you can read here, gave me an excuse to cold-call some folks whose work I’d been admiring for ages. I featured one of them, Mars Wright, on this column in early summer. Now, I’m thrilled to share another of these creative geniuses with you — an inspiration of a designer named MI Leggett.
Originally from Massachusetts, MI now lives in New York City, where they work as a community advocate, activist, and creative entrepreneur. Before encountering their work, I’d never seen anyone upcycle clothing quite the way MI does. Everything is impeccable, clearly hand-crafted in a careful and intentional way. Their work, under the name Official Rebrand, has been featured in major publications like them, The Queer Review, and Teen Vogue. They do a lot of hand-painting, screen-printing, cutting up dead-stock garments in unimaginable ways. It’s like they look at a shirt and see something completely other. Wild.
I spoke to MI on a park bench in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with an ice-coffee in one hand and my laptop perched precariously on my knees. Even though our conversation was pretty brief (I had to pick up my kid, they were on their way somewhere), it was extremely rich. They were incredibly kind and knowledgable, sharing insights about how they believe we can rearrange our economy and society in order to bring about a sustainable, equitable future. It’s a beautiful vision I’m excited to share with you.
How did you end up drawn to the world of fashion and clothing?
I grew up in a couple different places, I was born in New York and I grew up more in Massachusetts. Early on, I went to a single-sex Catholic school with a uniform, so I realized the value of self expression through fashion from a very early age because I couldn't do it. The days when I could wear whatever I wanted were so special, I would just grab them to the fullest and dress kind of crazily. I’d just get really excited to be able to pick out my own outfit when it was normally decided for me so much of the time.
I've always gravitated towards alterations and creating things to put on my body, I think it's just sort of like an innate thing. I had many interests as I was growing up — I worked in sustainable agriculture, I got really, really invested and interested in visual art. It all kind of culminated, around when I was graduating from college, with an interest in like art-wear and upcycled fashion design. And I've just been going at it ever since.
Where did you go to college?
I went to Oberlin, and then I also studied in Berlin for three semesters at a couple of different universities in the area.
Oh, yeah, I can definitely see the influence of Berlin fashion on your work.
Absolutely. Yeah, it definitely sort of opened me up to like a whole new world of queer community, and international culture, and European culture. I was working for a designer there, and that's where I started painting on clothes for the first time. Something kind of broke open in me in that moment, where I realized I had been interested in painting, in fashion and thrifting, and in self expression. And then painting on these clothes... I just sort of realized that that’s what I needed to do.
Is that how you began to explore the possibilities of upcycling? And, actually, what does the term upcycling mean to you?
Yeah, that was part of it. The term “upcycle” is interesting. Even though people have been doing this sort of thing for so long, the language and the terminology are still a little loose right now. So, there are a lot of words people throw around that may mean different things to different people. Mainly, people use the terms upcycling, recycling and downcycling. For me, recycling feels a little bit like a misnomer, because everything is not necessarily staying exactly the same. Anytime, a plastic bottle gets recycled, it downgrades in quality, so most recycling is actually more like down-cycling. With upcycling, though, you're creating something of greater value out of something that was originally unwanted. To me, upcycling is taking something that maybe has a stain or is damaged in some way — misproduced in the factory, or has a design flaw — and transforming that defect into an asset. You could cover up a stain with like a beautiful painting, for example.
It’s like a metaphor for life.
Yeah, sure, you could totally see it that way. I mean, I think any sort of challenge can be viewed as an opportunity. It's really easy to get quite downtrodden these days and become an environmental pessimist. You know, I go through phases where I feel very hopeless with the state of the environment. But being solution-oriented and thinking about how you can actually transform a challenge into an opportunity is going to be the only way that we get through this. So I try to keep that in mind in other aspects of my life as well. It's so easy to become overwhelmed, but we can't let that fear and feeling of powerlessness get in our way too much.
Is the work you’re doing — taking preexisting fabrics, garments, etc. and upcycling them — a more ethical way to do fashion? Is that how you find a balance between wanting to do fashion and not wanting to take part in a very polluting industry?
Absolutely. There's already so much clothing on Earth right now. I guess there is a certain need for new stuff, but in general there's already enough clothes to clothe everyone. So making use with what's already been produced, when there's already so much waste, is so important. By the way, the wast doesn’t just happen on the post consumer side, with overconsumption. So much blame is put on the consumer, but there's also so much waste that happens on the industrial side, before we even get to the consumer. I really like to think about tackling those industry problems, in addition to the problems of overconsumption. There’s a drive for people to wear something once, post a picture on Instagram, and then not want to wear it anymore. There's no problems on many sides of this.
Are you seeing the industrial problems specifically in the world of fast fashion? Are these industry-wide issues?
It’s across the industry. I work with other brands that have stock they need to get rid of. Maybe the stock hasn’t sold, or it has some sort of defect in it, or the brand shuts down. Sometimes a brand wants to do a creative collaboration, where they provide unsold stock that I then transform in different ways. There's many different ways in which I work with pre-consumer waste. Fast fashion is a huge problem, though. I tend not to work on materials created through fast fashion so much, because you can’t make something good quality if the initial quality is just not good.
Tell us more about those collaborations. Are these an integral part of your work?
Yeah, absolutely. Last year, for example, I worked with Blundstone, the Australian brand, as a creative director for their pride campaign. As part of that work, I repurposed a bunch of boots they had used in photoshoots and couldn’t be sold because the bottoms were dirty or things like that. I painted those boots, each with its own unique painting, and then we actually raffled them off to raise money for a queer arts organization. We did a photoshoot with a bunch of amazing queer and trans models; it was super fun.
That's a good segue into talking about how your work supports the queer community. Can you talk about how supporting LGBTQIA+ folks fits into your outlook and what you do?
Yeah, it's quite critical. We’re at a really interesting point, historically, with queer liberation. We're becoming more visible, there's more language to describe us, there are more public figures who identify as non-binary or trans than ever before. Youth are realizing they don't want to be confined by gender norms that don’t help us become the best versions of ourselves. They don't want to be limited by the idea that certain positive qualities are inherently feminine or masculine; they just want to be themselves. And there's like a huge backlash to that right now.
At the same time as we see this heightened visibility, we also see heightened vulnerability. Our freedom to express ourselves and be our own, self-actualized individuals is being attacked. People in position of power are targeting our humanity, and our healthcare, and our ability to exist in public spaces. It's a really pivotal time. I think some people may believe we're taking up a lot of space, but we've actually always been here, it's just now there's a little bit more language and visibility.
You know, queer rights are under attack all over the world. I mean, there are plenty of places where it's illegal to identify as queer. Speaking on a local level, I feel very safe in New York. I’m thankful my healthcare is pretty enshrined in the law, that my right to be medically transitioning is safe. But my queer siblings all over the country are having that right infringed upon. It’s a really important time to be vocal about it; we can’t be complacent, in our own bubble. We're all in this together. “No pride for some without liberation for all,” as Marsha P. Johnson said.
Why do you think so many queer-led companies include an aspect of community support in their work?
I think it probably has to do with the experience of needing community for survival, finding your chosen family. You know, a lot of us don’t necessarily identify with the body or the family we’re born into, so we find more solace in the communities we build for ourselves because we have to. With queer people, especially, there's an understanding that what you wear signifies so much to the people around you. There's so much signaling, both historically and still today, in situations where it's not safe to be openly queer. There’s a whole lexicon of ways to signal your queerness to people without having to openly say it. Style, self expression, coding — that’s always been part of the queer experience.
As a queer brand, it’s always going to be about much more than just putting clothes on your back. It’s going to be about being empowered, being embodied, being comfortable in yourself. I also think that cisgendered people deserve the right to be empowered and comfortable in themselves, they just don't have to fight for it as hard. Everyone goes through a process of figuring out who they are and how they want to dress.
But for queer people, there's a little bit more at stake.
Yeah, and there’s often more risk. But also, you know, maybe the reward is more dramatic, too. After not feeling safe expressing yourself that way.
Absolutely. How do all of those principles — sustainability, supporting queer community, and collaboration — connect in your work? How do those come together to form Official Rebrand?
Despite the current backlash, I think queer rights are progressing. More and more people are realizing they don't have to be oppressed by strict gender or they don't have to follow strict gender norms if it doesn't feel right to do so. And yet, none of this progress actually matters if we're not going to have a planet that's habitable for humans in a couple of decades. People in the world of sustainability say “Save the planet” a lot, but it's not about the planet. It's about humans surviving, keeping it a habitable planet for all of us. There's really no point in having a gender-free outfit or fighting for queer liberation if we don’t have clean air or clean water.
Of course, people in the Global South, who are on the frontlines of climate change already see this impact already. I mean, things are getting warmer and warmer every year, so we feel that. But people who live on the coastlines or on islands will be impacted first, and we need to have solidarity for everyone.
In a more philosophical way, my work is about transformation, and how humans can transform endlessly. I express that endless transformation through garments, too. There’s this kind of material fluidity to the pieces that I work on; I think it's a metaphor for the fluidity of our identities as well. It’s the idea that nothing is fixed. Things are in a constant state of flux, and we need to be free to explore, and change, and transition.
What are you working on now? What's coming up for Official Rebrand?
I'm mostly continuing what I'm always doing — transforming dead stock into pieces that make people feel comfortable in their bodies and happy in their self expression. I'm working on some tailored pieces that combine elements of men's tailoring and women's tailoring into the same garment, which I'm pretty excited about. I've been very focused on building up my sewing repertoire and developing my patterns. And I have an ongoing collaboration with my friend Valentina, who does weaving, and I've been making pieces that they will then weave afterwards.
Official Rebrand revives discarded clothing, breathing new life into what was once unwanted. Through painting and other alterations, artist MI Leggett's “rebranding” process proposes an anti-waste alternative to today's industrial and social norms. OR?!’s transformative process celebrates the fluidity of identity, dissociating garments from gendered categories, reintroducing them without arbitrary social constraints.