oners, commodities and consumers, are both in the end engulfed in each other’s
desire and magic.
With their practice YOMANGO performs a double-edged ironic gesture, as their
actions are always playful enactments on the borderline of slapstick comedy, while
at the same time they reverse the desire projected through the system. Nevertheless,
their actions and rhetoric can also be read as strictly analogue and it could make us
see new approaches to how fashion meets activism.
In this way a traditional counterculture critic would argue that YOMANGO is a
failure, not radically opposing the “artificial” desire the system produces. This is the
traditional critical viewpoint, of seeing consumerism as an “opium for the people”
or of offering a “repressive tolerance”. On the contrary to this YOMANGO does
shift the approach to the system, and engages passive consumers in direct action.
The acts are not desperate but instead full of celebration and even hope in the sense
that the artefacts of faith and desire should be available to all believers.
YOMANGO works with reversing flows in the fashion system and consumerism,
making their approach to ownership a lifestyle in itself and at the same time ap-
propriating the methods and rhetoric of the adversaries and create a new lifestyle
out of it. The moral and constructive aspects of their tactics of stealing can be dis-
cussed and are doubtful in addition so is their focus on commodities as the path
for liberation, as it preserves the unequal status between producer and consumer.
As we will see further on, through an example of a similar practice by the Gothen-
burg-based group SHRWR, perhaps it is not the possession of commodities that
this struggle is really about. For the most important characteristic of YOMANGO
is the way they bring down the production of lifestyles into the hands of street
level activists while still connecting their practice to the cool lifestyle “myths” in
fashion.YOMANGO’s manuals are available
at their site and include detailed instruc-
tions for how to best avoid the electronic
article surveillance in the shops. They
also provide brand labels for people who
want to brand the holes where the alarm
has been cut away, to show that this theft
was no thoughtless crime but part of a
larger lifestyle concept and philosophy.
YOMANGO shows that their lifestyle
is also celebrated in Hollywood and
their protective “saint” is the shoplifting
actress Vinona Ryder.