Through the long twentieth-century a series of imperial, social, and ecological collapses and reformations have registered in the fabrics and fashions we use to form and transform our bodies and social environments. Textiles and wearable costumes have at once structured imperial formations and their ordering of ecological, racial, and gendered regimes. However, they have also materialized alternate ways of being, refashioning conceptions of identity, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as they transform the shape of the body and our interaction with lived space and environment. Comparing the Soviet and French Orientalist imaginaries of its southern and eastern colonies in North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia exposes a common preoccupation with costume and textiles as both modes of exoticization and imperial capture and revolutionary forms of anti-colonial resistance. This includes the ways in which French orientalist photographs of women in North Africa exoticized dress, bodily ornamentation, and textiles to mediate colonial desires, as well as how costume and textile served the Soviet orientalist creation of distinctive "nationalities" and their assimilation into the multinational imperial project. The collapse of these two empires renders legible how self-fashioning through forms of wearable art and textiles—as indigenous semiotics shared by both regions and interconnected through overlapping migratory histories of textile production and circulation—provided a means of evasion, disguise, and play. This project turns to costumes, textiles, and wearable art as forms of anti-colonial and queer resistance at the interfaces of embodiment, materiality, ecology, and affect. Activities include a series of reading groups, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that will travel from Chicago (2024) to Tbilisi (2025) and Paris (2026). Reinterpreting traditional clothes, parodying uniforms, or queering garments against a backdrop of imperial, social, and ecological collapse, the project addresses the formation of new modes of politics and aesthetics fashioned through wearable art.