RESEARCH

At the heart of this project are two thinkers who profoundly reshaped how I think about design, identity, and the future: Yuval Noah Harari and Patricia Piccinini. Though they work in vastly different disciplines—Harari through historical theory and Piccinini through visual art—they converge on a question that feels central to this moment: what happens when we let go of the idea that humans are at the centre of everything?

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Harari’s chapter The Anthropocene in Homo Deus was an entry point into this question. He describes a world where humans have become the dominant force on Earth—capable not only of reshaping ecosystems but of erasing them entirely. He writes, “The future of life is now in our hands,” and frames the Anthropocene not just as a crisis of climate or technology, but as a crisis of imagination. That insight stayed with me. It made me question how fashion, as a form of cultural expression, often reflects the same logic of human exceptionalism—glorifying control, surface, and permanence.

At the same time, I was revisiting the work of Patricia Piccinini. Her strange, tender creatures feel like emotional protests against the binary between human and non-human. They’re ambiguous and unsettling, but they’re also soft, relational, and deeply alive. Piccinini once said, “I’m interested in the idea that we are all part of one big, messy family of living things.” That sentence became something I kept returning to. It helped me understand that evolution doesn’t always move forward in clean lines—sometimes it loops, adapts, breaks open.

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Together, Harari and Piccinini shaped the conceptual and emotional space that Echo Primitus would grow from. But it was Gen-AI that became the space I would build in. I began using it not as a tool for production, but as a method of world-construction—to visualise what this speculative future might look like: a world after the Anthropocene, where human-animal hybrids have emerged not through technological intervention, but through surrender and adaptation. Gen-AI became my sketchbook, my terrain, and my mirror. I used it to generate not only garments, but landscapes, textures, and forms of life that don’t yet exist—futures that feel uncertain, but possible.

 

This process allowed me to blur the boundary between design and storytelling. The garments I created are not just clothing—they’re artefacts of an imagined future. They reflect a shift away from domination toward coexistence, from species hierarchy toward shared vulnerability. I wanted the pieces to feel like second skins—textural, primal, almost feral in some cases. They belong to bodies in transition. Bodies that have given up on being human as we know it.

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Harari gave me the urgency—the knowledge that we are in a fragile moment, one shaped by the fantasies we choose to believe. Piccinini gave me the tenderness—the permission to imagine futures that are intimate, strange, and non-linear. And Gen-AI allowed me to construct that future in visual form: not as dystopia, but as an unfolding ecology of new life.

This is where Echo Primitus began: not with fashion as it is, but with what it could become when we finally stop designing only for ourselves.