The climate crisis prompted Wong to reimagine the traditional space suit. by Sam Machkovech Seattle fashion designer and artist Sophy Wong is clearly from another planet, and this summer, she brought her vision of Earth’s future to the masses.  Her newest collection revolves around her vision of a not-too-distant climate crisis, expanding upon years of cosplay and costuming to rethink the forms and functions of attire. And her singular artistic vision finally found a perfect canvas on Bumbershoot’s catwalk, when her first-ever multidisciplinary show, Symbiosis, premiered over Labor Day weekend. The foundation of Symbiosis is Wong’s “story bible”: a trippy vision of Earth’s future, driven as much by the impending climate crisis as by humanity’s incredible resilience, and sketches of uniforms that explode with color and trippy geometrical forms. In it, Wong suggests that Symbiosis is subliminally driven by “all the sci-fi and anime” she watches—a fact made immediately apparent by so many abstract-astronaut attachments on her dancers’ attire—but she formally name-checks one literary legend. “The Isaac Asimov idea that civilization continues,” Wong says. “Regeneration, rebirth, hope.” The story, then: Earth’s citizens fled the planet roughly 400 years ago, but they failed to find anywhere that was more hospitable and are trying to come back. Two astronauts went on a pilot mission, only to vanish. Wong’s story begins with a third astronaut, wearing the show’s most “classic” space suit, returning to the planet, where she has found that the other lost astronauts have become the titular “symbiotes” who’ve adapted to the changed landscape. Eventually, four other “adapted” life forms come into contact with our hero, and while they’ve blended more fully with a changed, otherworldly landscape, they still share functional and aesthetic lineage with the least adapted astronaut, such as mesh breathing patches, “vestigial” helmets in the forms of ornate collars, and The Fifth Element-like belt harnesses. Before her Bumbershoot show, Wong was known for integrating LEDs into her designs. She still plans to build a full suit in this style. BILLIE WINTER “Over time, these creatures are finding a way to survive, because we’re providing a substrate and resources for them,” Wong says. “They are doing the thing that plants and creatures in the environment do: they absorb the toxins, scrub the air, and do all of that great stuff. They are rehabilitating the planet.” For Wong, then, her dream is for viewers to rethink our relationship with “protective” gear on our real-life, rapidly changing Earth. “Maybe it’s less of a barrier to protect us from the environment and more like: Could it help us merge with our environment?” The story of Symbiosis is told largely by seven signature outfits, which are all inspired by spacesuits. “They’re a technology barrier that keeps us away from our environment,” Wong says. The show starts with a short video clip of an astronaut making a Star Trek-like log before they descend to Earth. Then professional dancers with backgrounds in ballet, contemporary, and Mexican folk dance stream onto the stage in fetching, motion-flowing costumes, moving with and through each other while following Wong’s “story bible.”  The climate crisis prompted Wong to reimagine the traditional space suit, enough so that she wants any Symbiosis viewer to have their own Planet of the Apes moment of realization: “The twist is, you [may one day have to wear these] here.” Wong’s 3D printed hexagons represent technology in this collection, and they appear in different forms on each piece. BILLIE WINTER Wong has never shied away from crossing disciplines. Her designs have incorporated everything from 3D-printed sculptures to lightsabers to programmable, LED-loaded electronics, and they resulted in dazzling flourishes of color, light, and form. But for Symbiosis, she’s opted for more organic designs. It was a daytime show, so Wong is skipping her usual light arrangements; sunlight would otherwise drown those out. Her typical reliance on 3D-printed materials remains intact, but at this show, they’re sewn into intentionally floral and Earth-toned prints. In one visually striking touch, Wong stitches the shimmering light bounces of satin into a 3D printing material known as “bifurcated filament”—in short, a type of plastic that has a different, complementary, shimmering color on each side. The result looks bioluminescent. In Wong’s vision of future Earth, space suits and native biology may fuse to become indistinguishable: combined organisms, adapting to survive on a rapidly changing planet. By slowing the speed of a 3D printer and stretching its printed, corn-derived material just so, Wong is able to produce sparkling, barnacle-like cones and other ephemeral “growths” that dot many of her costume designs. Smaller, self-contained, 3D-printed projects were Wong’s first steps into an eventual passion for fashion design. About a decade ago, she began dabbling with 3D printers on a lark outside her day job as a graphic designer: “3D printing activated the kind of digital workflow that I was already comfortable with in 2D,” she says. Her aspirations evolved from small, easily printed projects like earrings to fully blown cosplay creations, and the latter excited her in a similar way. “[Cosplay is] a design challenge to translate someone else’s vision, someone else’s 2D design, into a physical form, into a reality.” Her rising passion for cosplay led to figuring out how to operate as an all-in-one design shop—and perhaps more importantly, to take a step back from the process and embrace cosplay’s hard-to-pigeonhole spirit. “Now I’m pulling from [so many disciplines] to create something, and I want it to live in a confusing space between: Is this fashion? Is it costume? Is it art? Is it something new? That is more comfortable to me than making something that someone looks at, and they come to an easy answer.” Wong continues to challenge fashion conventions with her shoulder shrug at the catwalk: “I find that really boring, personally. And I knew that I wanted to do something different, from the total inside veins of the show to the outside skin of it.” Wong is a dancer, and casting local dancers for Symbiosis was a natural addition to the show’s storytelling ambitions. “Dancers are born to perform,” Wong says. “You can give them a concept, an idea, and a character, and they can run with it.” 3D printing allowed Wong to create small details like clasps, vents, and collars that had never been seen on Earth. BILLIE WINTER Wong’s vision does more to unify the show conceptually and visually than it does to shove a clear ecological message down viewers’ throats. And that sense of progression and evolution within one show may continue on with more shows to come—as Wong already has a concept board smothered in space suits, plot ideas, and sci-fi inspirations (including a Star Trek: The Next Generation photo of Deanna Troi, Whoopi Goldberg, and Gates McFadden, who Wong calls out as “the holy trinity”). “I want to do all the rest of these [show concepts] eventually,” Wong says about the other scribbled concepts on her studio wall. Bumbershoot called at just the right time to get an initial concept beamed from her imagination to our planet, she suggests. Then Wong gestures at the fuller board: “This is my universe that I want to create. Symbiosis is just one planet.” The original version of this story was published online on August 28, 2024. It has been updated for print in our Art + Performance Fall 2024 issue.