Roy Yogev

Category: Apparel

Competitions: International

PLAY AND REALITY Children don’t begin with rules. They begin with imagination. Children invent before they understand. Unconcerned with pattern making, technical limitations or convention, they allow ideas to exist before questioning how they might be built. Making comes afterwards. Play and Reality adopts this same way of thinking. Every garment began as an intuitive image rather than a technical solution. Construction became the act of translating imagination into reality. While developing the collection, I returned to my childhood photographs and noticed something I had never consciously recognized before. Every image contained an object that once felt indispensable: a pink plastic heel, rabbit ears, a birthday cake, a pumpkin costume and a dog blanket. Although these objects had long disappeared from my life, I realized that their emotional function had not. Each had simply taken a new form. Only afterwards did I encounter Donald winnicots theory of the transitional object. His writing gave language to what I had already observed: transitional objects do not simply belong to childhood. They evolve with us, continually supporting identity, security and belonging throughout life. The collection is built around five personal pairings extracted from these photographs. Each childhood object is placed in dialogue with an object from my adult life: a toy heel becomes a CrossFit shoe, rabbit ears become a motorcycle helmet, a birthday cake becomes protein powder, a dog blanket becomes my German Shepherd and a pumpkin costume becomes a leather harness. These pairings are not based on visual resemblance, but on emotional continuity. Rather than replacing one another, they reveal how transitional objects adapt to the changing roles we perform throughout life. This dialogue became the foundation of the garments. A central construction detail originates from paper dressing dolls, where folded paper tabs temporarily attach clothing to a paper figure. These tabs are reinterpreted as oversized leather straps that become structural components throughout the collection. The transformation is expressed most clearly at the shoulders and along the sides of the knees, where the straps remain visible as functional elements rather than concealed construction details. What was once a playful fastening system becomes a language of attachment, assembly and protection. The garments deliberately preserve the logic of childhood making. Their proportions are intentionally reinterpreted, recalling the directness of children’s drawings and the modular simplicity of construction toys. Visible seams, articulated panels and exposed structural elements celebrate the act of making rather than concealing it. The garments are not designed to resemble childhood; they are designed according to its logic. This logic also shaped my design process. Like a child, I never began by asking whether an idea was possible. Every garment started as an instinctive image. Pattern cutting, construction and material development came afterwards, becoming acts of translation rather than points of departure. Leather became essential to this process. Traditionally associated with protection, resilience and adulthood, it carries the symbolic weight of the adult objects that inspired the collection. At the same time, its structural integrity preserves the exaggerated proportions, modular volumes and sculptural forms that emerged from an intuitive way of thinking. Rather than correcting imagination, leather allows it to remain visible. Play and Reality does not borrow the visual language of childhood—it adopts its way of thinking. It proposes that growing up is not the disappearance of transitional objects, but their transformation. Childhood is not left behind; it simply learns to speak another language. Here, play is not a memory. It is a method of making.