VakkoVamps was an attempt to create
a shared and collaborative interface between
the artists and designers of the Hackers
and Haute Couture Heretics exhibition
and the Turkish up-market brand Vakko.
The idea was to apply the hacking methods
onto high fashion and try to make this
tactic reach further into the fashion system.
The aim was to create a synergy between
the hackers and the brand and to reach
outside the gallery walls with the methods
explored in the exhibition.It was not hard to see that this approach to engagement could be a common theme
in fashion and recently British Topshop has had open workshops in their flagship
stores on Oxford Street where they lead recycling workshops and arrange success-
ful “Topswops”. Under the label “Topshop wants your rubbish” they invite stylists
and designers to make visitors rethink the fast-fashion cycle in which they are a
part, and to which, paradoxically, Topshop is one of the contributors. Nevertheless,
it is a basic example of how this type of engagement can be done by a bigger actor
on the fashion scene.
As a part of the exhibition we put together a project that we hoped could bridge the
distance between the down-to-earth DIY approach and the exclusive offering of
lustrous and branded ready-to-wear, where dreams seems to be made. We con-
tacted the high fashion brand Vakko to do a collaborative project.
VakkoVamps
With VakkoVamps we tried to connect the gallery with the fashion system and to
find new ways of intersecting hacktivist practices with the established system. The
experiment was to find out what could happen to DIY if it was given access to the
nodes and vectors of high fashion and to be seen next to the most artistic tailoring.
We wanted to see if it would be depicted as the highest exclusivity that could be
tried on by customers inside the stylish guarded stores where the beautiful people
buy their clothes.
Usually, when fashion comes under the scrutinizing eyes of critical art or theory, it
is considered an illusion or a spell from the black arts and it needs to be “revealed”
as fools’ play, ridiculed deception, or a capitalistic conspiracy. Very rarely does a
theoretical stand highlight the emancipatory, magical, extravagant, or luminous
sides of fashion. This leads to a situation where critical designers almost automati-
cally place themselves, or find themselves being placed, into a denunciatory or an-
ti-fashion position. From this position they, on the one hand, enact a “fashion
drop-out” statement, and usually become producers of singular objects comment-
ing on fashion from the outside. Or on the other hand, they organize or perform
workshops at a gallery where they proclaim the space a Temporary Autonomous
Zone (Bey 1991) and in this are free to change the world. Their actions rarely affect
the fashion world outside the gallery and it is even more seldom that the new crit-
ical expressions are actually worn, or reach an elevated position in the fashion sys-
tem. Instead, critical fashion must develop a way of coming into the system of
fashion and into the logic of dream producing expectations. It has to produce real
fashion; real objects of desire.
Our decided aim was to produce fashion that was true objects of desire, seeing if
DIY could become something else if it could access the whole dream producing
machine of high fashion; the best media, glossy advertising, high quality materials,
artistic tailoring, exclusive distribution channels, stylish shops and be sold with the
other gorgeous pieces in the commercial temples of the beautiful people. Would it
be different, and in which way? What happens when the most accessible DIY meth-
od ends up in stores with guards at the door, snooty attendants and marble floors
and where many of us would feel reluctant to enter because their concept is to
make us feel that we are not good enough if we cannot afford it. Most important,
we must ask if such an approach could bridge the gap between the crafting we do
for fun, for skills, and in the company of friends, with the “real” desire of the unat-