Woven From Fasteners: Lu Jin’s LockLoom Turns Reclaimed Cable Ties Into Wearable Structure

A plastic cable tie is designed to do one job and then be cut away. Its ratcheting head only moves in one direction: it tightens around a bundle of wires, holds its grip, and ends up in the bin once the job is over. In LockLoom, a sculptural garment made in 2025 by the London-based fashion designer Lu Jin, that disposable fastener becomes the thread itself.

Constructed from several hundred second-hand white and translucent plastic cable ties bought through an online resale marketplace, LockLoom uses no fabric, no sewing and no cutting. Every loop and joint is formed by the ties’ own locking heads, interlaced by hand over the course of roughly a month until they hold together as a lattice around the body.

From Dalí’s Shoe Hat to industrial hardware

Jin trained in womenswear at Istituto Marangoni in Milan before completing a Graduate Diploma in Art and Design (Fashion and Textiles) at the Royal College of Art in 2022 and an MA in Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion in 2024. Across her recent practice, she has worked repeatedly with discarded plastic and reclaimed materials, asking how objects made for short-term utility behave when they are treated with the patience of couture.

The starting point for LockLoom, she explains, came from looking back at Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí’s 1937 Shoe Hat. Where Surrealism displaced a familiar garment from the foot to the head, Jin wanted to test whether an industrial component built for binding and control could take on a second life as a textile.

Instead of melting or shredding the plastic, she kept the cable ties intact and treated them as warp and weft. By varying the diameter of each loop and the point at which one tie ratchets into the next, she built a self-supporting mesh that curves over the shoulders, opens across the spine and falls in flower-like rings down the hip and thigh. Small pearl-like beads are threaded along selected loops across the back and waist, catching the light against the matte nylon teeth of the fasteners.

Rigidity and the moving body

What makes the piece hold the eye in Xiaolin’s photographs, shot with model Veronika Liudera and hair and make-up artist Zimei Hua, is the contrast between the stiffness of the hardware and the softness of skin. A cable tie does not drape like silk or give like wool. When the wearer turns her neck, crouches or shifts her weight, the plastic loops push back, creating an exoskeleton that negotiates with posture rather than simply following it.

In February 2026, LockLoom was shown in London as part of My Body is Dust, a site-responsive group exhibition curated by Junze Zhang for the nomadic platform SPIRA9 inside the bombed-out interior of Asylum Chapel in Peckham. Displayed alongside installation and performance works among the chapel’s scarred walls and stained glass, the garment’s skeletal transparency took on an almost architectural quality. That same month, the photographic series appeared in Vanity Teen under the title The Architecture of Control, and in Volume 96 (Floral) of Collect Art Magazine.

Jin also presented work in the London group show I Personally Believe That in January 2026 and on charity and sustainable fashion runways in Durham and Leeds. Rather than treating sustainability as an exercise in certification or fabric substitution, LockLoom approaches reuse as a structural problem: taking an object engineered never to be undone and turning its one-way lock into the grammar of a garment.

Photographs of LockLoom by Xiaolin (@nozirohpic), with model Veronika Liudera and hair and make-up by Zimei Hua, courtesy of Lu Jin. More of Lu Jin’s work can be found on Behance and Instagram (@ulnijormik).