Études Studio turns Maia Ruth Lee’s Bondage Baggage into workwear capsule

Études Studio found the sharpest way to make artist dressing feel current: it stripped Maia Ruth Lee’s Bondage Baggage language down to clothes built for actual movement. The collaboration yielded a jacket, button-up, pants, silk scarf and tee, but the strongest signal came from the Casual Pant MRL, a 110 € wide-leg, medium-rise cotton trouser with adjustable drawstrings, flap pockets and an all-over artist motif that keeps the workwear reading visible without drifting into costume.

That balance sits at the center of Collection No. 27, Surroundings, Études Studio’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, unveiled at the Galerie Haute of Palais de Tokyo in Paris on June 24, 2025. The show leaned into Land Art, with references to Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, and treated clothing as something shaped by setting, use and repetition. Études said the collection blurred indoor and outdoor wardrobes, and the Maia Ruth Lee capsule extended that idea into a studio-day uniform that feels less precious than a gallery look and more exacting than ordinary utility wear.

Lee’s contribution carries real weight because Bondage Baggage was never just a graphic system. The series began with her observation of luggage wrapped by migrant workers at Kathmandu airport, folded into a practice informed by her own travel to and from Kathmandu, where her parents live. Études linked that history to Lee’s wider work, which moves across migration and memory in multiple mediums, then translated it into garments that read like functional tools: shirts with room, trousers with pocket logic, a scarf that can bind, cover or punctuate, and a tee that keeps the message close to the body.

Lee’s biography sharpens the collaboration’s geography. Born in Busan in 1983, raised in Kathmandu and Seoul, she moved to New York City in 2011 and is now based in Salida, Colorado. That itinerant life fits the collection’s concern with traces left by movement, but Études did not leave the idea in the realm of symbolism. The capsule’s softness, its loose proportions and its outdoor-minded construction make the artist uniform legible as everyday dress.

Études Studio has long linked fashion with contemporary art, and this collaboration made the case with unusual clarity. With Peter Sutherland credited on the imagery, the capsule looked less like a side project than a direct extension of the runway’s thinking, where workwear, art and lived-in practicality finally shared the same closet.