The Clothes make the Man was a solo exhibition by Lillian van Veen that ran at The Frame Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from March 21st to March 23rd 2025. The work explores the relationship between queer bodies and the clothes they wear, drawing from a personal archive of clothing that van Veen wore while presenting femininely and transforming these defunct garments into unwearable art objects. By rendering clothing unwerable, van Veen is able to interact with the material, symbolic, and communicative possibilities of their own clothing without the burden of wearing it themself.
The work is also greatly informed by the masculine clothing that the artist presently wears, and ways in which they must alter it in order to make it inhabitable.