Hussein Chalayan’s Airmail Dress (1999) is rooted in the artist’s childhood experience of moving between London and Nicosia, and the feelings of distance, movement and separation that accompanied it. Designed to be both worn as a dress and folded into a mailable package, the work transforms the body into an object that can be transported, blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, garment and parcel, intimacy and distance. While Chalayan does not consider his work a conventional form of self-portraiture, Airmail Dress carries traces of his personal experiences while extending them into a more universal reflection on displacement, connection and the desire to overcome physical distance.