דוד דוכי כהן

My name is David (Duchi) Cohen. I am a visual artist, as well as a writer on art,  curator, and  historian. A significant part of my work deals with clothing as a formative element of identity. One might call it “fashion,” yet most of the people whose clothing I examine are convinced they do not follow fashion at all; they see their choices as purely practical or comfort-based. In reality, they too wear what is customary in their environment—what their friends wear and value.

The clothing I focus on belongs to young men from the Religious Zionist community. Beyond its fashion—or anti-fashion—dimension, this dress code conveys values of simplicity, connection to the land, hiking, manual labor, and even a subtle association with the military. After years of working with individual items from within this system—such as sandals, shoes and kippot—I chose to move from a single garment to great heaps containing everything a person from this sociological group wears.

I approached friends and acquaintances and asked them to sell me everything they were wearing at that moment, from head to toe. All these people differ from me, yet each represents something of who I am—or who I once was.

The clothing piles were placed together in a compartmentalized wardrobe. Each pile has its own place, specificity, and signs of life—different shoes or sandals, showing wear and tear, traces of time. Yet when viewed together, the garments appear almost identical. They form a kind of collective or band, dressed in the same uniform, even though its members never coordinated with one another. This is a kind of group’s unspoken code—a dress code.