but one that collaborates with many different actors, established ones as well as
amateurs. We have over the last decade seen a variety of new collaborations emerge
throughout the fashion system but we will discuss here what it means when high
fashion eventually starts interfacing the abstract machine of hacktivism.
We have in the previous chapters mainly examined the actions taking place within
a community such as sharing practice or using the force from other systems. We
will now look at the attempts to create symbiosis between separated systems, be-
tween high and low, skilled and unskilled, rich and poor and central and periph-
eral. Here we will meet Pro-Ams, the professional amateurs, the serious hobbyists
who trespass into the world of the experts, channelling energies between the two
communities. We will meet the user-innovators who further the design of com-
modities, develop their hobbies and achieve a genuine mastership of their crafts
even if it is “only” a hobby.
To get there we will start in a fashion project at Garanti Gallery in Istanbul during
the autumn of 2007, the Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics.
Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics
The exhibition Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics investigated how designers
and artists work with fashion in ways connected to hacktivism and that relate to
practices such as reverse engineering, heresy, shopdropping, and craftivism. Their
techniques and oeuvres operate on the outskirts of fashion and propose new ways
to navigate through the unexplored blank spots of the fashion map.
The exhibition consisted mainly of a six-week long open workshop at the gallery in
which participating artists and designers shared and developed their methods in
collaboration with the workshop participants. Each artist used his or her own
method to approach fashion from various perspectives, and explored how it could
be synchronized with the hacktivist mindset.
Each artist and designer was thus orbiting fashion in their own way, exploring the
phenomenon’s plasticity and configuration in their own way, with their own spe-
cific approach, sensors and tools. The aim of this encircling approach to fashion
was to create a muliplicity of practical low-level interventions and perspectives
from which to look at fashion, both as a social phenomenon as well as a matter-
energy asset that can be mutated, tuned and transformed.
The gallery space was furnished like a studio, with tables, stools, sewing machines,
mannequins and all sorts of sewing equipment. Here visitors could drop in from
the street outside, the busy Istiklal Caddesi, along which about a million people
pass by every day. Between two to four hundred visitors a day came to the gallery
and often more then 30 visitors were engaged in the workshops at any given time.
From the beginning we thought of only having scheduled workshops in the eve-
nings, but as people joyfully joined during the day we had to keep on going with
the workshops for most of the day. Nine hours a day, five days a week we were in
the gallery helping visitors to try new methods and every week a new artist showed
their specific approach to crafting, DIY and fashion.
&
In this thesis we have already met many of the artists who come to share their skills
at the gallery. Giana González with her hacking-couture project, Stephanie Syjuco
with the Counterfeit Crochet Project, Cat Mazza and her microRevolt and the Nike