As lifelike as possible

In 1997, Goulet developed the concept of SkinBag alongside an art installation called The Relic of The Bionic Man. In an interview Goulet did with Vice, he explains that he sought to explore “the relationship between man and machine.” Read the Vice article from 2012 Here He found a fruitful dichotomy between the human body’s skeletal structure and the flaccid envelope surrounding that structure: skin. While the two are biologically codependent, Goulet worked them out separately, the skeletal structure resulting in The Relic of The Bionic Man, and the skin inspiring him to create his clothing line SkinBag. The project gathered quite some attention, perhaps mostly because of the icky thought of wearing human skin and because the clothes resemble the dermal creations of Ed Gein. Of course, Goulet is aware of the initial repellent effect the clothes can have: it was his intention to contest the clothing convention of enveloping our bodies in fabric that is as far away from human skin as possible.From Vice (2012): ”But one of the most important SkinBag concepts is that, while traditional garments try to turn the natural appearance of our skin into fabric, the SkinBags remain looking as lifelike as possible.”

Confronting the audience with such a statement gives insights into the ever progressing mutative force of the 21st century human body. As machines become increasingly influential in our lives and start to affect many aspects of our being, we are forced to reconsider the boundaries of what the human body is. The mobile phone as a necessary prosthetic, medical instruments that alter our lifestyles, the ability to change our entire physique by way of plastic surgery: the human body is not a solid notion anymore, and Goulet’s reapplication of human skin strikingly contributes to the defamiliarization of the human body. Perhaps it is the defamiliarization that makes this piece of clothing so intensely uncanny.