FASHION-able

The idea was to explore how a marginalized group
could use crafty interventions for self-enhancement.
Together with an Istanbul-based community art
group, Oda Projesi, and a group of Turkish women
we started a local brand for recycled clothes, Italyan
Avlusu. The brand became in itself a form or base
community, where we gathered around one subject
commenting it in relation to the participants shared
social situation.

italyan avlusu

In spring 2004 I was invited by the Turkish commu-
nity art group Oda Projesi to make a fashion related
project together with their neighbours in the Galata
district in Istanbul. Oda Projesi, which is usually con-
nected to the “relational aesthetics” approach, had by
then been working in this particular urban commu-
nity for several years. They were based in a ground
floor apartment facing the block’s open courtyard
and minimal square – the “Italian Square”, or Italyan
Avlusu. Around the courtyard, in century old houses,
some in need of restoration, housed a heterogeneous
group of east Turkish migrants with whom Oda
Projesi worked on their projects. The community
projects included everything from artists making
small exhibitions in the apartment to groups broad-
casting community radio, making animated movies
with the children or building wooden bridges from
small sticks between the windows so spanning the

Italyan Avlusu was a self_passage project

run together with the community art group

Oda Projesi in Istanbul 2004. During one

month we set up a local fashion brand based on

yard to manifest neighbourhood connections.

We decided to make a fashion project together, Oda

Projesi, the neighbours and me. It would be a locally

produced brand working with recycling clothes in

various ways, and with this very methodology some-

how try to comment on some central logics of fash-

ion. Most importantly the idea was to try to use

clothing as a tool for building community and use it

for reflecting on our connection to the world of fash-

ion.

The basic idea of the local brand, which we called

Italyan Avlusu, was to use the sparse resources of the

community in new ways, trying to somehow resem-

ble fashion, but also reverse some of its logic to build

a frugal advantage for the community. We agreed on

reversing fashion’s logic of building expectations by

“promising” an advantageous change to the wearer.

Fashion is always aiming at the future and by wear-

ing it we are promised to be able to run faster, be

more attractive, look sexier or reach future status. At

least that is what advertising tells us.

Instead we wanted to reverse this logic by underlin-

ing the history of each recycled garment and empha-

sise the personal memories of each garment collected

for reuse. Instead of building your identity on new

stories, provided through the fashion system, we

here offered the wearer to build an identity on the

stories the old garments had been through. To facili-

tate this we made fill-in-forms as labels for the gar-

a process of recycling garments and especially

their inherent stories. Before the garments were

recycled the previous owners had to write down

the clothes experiences in a fill-in-form.