of economic necessity, mainly because clothing is cheaply produced in South East
Asia and often just buying the fabric to sew yourself costs as much as a finished
garment. On the other hand it is still as hard to get that something “special”, that
garment that has a really personal touch.
In this way DIY might be another form of luxury, of creating special things, cus-
tomized and hand-made by its maker. It can be produced by the underprivileged,
by the ones placed outside of the narrow meritocratic race for status as a form of
self-enhancement. This is not a new luxury in a “normal” commodity paradigm,
but another form of fashion, another form of engagement.
DIY is in this sense similar to the “slowness” of the slow food movement and can
catch some of the same critique as the slow food; it discourages nominally cheaper
alternative methods of growing or preparing food and it rejects economy of scale
which makes food cheaper for most people. However, this criticism misses the
main points of DIY, that of skill, pride and appreciation of craftsmanship. It also
misses the possibility of the two models existing side-by-side ad does not take into
account that they are not necessarily oppositional.
This would also mean a resurgence of the historic handicraft associations, which
have promoted and documented traditional crafts for more than a century. Para-
doxically, the production from the handicraft associations has met the interested
amateurs mainly through elevated museum pieces and national crafts exhibitions,
as singular objects (Rosenqvist 2007). There is a lot to learn from this treasure
house of craft history and immense bank of knowledge, but most importantly, how
to connect to, bend, tune, and form coalitions between old crafts and new ap-
proaches. New modes of organization, new bazaar-like models of collaboration
and new protocols that connect these base communities of practice to the larger
energy flows through the fashion system must be tried. We must have alliances that
connect with fashion, but with the craft publics in the forefront.
This type of hacktivist alliance can take many forms. It could be anything from
product-service relationships in the form of barbershop-like recycling boutiques,
to offering re-styling help and infrastructure for drop-in updating of clothes. It
could be workshops that engage in secondary school craft curricula. It could be
free DIY cookbooks created in collaboration with the greatest haute couture de-
signers. It could be projects exploring the full width of user engagement, from
various forms of Lego-like kits to shared workshops for co-production inside fash-
ion stores. It could be new forms of Swap-O-Rama-Ramas where whole new scenes
are formed and shared and that intersect both a wide range of lifestyles and high
quality production.
It is important to remember that this is not a question of a new layer of engaged
“McFashion” or DIY activism subverting the cathedrals. It is a practice concerned
with finding new passages between the two fields that were separated, the high
fashion and the DIY. It is a perspective on design that does not aim at reaching the
top, even within the new micro-culture that is created by new intensities and prac-
tice. It is a delegation through protocols, as in the example of the Swap-O-Rama-
Rama. This is also a complementary form of fashion critique that does not aim to
be top-down but instead builds from in-between and from the reconciliation be-
tween the cathedral and the bazaar.
Here, the negotiations between time-saving and skill-producing activities are also
crucial, as well as skills to carefully reverse engineer the driving forces behind fash-