abstract
Title: FASHION-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design
Language: English
Keywords: Fashion Design, Hacktivism, Hacking, Heresy, Small Change, Professional-
Amateurs, Do-it-yourself, Action Spaces, Artistic Research, Practice-based research
ISBN: 978-91-977757-2-4
This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new de-
signer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse
engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social
activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an
engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice,
where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces
and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages par-
ticipants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collec-
tive experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able.
As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the
DIY upcycling of clothes through “open source” fashion “cookbooks”. By means of
hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding
of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research
projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion
experiments in galleries, collaborative “hacking” at a shoe factory, engaged design at a
rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands.
Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-ama-
teurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal
interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alter-
native reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces
available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as
hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words,
bending the current while still keeping the power on.
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