Abstract This contribution presents Labeltry, an artistic research practice that engages clothing labels as minoritised linguistic and conceptual worlds. Although ubiquitous within global fashion systems, labels operate as marginal texts: concealed within garments, instrumentalised by branding, and subordinated to the visual and economic logics of platform capitalism. Their language is optimised for circulation, legibility, and desirability, yet rarely acknowledged as a site of knowledge.

Through processes of collecting, archiving, cutting, and recomposing discarded labels into poetic micro-texts, Labeltry repositions these fragments as epistemic residues. The project treats fashion labels as sedimented carriers of cultural memory, encoding geographies of labour, gendered scripts, affective economies, and normative ideals of value and recognition. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the gaze, Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective circulation, and Adorno’s negative dialectics, the practice sustains contradiction rather than resolving it. By fragmenting and rearticulating commercial language, it interrupts the homogenising tendencies of maximisation, simplification, and aesthetic standardisation.

In doing so, Labeltry proposes minor poetic gestures as counter-models to algorithmic flattening and instrumental reason. Artistic research here functions as a method of recovering and transforming precarious conceptual worlds embedded in everyday material culture, foregrounding the fragile yet persistent knowledge contained in the seams of fashion.