Janelle Abbott's Labor-Intensive Garments Drip With Layers of Fabric—and Conviction

Chance inundation with source material is often the starting point for Abbott’s designs. In 2022, she was helping her aunt downsize a massive clothing collection when she decided to warehouse hundreds of T-shirts that didn’t have any resale value—and might not even enjoy a second life as ironic thrift-store finds. From that collection, she developed her 3T method, a chenille-inspired practice in which she deconstructs and reassembles three T-shirts into one three-times-as-thick garment. Abbott intends for the aesthetic of the resulting shirts, with their vertical slices and rough edges, to emphasize the temporal nature of the material: often, the T-shirts in these garments were created for one-off events such as 5K runs or family reunions. 

“For me, it’s really an offer towards individuals, encouraging them to wear more clothing simultaneously, to reduce the landfill, to reduce acts of waste colonialism”—many of these garments end up in secondhand markets in the developing nations, and ultimately, in landfills in those countries—“and to validate the labor of garment workers by keeping their product in circulation for longer, and validating the existence of these pieces,” she says.

The 3T is also a more approachable aesthetic for fans of Abbott’s work who might not be adventurous enough to wear an Edwardian-inspired ruffled jumpsuit. Her designs—from the 3T to her more daring pieces—can be found in boutiques such as Café Forgot in New York and Stand Up Comedy in Portland, Oregon, as well as stockists as far away as Tokyo and Paris.

Currently an artist-in-residence at Recology King County, Abbott is enjoying access to new source materials. Instead of clothing, she’s making artwork out of plastic cutlery, tiny hygiene product containers, and other items that pass through one of Recology’s material-recovery facilities. She sees the residency as an opportunity to diversify her creative output, away from the commercial pressures of fashion. And the residency is a chance to explore how to use plastics in new ways: she has opted to stop using them in her clothing in light of the microplastic pollution created by wearing and washing polyesters, but she wants to find interesting uses for the discarded items that already exist. 

Abbott has been staging shows for the last several iterations of New York Fashion Week, too, and she’s now preparing her next one for this September. Her last fall show, Pretty/Ugly Princess, was conceived as a faux pageant exploring the ugliness of the pursuit of beauty. 

Abbott says she thinks it’s important to keep showing up in New York, insisting to the industry that her approach is legitimate and necessary.

“So much of fashion has been and still is about the spectacle and about glossy magazines and runways and celebrities, but I couldn’t care less about that kind of stuff,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m doing it wrong, but I think I’m doing it authentic to my own convictions and to the reality of clothing itself. It only exists because of labor.”

Megan Gannon is a writer and ceramist based in Seattle. She is a manager at Third Place Pottery, a community clay studio, and her journalism has appeared in National Geographic, High Country News, and Scientific American, among many other publications.