Most musicians treat clothing as something that happens after the music. The songs get made, then a stage look gets chosen to match them. Katya Lee works in the opposite direction. For her, the garment is often where the idea begins, and the sound grows out of it. That habit has pulled her into rooms most pop singers never enter, from acoustic engineering studios to the labs where researchers build the future of mixed reality.
It is an unlikely place to land for someone who started out at the front of an arena. Before any of the technology, Lee spent years as a working pop star in Russia, first as the female lead of the dance group Hi-Fi and then as a member of the all-female act Fabrika, a run that included a Golden Gramophone award. Then she walked away from it, moved to New York in 2014, and started rebuilding from a position with almost no leverage at all.
A Suit That Plays Back
The clearest expression of where Lee’s curiosity has taken her is a project she calls the CyberSuit, a piece of clothing designed to work as a playable instrument rather than just something to look at. She developed it alongside Ken Perlin, the New York University computer scientist whose foundational work in computer graphics earned him a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Perlin’s lab spends its time on questions about how human senses might be extended by technology, which turns out to be a natural fit for an artist who keeps asking what a body can do once you stop treating a costume as decoration.
The collaboration says something about how Lee positions herself. She is not a performer borrowing a scientist’s credibility for a press photo. She is interested in the same problem he is, namely, the gap between what a person feels and what the tools around them can express, and she approaches it as a builder.
When a Jacket Becomes Armor
Not every garment Lee makes is so high concept. Some are born out of irritation. When she first arrived in New York, she ended up in an apartment overlooking a skyscraper under construction, where the noise ran from early morning until late at night. Rather than only complain about it, she started carrying a decibel meter around the city and taking readings everywhere she went, in subways, libraries, parking lots, and coffee shops. The numbers kept landing well above what is considered healthy. She decided the noise was quietly grinding people down, and that nobody was naming the problem.
Her response was a garment she describes as emotional armor. She took the cheap foam earplugs that get manufactured by the million and never decompose, then glued hundreds of them in bright blues, yellows, oranges, pinks, and fuchsias across a disposable jacket. The result looks less like protective gear than a piece of candy, and that is the point. People keep wanting to reach out and touch it, and a touch is an easier opening than a song. When she brought a version to Art Basel this past December, she dressed models in the jackets and stationed them outside the main entrance, then let the questions roll in.
Noise as a Raw Material
The jacket has a companion in sound. Lee took the videos she had filmed of the drilling outside her window and turned the recordings into a dance track she called “Wall of Sound,” with a subway preacher she had watched the city ignore installed as its unlikely front man. The move is typical of how she works. A nuisance becomes source material, and the thing everyone tunes out gets pulled to the center of the frame.
That same instinct shaped “Blindfold,” a track she did not so much write as engineer. There is no guitar or piano anywhere on it. She built the entire piece out of manipulated gunshots, explosions, sirens, and screams, stacking them until they read less like a song and more like a place. The density of that construction drew the interest of LemonTree Studios, one of the few rooms in Los Angeles equipped for the immersive Dolby Atmos format used in modern cinemas. By Lee’s account, engineers there began using the track as a reference because of how much sound design she had packed into it. “Blindfold” was mixed for Atmos by engineer Ed Donnelly and is registered with ASCAP.
Why the Clothes Matter
Underneath the wearable technology and the unusual recordings, Lee keeps returning to a single idea, which is freedom. She describes it as the value she organizes her work around, and it shows up everywhere, from a song she wrote while stranded abroad for a month during a collapsed visa appointment to the constraints she lives with as the holder of a passport that closes doors other artists walk through freely. She does not treat any of it as a grievance. She treats it as something to make things out of.
That is what connects the suit that plays, the jacket that protects, and the song built from sirens. Each one takes a limit, a frustration, or a piece of waste and turns it into an invitation. “I just wanted to see how far I could push a sound,” she has said of her studio work, and the line holds for everything else she makes. The pushing is the work. Eleven years after she landed in a country where she could barely order a coffee, she is still finding new surfaces to press against.
