As issue two of Nice Outfit is published, curator and editor Felix Choong talks about feeling like an outsider, and his desire to “use fashion conceptually”
While working as a stylist, Felix Choong became disillusioned with the brief attention span afforded to editorials. So, with the onset of the pandemic, and the pause for reflection it allowed, he decided to redirect course towards independent curating. “I wanted to work with fashion in a way that was a bit slower, a bit more considered, and a bit more caring,” says Choong of his career pivot, “as much as I loved creating an editorial, if someone spends ten minutes at an exhibition, that’s more of a success than someone looking at something for two seconds.”
As an extension of his curating, Choong publishes Nice Outfit, an annual fashion periodical that uses his exhibitions as a sort of creative icebreaker and conversation starter. Whereas traditional catalogues turn inwards and tether the exhibition to a space in time, the curator envisages the magazine as a way to connect a wide variety of disciplines and start new conversations around fashion. “I try to look at exhibition-making (and by extension Nice Outfit) as a city, in the sense that it is a chaotic, opportunistic, and diverse space, where all sorts of things come up against one another that don’t necessarily make ‘sense’,” he explains of his work. The magazine is therefore a medium “to bring all these really varied perspectives together in something that feels homogenous.”
The latest issue of Nice Outfit responds to his exhibition Knock, Knock which was held at Season Gallery, east London, in December 2022. Taking the now-faded dream of the white picket fence house as a starting point, the exhibition explored through garment and textile how the housing and cost of living crisis have meant domesticity is no longer a generic safehold, but perhaps a site of contention. Alongside photographs of the exhibition, Nice Outfit Issue #2 includes contributions by AnOther columnists Philippa Snow and Elise By Olsen, artwork from Julien Ceccaldi (which features on the front and back covers), fiction from Charlie Fox and Ethan Price, alongside many other thought-provoking features.
If the genres within Nice Outfit are diverse, this reflects Choong’s desire to level out the playing field between fashion, art, writing, and other creative disciplines. “The fashion-art hybridity is really interesting to me, as art’s relationship to fashion within the exhibition space is like its big sister,” says Choong, “There are blockbuster fashion exhibitions, but they are from a historical viewpoint, it’s a representation of that time in culture. I want to use fashion conceptually.” This clever, coherent dialogue of disciplines within Nice Outfit opens the realm of fashion to different audiences by providing multiple access points. “You can either read it from cover to cover, or just dip in and out.”
The pioneering scope of Nice Outfit cements Choong’s well-deserved place amongst a crop of creatives, like Tenant of Culture, who are redefining the way fashion is digested. The publication is usually released a year from the exhibition – going intentionally against the rapid nature of mainstream fashion systems to allow the ideas presented to develop, stick, and take on novel forms over time. “I’ve always felt like an outsider as I didn’t study fashion. Now I’m training as a curator, and it’s the same thing – I’ve never studied history of art,” he explains of the magazine’s “DIY, outsider ethos”. “It just goes back to my point of wanting to bring people in.”
Issue two of Nice Outfit is available to buy here.