their clothes reveals new connections to what they wear and why. Garments they
first thought only related to their status in relation to fashion also harboured lots
of personal memories. These stories are cheap yet still priceless and are a hidden
asset among recycled clothes.
Still, the project also helped develop new skills among the participants and en-
couraged their endeavours. Touching the product of ones creativity proved to be
motivation enough for many to continue working with their ideas at a later date.
New people visited the yard to share their approach to community art practice
and these shared activities revealed the multiplicity of stories connected to cloth-
ing. This indicated how this narrative quality could be used in the future, inter-
secting it with the expressions of big fashion. There was an overall feeling of
shared encouragement as the everyday stories of the wearer’s own life experiences
was brought to a focus in the garments, and not the stories of unreachable idols.
To build together on each others stories and garments can in this way be a vehicle
for self-enhancement, reinterpreting the otherwise top-down fashion myth and
connecting it to ones own social situation, instead of listening to the mediated
stories from the top. From this standpoint we built a new approach to fashion,
based on the limited resources we shared, but revealing stronger narrative intensi-
ties by using the memories of the garments instead of “promising” the new. In-
deed this was very much like the shared praxis within the base communities
among the liberation theologist.
Parts of this perspective were further explored in the projects at the Merimetsa
rehabilitation centre in Tallinn from 2004 to 2006. In this case a set of organized
institutions were brought together to engage in a collaborative project of fashion
production in which the finished products would be inserted into the normal in-
terfaces of fashion. Here the aim was that the products should become fashion
images and the collections sold in fashion stores.
The last week of the project we
organized a “fashion weekend” where
the reformed garments were offered for
exchange. If someone was interested
in a garment it had to be exchanged
with something that person wore at
that moment, and that person had to
fill in the form about that garment’s
history. This proved counterproductive;
the more people filled the form, the less
they wanted to swap the garment they
wore. They rethought the stories and
value of their garments.