What is this place?

I love messy folders.

There’s a certain charm to a good garbage bin that beats any pantry. I’m talking Windows-style folders, the ones you could customize the icons of and just throw shit into without thinking much. One of the first songs I ever made was called “world.” The beat was awful. There were probably twenty versions of it, all tucked into a single zip nested inside a bigger folder called “songs.”

“"It was my first introduction to music."”

I started making clothes at the top end of 2021. My mom had this old Singer collecting dust in the basement that I’d been eyeing for months. I was sixteen. Drafting was weird. Cutting pants was even weirder. For my first pair, I used an old bedsheet along with elastics ripped from scrap tennis shorts to make super low-cut trousers. I didn’t even know about shears so I used kitchen scissors. The cut was terrible. I wore them everywhere. They took me to Queen Street. Hopping the Lakeshore East train just to hit Affordable Textiles. They took me to pick up my first industrial machine, when I had to saw off half the table just to fit it in my bedroom. And they gave me an obsession with fabric and formation that I still can’t shake to this day. The pants became an excuse for me to become a cooler version of myself, and I did.There wasn’t even a rise in the pattern, not even pockets. They felt so raw. Starchy. Unfinished. But they were mine. Straight cuts. High rise. Wide hem. Exactly the fit I’d been desperate to find for so long.

That feeling is all I want to catalogue, to preserve and replicate it as best I can through whatever work I do. Comfort. Cunt. Fitted to the neck and flowering at the hip.

“"That’s what tailoring is to me."”

A lot of that thinking was also shaped by the work Saint Heron and Solange Knowles were doing around that time when it came to cataloguing and preserving Black expression. Saint Heron was my shit. It showed me what care could look like in archiving. It also introduced me to the word “dossier,” and more specifically, what that looks like on the web.

So, what is this place?

HELLO WXRLD is a physical dossier of all the things I find myself entangled in with a digital postal code. It’s my excuse to be on the internet. Clothes, objects, music, design, people, places, events, things I collect, make, don’t finish, literally everything I do in one big giant folder.

I’ve been hacking away at it in private for five years now, playing with proportions, fonts, necklines, 808s. I’m at a point where I finally feel comfortable opening the doors and showing the dope shit me and my friends have been building for a while now.

Going forward, I’ll make sure keep it updated with all the postcards I collect, the products I create and curate, the interesting people I collaborate with and places I exchange with along the way. I’m really excited to see where this goes. Stay tuned! — Keith