ism. The wild concerts and violent street life became
the image of punk, as it also fitted nicely with the
idea that identity is a performed entity of the self.
However, as McRobbie proposes, clothed identity is
something happening while living with an interest in
clothes, searching for those special garments, recy-
cling those second-hand rags and hanging out to-
gether discussing clothes in shops. It could perhaps
even happen during workshops where participants
remake their old or discarded clothes.
&
It is through practices like the ones highlighted by
McRobbie that micro-cultures are formed rather than
subcultures. There can hardly be any “sub” as the he-
gemonic One dominant culture is in itself a million
rebellions and symbolic or not, the rebel imperative
is the cultural machine of today.
Instead of striving for resisting this type of system we
can build on many complements we find more inter-
esting and more desirable. These can form micro-
cultures of communities, who build on a shared ex-
perience, of seeking, discussing, picking, trading,
wearing and eventually reselling their own creations.
Each of these is a temporary coalition assembled to,
for a few hours, counter the logic of ready-to-wear
fashion, alienation and de-skilling, but which at the
same time uses the surplus that the big economy has
created as the resource for building a new culture. It
is a micro-culture riding on the surplus of used
clothes we have in our wardrobes, releasing their po-
tentials to become something new. It is a hacktivist
practice and we can see it emerge in the Swap-O-
Rama-Ramas, public clothes swap and redesign
events. I will now discuss the one I organized in Is-
tanbul in autumn 2007.swap-o-rama-rama
Half an hour before opening there were already
queues of people waiting outside the Hall, a club not
far from Istiklal Caddesi in central Istanbul. Through-
out the evening around 500 visitors were going to
come and share their leftover garments and redesign
them together with designers at the event. What the
visitors were queuing for was the city’s first Swap-O-
Rama-Rama, a clothes swap and design event open
to the public. It was organized as part of the Hackers
and Haute Couture Heretics exhibition in Istanbul,
an exhibition and six-week long workshop at the Ga-
ranti Gallery a block away from the swap.
As the inventor of the Swap-O-Rama-Rama events,
Wendy Tremayne, could not come to organize the
event but we followed her methods. These were a
loose set of instructions which under a Creative
Commons licence are open and free to use every-
where and now her Swaps are organized all over the
world. Tremayne who is based in the southern US,