632 Wool Skirts and the Radical Act of Not Knowing

*Wool Skirts* on view at SUDESTADA, photo ©Pablo Íñigo Argüelles

When Mae Colburn’s grandmother Audrey Huset died, she left behind 632 wool skirts—bought secondhand over a lifetime and meticulously stored in boxes. Everyone asked the same question: What will you do with them?

Colburn didn’t have an answer, and she let that uncertainty guide her. She gathered with friends and family and together they made a running list of possibilities: turn them inside out, throw a skirt party, quilt them, partner with artists, disperse the collection and document where each one lands. The list kept growing. Eventually, 21 artists and designers were invited to respond, and the result is Wool Skirts, now on view at SUDESTADA—a group exhibition where a grandmother’s collection becomes material prompt, collaborative experiment, and memorial.

The exhibition unfolds across three dimensions: an immersive installation combining the full archive with the stories behind each piece; 29 one-of-a-kind transformations created from 47 skirts, spanning sculpture, tapestry, performance, experimental fashion, and textile exploration; and a curated capsule collection of original skirts available for purchase through SUDESTADA’s gallery and their online design lab at shop.lasudestada.com.

At No Kill, we’ve been looking to Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham’s Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan as a way to reframe how we think about fashion, and Wool Skirts feels like one of the clearest embodiments of that framework we’ve encountered—even if it didn’t set out to be.

Earth Logic proposes placing earth before profit and care before growth, offering eight values as a compass: multiple centers, interdependency, diverse ways of knowing, co-creation, action research, grounded imagination, care of world, and care of self. What strikes us about this exhibition is how many of those values emerge organically from the work itself.

Audrey Huset’s lifetime of collecting was already an act of care—material attention sustained across decades, wool that lasts forty years, skirts that outlived their collector. And Colburn’s response extends that care outward: dispersal as tending, releasing into new lives. The 21 artists become stewards, as does everyone who purchases a skirt from the collection. The pieces scatter into different futures while remaining connected to each other, to Huset, to a place and practice of collecting that stretched across a lifetime. Fletcher and Tham write that care is “everything that is done to maintain, continue, repair ‘the world’ so that all can live in it as well as possible,” and you can feel that ethic running through the exhibition—in the mending, the deconstruction, the new narratives artists created and the older ones they used the material to mine.

“Wool Skirts challenges how we think about fashion, memory, and materials,” says Gimena Garmendia, founder of SUDESTADA. “From garments that carry generations of stories to wool’s enduring resilience, it transforms the familiar into the extraordinary, proving the power of reinvention, collaboration, and fearless experimentation.”

The artist responses range widely in form and reference.

Jason Rosenberg selected a skirt from the 1960s after coming across a photograph of his mother as a teenager in the Bronx, holding a protest sign. In the early ’60s, she had organized a walkout at her school against the dress code that required female students to wear skirts even through cold winter months. The sign she carried read: “When a system starts telling people what to wear, then it’s time for that system to be changed.” Rosenberg painted those same words onto the skirt in beeswax—a garment from the very era his mother was protesting, now carrying her words forward.

Camila Banzo drew on the boxy silhouettes and unexpected cutouts of traditional Mexican aprons, reimagining a skirt through the lens of her upcycling label, Banzo, which grew out of her vintage shop in Mexico City. For Banzo, the work explores “the bond between memories and clothes”—each piece she recrafts becomes one-of-a-kind, carrying both its original history and the new narrative layered onto it.

Emma Larimer took perhaps the gentlest approach of the group, stitching two skirts together through draping on the body. She wanted to “not disrupt how Audrey left the skirts,” keeping them close to their original form while allowing the materials to play and become one. It’s a reminder that response can also mean honoring what already exists—transformation through care rather than rupture.

What makes the project radical is its structure. Colburn worked with 632 actual skirts, actual wool, actual constraints—imagination tethered to material reality. That running list she kept (name the colors, weigh the mass, paint the plaids, wear them, alter them, rework them) is Earth Logic’s “grounded imagination” in practice: creative possibility that stays accountable to the materials at hand. The cataloging itself—the painstaking work of indexing each skirt with her family—becomes a form of research, embedded and relational and tactile, drawing on craft traditions from the Upper Midwest and knowledge passed down through generations.

The beginning documentation of the skirts in Minnesota

The exhibition holds multiple centers simultaneously.

Huset is a center. Wool is a center. Each of the 21 artists becomes a center. Memory is a center. There’s no single authoritative reading, no hierarchy of interpretation—just a collection that disperses into a web of new relationships, new obligations, new forms of attention.

The process doesn’t end with this exhibition. Every artist’s journey has been documented, and those who purchase skirts from the collection will be invited to add their own stories to the archive. Eventually there will be a book, perhaps more exhibitions. This is a living body of work—an ongoing memorial to Audrey Huset that grows as the skirts travel into new hands and new contexts.

Colburn still doesn’t know the full answer to what she’ll do with them, and that’s the point. The project reveals itself as each action leads to the next, grief transformed into generative possibility, a question that became an opening. An inheritance held as material to think with, a personal collection that has become a collective expression of how we form clothes and they form us.

This is what Earth Logic looks like when someone commits to it—care over growth, collaboration over control, imagination grounded in what actually exists.