Petition Blanket, and SHRWR with their project on
liberating clothing. One artist, Rüdiger Schlömer, es-
tablished a button-exchange at the gallery where
visitors came to exchange their buttons and to make
their own “updated” reflexive ones – shining back at
the camera flashes in their coming 15 minutes of
fame.
Another of the artists, Megan Nicolay, who with her
bestseller book Generation-T: 108 ways to redesign a
t-shirt (2006), is a guru of simple reform methods.
They are very accessible and the first third of her
book shows methods where you only have to use
scissors to remake your t-shirt. She manages to invite
the most untrained crafter and her workshops had a
massive attendance.
The group Junky Styling from London had quite an-
other approach. In their studio and shop in East
London they have for a decade been redesigning
men’s suits to create all forms of garments and acces-
sories. By employing systematic suit surgery they re-
use the suits so that become like high quality art
pieces, combing the sartorial qualities of their raw
material with inventive remixing and hacking. At the
gallery they helped the participants to remake suits
with very simple steps. They preserved the qualities
The Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics exhibition
was organized in summer 2007 at Garanti Gallery, Istanbul. It
consisted of a six week relay of workshops that aimed to explore
a multiplicity of fashion practices and experiment with how fashion
can be turned from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a
collective experience of empowerment. During the workshop period
fashion was “orbited” as each artist approached fashion from a dif-
ferent angle during their stay at the gallery. Each week offered new
workshops for the visitors to participate in.of the originals, but with these very simple steps re-
made them into seriously tailored dresses and street
wear.
During the exhibition we were using the gallery as a
common resource and meeting point and each week
had new artists who came to help out visitors to re-
make and produce own garments. Many visitors
came regularly and followed the whole process.
Sometimes students on textile courses arrived, often
in groups of ten to fifteen people, and started work-
ing at one table, adjusting their curriculum to fit the
workshop hours. In this way a form of practical coa-
lition building was happening in the exhibition
space. Visitors came to engage in the workshop ac-
tivities noticing the positive atmosphere and seeing
how easy it was to get started. Very often they were
participating, discussing and crafting, rather than
just observing the rest of the community at the gal-
lery. Young men sometimes sat down reluctantly as
they were waiting for their girlfriends and refusing to
do “girls work”, but often they became involved and
took their first craft steps, first in silence and then
with increased liveliness and discussing vividly. It
was very similar to the way Critical Art Ensemble
sees street theatre as political tools of engagement.
The street theatres they discuss are