The David Estrada Parsons bathroom videos arrive at a particular cultural moment when the outfit-of-the-day format has become so calcified, so reliably beige in its aspirational self-presentation, that the only interesting move left is to refuse it entirely. Estrada, a New York-based creator and Parsons School of Design student, has done exactly that. His ‘dressing for class’ clips follow a strict grammar: filmed in university bathrooms, shot in sped-up loops, the figure at the centre is veiled and layered in black, climbing stall dividers, contorting through the tiled space with the energy of something that is either very free or very trapped. Viewers, apparently, cannot look away.
David Estrada Parsons bathroom videos: the format and what it refuses
The format that the David Estrada Parsons bathroom videos have settled into is recent, even if Estrada’s practice of posting online is not. He traces the habit back to Vine in 2013, and posted something in a similar vein in 2023, but it is only in the past six months, he says, that he has been ‘locking down on this formula.’ The consistency is partly archival instinct: ‘It’s a really cool way for me to archive what I’m wearing.’ But something else is happening beyond record-keeping.
What distinguishes these clips from the ordinary influencer wardrobe post is the removal of aspiration as the organising principle. There is no clean white background, no ring-lit bedroom, no gaze that solicits the viewer’s approval. Instead, Estrada scrambles and squirms. His chunky boots find purchase on the tops of stall dividers. The sped-up loop turns dressing into something close to a tic, or a ritual, or both. Commenters have reached for the language of the uncanny: a spider, a roach circling the drain, a sleep paralysis demon. He takes all of it as a compliment.
The audio, for a long time, was no audio at all, just the incidental noise of fabric and movement, because Estrada found himself paralysed by the choice of sound when posting every day and resolved the problem by dispensing with music entirely. It is a small decision that does a great deal of work, removing the borrowed emotional charge that a well-chosen track normally provides and leaving the images to produce whatever feeling they can on their own terms.
Urine, filtration, and what counts as clean
The visual logic of the bathroom videos is not entirely disconnected from Estrada’s academic work at Parsons, where he studies Interactive Design. For his final major project, he used urine as a watercolour base, filtering it until, as he describes it, it became clean enough to use and ‘ended up smelling like roses.’ He built a custom filtration system and let the resulting liquid pour and stain different canvases. The project, he explains, was about ‘challenging conventional ideas of design and questioning what is considered art,’ with a specific interest in how the transformation of something into something ‘clean’ alters its perceived value in contemporary society. The bathroom as studio, then, is not incidental to the work: it is the work’s home territory.
His Fashion Mount Rushmore, offered without hesitation, runs Rei Kawakubo, Demna, Shayne Oliver and Simone Rocha. His holy grail is the Comme des Garçons AW04 runway, the whole runway. ‘I literally want the whole runway,’ he says, with the specificity of someone who has thought about this for years. Comme des Garçons sits at the centre of the imagined lift encounter too: he would show up in a Comme des Garçons skirt, a Vetements hoodie, Balenciaga boots and a City Bag, ideally opposite Lisa Rinna.
Confidence, Parsons, and what it means to look a mess
The ease with which Estrada now performs in public bathrooms did not come pre-installed. Growing up, he says, he was ‘so into fitting in with everyone else.’ The shift came from noticing that people were taking inspiration from how he dressed, and from Parsons itself, which he describes as ‘being around so many people who are just happy to look a mess.’ The institution, perhaps more than any formal instruction, normalised the idea that being first to a look is not the same as being wrong about it.
After graduation, he says, the aim is some form of marketing or PR, or, if circumstances allow, ‘just being an artist.’ The mantra he lives by: keep moving. On TikTok, at least, he has been doing exactly that.
