There is a particular quality to David Estrada’s Parsons bathroom videos that separates them from the ordinary scroll of outfit documentation: they are, in the most literal sense, uncomfortable to watch. Estrada, an NYC-based creative who studies Interactive Design at Parsons School of Design, films himself veiled and layered in black, scaling toilet-stall dividers and contorting through institutional bathroom space in sped-up loops. Viewers have reached for entomological metaphors (a spider, a roach circling the drain) and, more unsettlingly, the sleep paralysis demon. These are not, it should be said, unflattering comparisons. They are accurate ones.
The format is fixed. Chunky boots find purchase on stall partitions. Fabric pools and billows. The only audio is the sound of cloth and body moving through a tiled room. When Estrada was posting daily and felt paralysed choosing a backing track, he simply dropped the sound altogether. The decision turned out to be the right one: silence makes the videos stranger, more ritualistic, less like content.
From Vine to the Parsons bathroom videos: a decade of dressing online
Estrada has been posting online since around 2013, beginning on Vine before moving occasionally to TikTok with more trend-led clips. The bathroom format itself appeared once in 2023, then lay dormant. Over the past six months, as he puts it, he has been ‘locking down on this formula.’ The word he uses (‘archive’) is worth pausing over. ‘It’s a really cool way for me to archive what I’m wearing,’ he explains. Most OOTD content is built for immediate consumption, designed to circulate and dissolve. The archive implies something more durational: a record, a practice, a body of work. That distinction matters when the body in question is doing something this committed to its own logic.
The question of confidence runs through any conversation about Estrada’s work. It takes a specific kind of nerve to climb bathroom stalls in a university building while strangers come and go, and an equal kind to post the result. ‘When I was growing up, I was so into fitting in with everyone else,’ he says. The shift came when he noticed 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.’ Parsons, he says, accelerated that realisation, being ‘around so many people who are just happy to look a mess’ recalibrated his sense of what dressing could permit.
Urine, filtration and the perceived value of clean
The bathroom setting, it turns out, was never incidental. For his final major project, Estrada worked with urine as a watercolour base, filtering it until it was clean enough to use on canvas, at which point, he notes, it smelled of roses. He built a custom filtration system and let the liquid pour and stain different surfaces. The project concerned ‘challenging conventional ideas of design and questioning what is considered art,’ with a particular interest in how transformation into something ‘clean’ changes the perceived value of an object in contemporary society. It is a neater conceptual thread than it might initially appear: the same institutional bathroom where the body is surveilled and tidied up becomes, in Estrada’s practice, a site for both performance and research.
His Fashion Mount Rushmore (Rei Kawakubo, Demna, Shayne Oliver and Simone Rocha) maps the territory of designers who have each, in different registers, made discomfort productive. His holy grail is the Comme des Garçons AW04 runway: ‘I literally want the whole runway.’ In the lift with his celebrity crush, Lisa Rinna, he is wearing a Comme des Garçons skirt, a Vetements hoodie, Balenciaga boots and a City Bag. The outfit is, characteristically, completely thought through.
After graduating, Estrada says he is drawn to marketing or PR, or ‘if possible, just being an artist’, the ‘if possible’ doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. His mantra is ‘keep moving.’ Given that his most-watched work involves scaling walls in sped-up silence, it reads less like motivational shorthand and more like a literal description of method. When asked which fictional character he most relates to, he names Spider-Man: ‘because he’s always climbing the walls.’
