At the core of the Swap-O-Rama-Rama is the sharing of material, ideas and skills
within a community. The Swap is an idea- and skill-expanding event where people
in a group come to experience an event of collective empowerment. Actually, they
together form a temporary and complementary fashion scene. The lonely fash-
ionista remaking clothes at the kitchen table is no longer secluded but with a crowd
of like-minded friends.
It is this community feeling that is the core of the Swap-O-Rama-Rama. It is not
only about swapping and leaving the place with new items of clothing, but to en-
gage in remaking them together with others, help each other, share skills and build
a community or fashion scene by finding likeminded persons. The whole event
mimics a big fashion studio, but one where every participant is a fashion designer.
There is a shared surplus of materials that once originated from the big fashion
system, but have now been discarded. These items have fallen from grace, and they
are now revived into living material for everyone to use. It is a new fashion world,
built together with all the participants, where they all share their resources and
skills. At the event in Istanbul the atmosphere was so high and the participants so
exited that we had to be ruthless and pull the sewing machines’ power plugs from
the walls to get people to leave when we closed. They had such a great time they
didn’t want to go.
The Swap-O-Rama-Rama event was organized by a loose and self-organized group
with the aim of triggering an autocatalytic loop to make the Swap-O-Rama-Rama
an actual fashion event, but one outside the fashion system. Instead of focusing on
commodities and the exchange of money the Swap is free and offers personal con-
tacts and expanded skills. By forming their own scene the people at the Swap dis-
covered common expressions. They share these and build a temporary congrega-
tion with its own format, protocols and fashion doctrine. It is an open meeting for
believers and makers, forming a critical mass and empowering each other even
after the event itself has ended. As a visitor one see that one is not alone, but part
of a whole micro-culture of like-minded people. One makes friends and gets new
ideas.
In this sense the Swap-O-Rama-Rama shares a lot with the hacktivist scene, not
only in the reforming of material and communal building, but also in the organi-
zation of the event. Similar examples could be the temporary “sprints” in open
source software production, where programmers meet and dedicate a few days to
common work together on a shared project. Organization-wise it is also similar to
the big C64 Copyparties or Demoscene parties of the 80’s, or the contemporary
LAN (Local Area Network) gatherings in the hacker scene where participants bring
their computers and plug into one communal infrastructure, a high speed local
network, sharing files, playing games, exchanging ideas and just socializing around
their networked material and digital public.
To add some more of a fashion atmosphere to the event we organized it in con-
junction with an ”Istanbul Street Style” party, a monthly club event hosted at vari-
ous nightclubs in the city. At these events local upcoming designers show their
latest collection together with street art, photography, creative cooking and music
performances. For the party, make-up artists and hairdressers were invited to style
models and the swap participants who could show off their new creations on the
catwalk if they so wished. With models and DJs intermixed with workshop par-
ticipants the final swap-catwalk came to be a celebration of small scale creativity
but with a glamorous framing with flashing lights, creating a small fashion worldA make-up team were also present at
the Swap-O-Rama-Rama and Sahane
event to make the models and participants
ready for the final catwalk show.