Meet designer Maya Tastet and her radical invention, the “Pee Skirt”, which promises to change the way women publicly urinate forever.
Go piss girl, but not here. Not there.
Not anywhere without getting your vulva out in public. Squatting over a piss-soaked toilet seat might be a second option, but you’ll be paying £9 to a bitchy barista to get access to it first.
It’s time to introduce Luxembourgish designer Maya Tastet. Coming from Europe with a stink on about the politics of female public urination, Maya presents a revolutionary new approach to relief for the modern woman: the Pee-Skirt.
Interested in toilets’ “urban and public presence and their unavailability to women”, Maya has designed a skirt which comes in many experimental forms, each intending to “serve as a protest for better infrastructure, questioning the social and material dynamics of the toilet experience for women.”
Here, Maya shares her inspirations and political motivations, and how she intends to clean up the messes of systemic gender inequality in toilet spaces like an angry bottle of Cillit Bang.
Describe the Pee Skirt. How does it work?
The Pee-Skirt allows a woman to piss as comfortably as men do. The skirt comes in multiple forms ranging from a casual, Marilyn-Monroe style flappy skirt, a high fashion-esque gown and a completely unwearable statement piece that takes inspiration from the cumbersome design of a life jacket. These forms all work in their own way as a clothing piece and a pop-up cubicle.
The skirts will use carbon gas dispersed through tubes woven throughout the fabric, allowing the skirts to take their cubicle form quickly and dramatically. Like an inflatable tent triggered by a toggle.
Along with my design for the Pee-Skirt, I am developing a whole line of pee-garments like trousers and vests that simplify the act of pissing. They too are meant to serve as a visual protest to show what discomfort women go through when they have no choice but to pee in the open-air.
What problems does the Pee-Skirt solve?
The design for men and women’s trousers are the same. I think that this is legacy of a time in which men wore trousers and women wore dresses, and so the design was adapted to the male body. But, in all the years women have been wearing them too, why haven’t they been readapted? For me, I’d love a zipper that went right down to the ass so I could pee standing up just like any man.
Women’s urinals should exist more for sure. You will encounter a lot of men’s urinals when there’s no toilets in public spaces, just because I think they’re small and vertical and they don’t take up space, but never any for women because of the idea that women need all the space in the world to piss. The Pee-Skirt proves this wrong, and offers a solution to these issues by providing women a portable private space, enabling an outdoor pissing experience already accessible to those with a penis without shame, without feeling gross – if men can do it, why can’t women?
What is the concept behind the Pee-Skirt?
My Pee-Skirt is a protest piece before anything else.
Although my design is practically applicable to some extent, it stays very conceptual. It doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. 40% of the world has no access to appropriate sanitation. For these people, open-air defecation poses huge health risks. I want my skirt to shock people into acknowledgement, because the alternatives that I suggest with this project are something no one wants. The skirt is a fight for better infrastructure around the world, and questions social and material dynamics for women living in cities.
I’d rather be a public urinator than soaked below the waist for the afternoon.
Maya Tastet
What inspires you as a creator?
I’m really interested in very mundane objects or systems that don’t get questioned a lot. I like using this fixation to explore the world around me. I’m very object based, and especially drawn to objects that create or shape a culture in small, often insidious ways.
So what is it about urination and toilets?
Last year, I was walking through central London desperate for a piss. I had a choice: I could either buy a £20 coffee to get access to a café toilet, piss in the street, which of course is illegal, or piss my pants. I mean, I’d rather be a public urinator than soaked below the waist for the afternoon, so…? It’s just crazy how relieving oneself like that is illegal. How can you attach a law to a behaviour we have no control over?
The toilet as an object is so taboo, and so it just doesn’t get questioned, but for me this is a huge misstep: the way toilets are built, with gender segregation so ingrained, the poorly considered designs and lack of facilities for women, its reinforcing this weird notion of propriety making us lose touch with the most human aspects of ourselves.
Do you think the pee skirt can change the world?
I mean, what I want is more toilets. What I want is to legitimise women’s presence in the city, and to change the discourse around toilet facilities and what they could look like in the future. What I want is for us to not to need this skirt. I invented it to start a conversation, to shock the world into action. The goal is to make the Pee-Skirt obsolete, and to un-censor our bodily fluids. If you want to get rid of public urination, don’t slap a fine on people and take away our right to piss. Build more fucking toilets.
If you want to help Maya with her pissy protest mission, divulge your most personal toilet memories for ongoing research here.