The David Estrada Parsons bathroom videos arrive with a particular quality of wrongness. In the best possible sense. A figure, veiled and layered in black, scrambles over toilet stall dividers, scales walls, contorts through narrow angles, filmed in sped-up loops that make the body read less as a person getting dressed than as something that has colonised the space. The comments, Estrada notes, have compared him to a spider, a roach circling the drain, a sleep paralysis demon. He takes this, one senses, as a compliment.
Estrada, who studies Interactive Design at Parsons School of Design in New York, has been making content since 2013, when he first started posting on Vine. The bathroom format, though, is a more recent crystallisation. He posted one similar video in 2023, but it is only within the past six months that he has, in his own words, been ‘locking down on this formula.’ The result is a body of work that treats the everyday outfit-of-the-day post as raw material for something more genuinely strange: not fashion content, exactly, but fashion content as performance, as creature study, as archive.
David Estrada Parsons Bathroom Videos: The Format and Its Logic
The format is almost aggressively simple. University bathrooms. Chunky boots on stall dividers. Layered black garments. No music, because when Estrada was posting every day, he could not settle on a sound and went without one. The audio that results is just the ambient noise of his own movement: fabric, footfall, effort. ‘It’s just me moving,’ he says, laughing. The effect is, oddly, more intimate than any carefully selected track would produce.
There is also, beneath the strangeness, something quite straightforward going on. ‘It’s a really cool way for me to archive what I’m wearing,’ Estrada explains. The contortions, the scaling, the sped-up loops: these are, at some level, a filing system. What the format does is take that archival impulse and give it a body, a space, a physical risk.
And there is risk, or at least vulnerability. It takes a certain kind of ease to throw your leg as high as it goes in a public bathroom and film it. Estrada had not always had that ease. ‘When I was growing up, I was so into fitting in with everyone else,’ he says. The shift came when he began to notice 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.’ The institution functions here as permission structure as much as design school.
Urine, Filtration and the Question of Value
The bathroom, it turns out, is not only the setting for his videos but something of a conceptual preoccupation. For his final major project, Estrada worked with urine as a watercolour base, filtering it until it became clean enough to use and, eventually, until it smelled like roses. He built a large custom filtration system, then let the liquid pour and stain different canvases. The project, he says, was about ‘challenging conventional ideas of design and questioning what is considered art,’ specifically exploring ‘how something is transformed into something “clean” and how that shift changes the perceived value of an object in today’s society.’ The logic is not so different from the videos: take what is abject or overlooked, process it, ask what it becomes.
His Fashion Mount Rushmore runs to Rei Kawakubo, Demna, Shayne Oliver and Simone Rocha, and his holy grail remains the AW04 Comme des Garçons runway in its entirety. The designer references read less as aspiration than as a consistent aesthetic programme: work that is formally strange, that makes the body unfamiliar, that asks the viewer to reconsider what clothing is doing.
After graduation, Estrada is drawn towards marketing or PR, or simply, as he puts it, ‘just being an artist.’ He describes being ‘obsessed with creating a whole world and executing a vision.’ The mantra he offers is brief: keep moving. On TikTok, at least, that is precisely what he does, in sped-up loops, over and over, up the walls and through the stalls.
