The first thing to understand about David Estrada’s Parsons bathroom videos is that they are not, strictly speaking, about getting dressed. The format is consistent: filmed in university bathrooms, Estrada appears veiled and layered in black garments, his chunky boots scaling stall dividers as he squirms, scrambles and contorts through the space in sped-up loops. The everyday outfit-of-the-day post (one of TikTok’s most earnest and exhausted genres) is reimagined here as something closer to a horror sequence. Commenters have reached for spiders, cockroaches, sleep paralysis demons. Estrada accepts the comparisons without objection.
From Vine to David Estrada’s Parsons bathroom videos
Estrada has been making content for over a decade, starting on Vine in 2013, and posting occasional trend-led clips on TikTok since. But the bathroom format (his current, defining one) is a more recent consolidation. He posted something similar back in 2023, he says, and then, within the past six months, began locking down on this particular formula. ‘It’s a really cool way for me to archive what I’m wearing,’ he explains. The logic is mundane enough. The execution is not.
What makes the videos work is precisely the gap between the stated rationale (archiving an outfit) and the visual experience of watching someone contort through institutional tiling like a figure from a Cronenberg film. The bathroom is not incidental. The bathroom is doing a great deal of work: the fluorescent light, the partitioned stalls, the hard acoustics that make his movements audible as a kind of percussive score. ‘It’s just me moving,’ Estrada says of the sound. When he was posting every day and couldn’t settle on a piece of audio, he simply removed music altogether. The absence turned out to be the point.
Estrada studies Interactive Design at Parsons School of Design in New York, and his final major project extends the same preoccupations his videos raise, transformation, value, what we decide is clean or contaminated. For the project, he worked with urine as a watercolour base, filtering it until it became clean enough to use and, in the process, odourless. ‘It ended up smelling like roses,’ he says. He built a large custom filtration system and let the liquid pour and stain different canvases. The project, as he frames it, was about challenging conventional ideas of design and questioning what is considered art: ‘I was interested in how something is transformed into something “clean” and how that shift changes the perceived value of an object in today’s society.’ The bathroom, again, is not merely a location.
Fitting in, then fitting out
The confidence required to scale a cubicle divider in a public bathroom (unbothered by whoever might be waiting at the sinks) did not come automatically. ‘When I was growing up, I was so into fitting in with everyone else,’ Estrada says. The shift came when he began noticing people taking inspiration from the way he dressed. ‘I realised if you’re the first to do it, it doesn’t mean it’s bad. I learnt that especially at Parsons, being around so many people who are just happy to look a mess.’
His Fashion Mount Rushmore (Rei Kawakubo, Demna, Shayne Oliver and Simone Rocha) maps a consistent aesthetic: work that refuses to resolve itself into comfort, that asks something of the person wearing it and the person looking. His holy grail is the entire AW04 Comme des Garçons runway, not a single piece from it. For the hypothetical lift encounter, he arrives in a Comme des Garçons skirt, a Vetements hoodie, Balenciaga boots and a City Bag, opposite Lisa Rinna. He identifies most with Spider-Man: ‘because he’s always climbing the walls.’
After graduating, Estrada says he is drawn to marketing or PR, or simply to continuing as an artist: ‘I really am obsessed with creating a whole world and executing a vision.’ The mantra he lives by is three words: keep moving. Given the videos, it reads less like motivation than method.
