Profile: Azaria Smallwood – Only Natural Design Competitions

Azaria Smallwood

Rhode Island School of Design

Azaria Van Der Stok-Smallwood is a Black, Jewish, and queer designer, researcher, and activist from Pennsylvania whose practice explores the relationship between material, memory, and liberation. Grounded in slow, deliberate craftsmanship based within the natural world, their work challenges the speed and extractive logic of capitalist production by reclaiming making as an act of care, resistance, and ancestral continuity. Working primarily with natural materials—including shells, raffia, cotton, and plant-based fibers—Azaria investigates how these materials carry histories of migration, survival, labor, and cultural resilience across the African diaspora. Rather than treating natural materials as decorative, they position them as living archives that embody ecological knowledge, spiritual cosmologies, and collective memory. Through labor-intensive hand processes such as knotting, wrapping, weaving, and modular construction, each garment becomes a testament to time, intention, and the transformative power of craft. Drawing from African American history and critical theory, Azaria's practice examines transgenerational trauma while imagining sustainable futures rooted in reciprocity rather than extraction. Through slow construction, they reclaim time from capitalist urgency while unraveling Western codes of respectability. Employing shells, raffia, and natural fibers historically tied to diasporic survival and cosmology, they shift these materials from narratives of degradation to expressions of sovereignty and cultural permanence. For Azaria, sustainability extends beyond material selection—it is an ethical framework grounded in longevity, intentional labor, cultural preservation, and environmental responsibility. Their work transforms collective memory into archive, the body into testimony, and visibility into declaration, demonstrating how fashion can honor both the earth and the communities whose histories are woven into its fibers.

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Denouncing Panopticism

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2026

Historically, reeds have been used throughout West Africa and across the African diaspora in weaving, architecture, basketry, ceremonial objects, and domestic craft traditions, carrying histories of resilience, communal knowledge, and deep connections to place. Constructed entirely from hand-collected reeds harvested from the shores of Rhode Island, and photographed within the very landscape from which its materials were sourced, this garment explores ecology, material value, and the beauty of impermanence. Centered around the question, What happens when we reject the expectations of respectability politics and conventional Western professionalism? the piece proposes an Afro-futuristic vision rooted in craft, adornment, texture, fluidity, and ephemerality rather than conventional symbols of status and permanence. By elevating an often-overlooked natural material into couture, it challenges Western notions of luxury that privilege manufactured perfection and durability over living materials that exist within ecological cycles. Emerging organically around the wearer's body, the reeds transform the figure into an extension of the landscape. Their ability to bend without breaking becomes a metaphor for the endurance of ancestral knowledge and the resilience of Black communities across generations and shores. Rejecting colonial ideals of permanence, the garment embraces the natural life cycle of its materials; the reeds will dry, shift, decay, and ultimately return to the environment from which they came. Through the careful collection and hand assembly of every reed, the work honors women's craft traditions, environmental stewardship, and cultural memory, inviting viewers to reconsider beauty as a relationship to the natural world rather than permanence.