Upcycling a la Martin Margiela.
Deconstructed garments reassembled as
haute couture art objects. A jacket made
from vintage pilot capes in dark leather
(top), and a jacket made form vintage
pilot capes in sheep skin (bottom).
ing where thresholds to activity are lowered and interpassivity is broken. Wark
means that the benign, creative, ethical and aesthetic hacker offers an input to an-
other social order,for the hacker is a figure that speaks to the ideal of a kind of labor that finds its own
time, that sets its own goals, and that works on common property for the good of all.
(Wark 2006, 321)The hacker of Wark is a true craftsman in Sennett’s sense, of having production
knowledge, appreciating craftsmanship for its own sake, taking pride in one’s skills
and work, and making the journey a goal in itself.
Thereby, the landscape description of Deleuze can be seen a literal environment for
the spatial hacker. The lock-picker, the urban explorer, the freewheel rider, the
fixed-gear bicycle messenger, the skateboarder, the street surfer, the off-road trekker
are all exploring their empowering skills throughout the landscape, opening new
lines of practice between the official trails. They liberate potentialities, break open
new paths, show possibilities within an established and habitually used infrastruc-
ture, pushing the borders and modes of existence beyond the control mechanisms
of the main hierarchies or protocols.
The hackers are thus engaged in what Wark sees as a new modified Marxist class
struggle, but using hacking manoeuvres instead of dialectic oppositional tactics.
They reconnect what was before separated in creative ways. They draw lines of es-
cape, and are heretics in the eyes of the vectorialists and the system administrators
as they short-circuit and bend their systems. What their practices offer are escape
routes and forces playing with the gravity of the system. They are playing, not only
with technology or crafts, but with the lines of flight.
As we have now followed several lines of practice of hacktivism we should now see
how they could be applied to fashion. We will first look see how the popular meth-
od of “deconstruction” relates to hacktivism before we go on to projects that apply
lines of fashion-hacktivism.deconstruction and fashion hacktivism
Something that has intrigued me during my research is how Do-it-yourself prac-
tice and the reusing of old material is related to the concept of ”deconstruction”, an
idea that has been an active part of fashion over the last decades. This common
method of reusing or recycling old garments into new creations has especially been
a distinct part of what is considered as conceptual fashion. However, to call the
haute couture techniques by for example Maison Martin Margiela, or other up-
market brands such as Comme des Garcons or Undercover, as simply “recycling”
would be an understatement. What happens in this process of reuse is that the raw
material is augmented into an object of higher status than its original incarnation.
If these garments are in some way “cycled”, they are “upcycled”. This concept, ini-
tially explored by the Austrian artist group WochenKlausur, is a process of upgrad-
ing used material, making its new incarnation more desirable than it was to begin
with. “Upcycling is a procedure akin to recycling in which waste material and worn
out goods are reprocessed directly into new products without being reduced to raw
materials.” (Zinggl 2001: 87) What this form of recycling is doing to fashion has
deliberately been practiced on in the art world since Duchamp, and in this sense
used clothes are the objet trouvé of fashion. Like the Bicycle Wheel or the Urinal,