Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear
merges clothing design with social
activism and her garments acts as a
polyphonic answer to situations of
human distress. They are temporary
and portable shelters, serving the most
basic needs for essential protection in the
urban environment. The suits combine
mobility and waterproof shelter for the
inhabitant. The Refuge Wear suits can
be combined into Nexus Architec-
ture, a sort of modular and collective
architecture. Here the independent suits
can be zipped together to form a collec-
tive tent, sharing body heat between the
units. Her works points to situations
of distress and she emphasises that her
work is not about offering solutions, but
a starting point for raising discussion,
creating community and mobilising for
social change.the emergence of a new mass-homogenized “Mc-
Fashion”, as unsatisfying, commonplace and utterly
forgettable as the fast food equivalent (Lee 2003). It
could be argued that when H&M diffuses high fash-
ion collaborations to the masses in a “democratic”
approach to fashion, consumers are still only meant
to choose and buy, or not as the case may be, fashion
as prêt-a-porter. No real opportunity is offered to
“talk-back” to the system, which some would argue
to be somewhat undemocratic.
The question is if this fashion format means that we
are doomed to a stratified, totalitarian and hierarchi-
cal system where we as consumers must simply obey
dictates or if as designers our work constantly has to
be in tune with what everybody else does, or is about
to do. To me, fashion seems to be locked into a ready-
to-wear “creativity regime”, which to sociologist Fei-
wel Kupferberg is a social order of norms that defines
and regulates what is possible or not within the for-
mat of innovation, be it car production, science or
creative industries (Kupferberg 2006). Perhaps there
can be forms of fashion participation, beyond mere
choosing, in which we can create our own parallel
but symbiotic arenas and practices. This does not
mean becoming the new dictators of a new micro-
culture, but instead of being able to experiment with
radically participatory forms of fashion.
In this work I will explore other paths for designers
to engage Everyman in the creation and re-creation
of fashion. Perhaps this can be a complementary
form of exclusivity, an exclusivity of participation
and engagement where we can share tools and tech-
niques to build together in collaborative ventures.
This can be an interesting field to explore: where en-
gagement and participation meet the exclusivity of
fashion.
&This research explores a number of different ap-
proaches as to how we can understand and develop
the role of the fashion designer in relation to engaged
forms of consumer participation. The ambition is
not to find a new singular role model but to increase
the variety of both what it is possible for the fashion
designer to achieve and to better equip him for his
role as an agent of intervention. Instead the ambi-