The David Estrada Parsons bathroom videos have a formula so specific it has become its own genre: veiled figure, layered black garments, chunky boots scaling stall dividers, the whole thing sped up until the NYC-based creative resembles something between a trapped insect and a Renaissance allegory of vanity caught in fluorescent light. Viewers have reached for the same comparisons, unprompted: a spider, a roach circling the drain, a sleep paralysis demon. That the videos are, ostensibly, outfit-of-the-day content makes them stranger still.
A format locked in on the Parsons bathroom floor
Estrada has been posting online since 2013, beginning on Vine before moving across to TikTok. The current format, though, is more recent. ‘Within the past six months,’ he explains, ‘I’ve been locking down on this formula of videos.’ What might read as performance-art provocation began, by his account, as something more pragmatic: ‘It’s a really cool way for me to archive what I’m wearing.’ The bathroom, then, is less a stage than a filing cabinet, albeit one with cubicle walls to scale and a sympathetic disregard for whoever happens to walk in mid-shoot.
That disregard is, in a sense, institutional. Estrada studies Interactive Design at Parsons School of Design, and the school’s culture, he suggests, is precisely what allowed the videos to become what they are. ‘People don’t give a fuck at Parsons, and if they do, they’re not there for the right reasons.’ There is something in that observation worth sitting with: one of the conditions for genuinely odd, genuinely personal creative work is an environment that simply cannot be bothered to police it.
The confidence that reads so easily on screen was not, he says, always natural to him. ‘When I was growing up, I was so into fitting in with everyone else.’ The shift came when he noticed people taking cues from the way he dressed: ‘I realised if you’re the first to do it, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.’ Parsons, with its ambient tolerance for looking, in his words, ‘a mess,’ accelerated that understanding. The videos are its proof of concept.
Urine as watercolour and the logic behind the work
The bathroom as creative territory extends beyond the videos. 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 of roses. He built a custom filtration system and let the liquid pour and stain different canvases. The project, he explains, was about ‘challenging conventional ideas of design and questioning what is considered art,’ and specifically about how transformation changes the perceived value of an object. There is a thread connecting that work to the videos: both take something the culture has decided is transgressive or disposable and process it, with considerable seriousness, into something else.
His Comme des Garçons references are consistent and specific: he names the AW04 runway as a fashion holy grail, ‘I literally want the whole runway,’ and his imagined lift outfit pairs a Comme des Garçons skirt with a Vetements hoodie, Balenciaga boots and a City Bag. His Fashion Mount Rushmore runs Rei Kawakubo, Demna, Shayne Oliver and Simone Rocha, which is less a list of influences than a fairly precise map of where deconstructed tailoring, institutional rule-breaking and Gothic femininity intersect. The videos, dressed correctly, live on the same map.
As for what comes after graduation, Estrada is candid about the range of possibilities, from marketing and PR to simply continuing as an artist, ‘creating a whole world and executing a vision.’ His mantra, characteristically, is brief: ‘Keep moving.’ Given that the videos require him to hurl his leg as high as it goes and hope for the best, it reads less as aspiration than method statement. The format continues, the stalls remain climbable, and the archive keeps growing.
