This bachelor’s degree project in the Interior Architecture & Furniture Design program at Konstfack, Spring Term 2025, constitutes a critical and experimental investigation of the wardrobe, both as a physical artifact and as a symbolic construct, through a queertheoretical framework.

The wardrobe is a piece of furniture shaped by functionality, standardization, and binary categorizations of needs, but it is also a metaphor for visibility, hidden identities, and the queer experience’s ongoing negotiation between safety and exposure. By deconstructing the spatial and semantic structures of the wardrobe, the project poses the question: How can we reformulate an architectural coding that has long been used to insinuate the need for concealment, constraint, and normalization?

The project begins with a comprehensive analysis of the wardrobe’s historical and cultural development, in which it functions both as an optimized storage solution and as a symbolically charged site in popular culture and queer narratives. By using queer semiotic codes such as the green carnation, the violet, the carabiner, and other discreet yet powerful markers of queer communities as design parameters, the project explores new ways of translating these signs into three-dimensional structures.

Through experimental material and form studies, various methods are tested to shape a structure that does not merely function as a static, gender-normative storage unit, but rather as a negotiable and exploratory spatiality. Assemblages of fragmented wallmodules, derived from the standardized wardrobe, combined with reinterpretations of intermediary objects, create a new type of structure. One that reflects needs other than those foundational to the traditional wardrobe design.

This project is thus both a material and philosophical interventionin to design’s relationship with identity, functionality, and implicit power structures. By activating the wardrobe as a critical site and a fluid design practice, it explores the potential to reimagine objects and architecture to accommodate the complexity, ambiguity, and resilience that characterize non-normative experiences.