tem, the once “passive” consumers. With hardly any means of production to create
the new, they can now recreate the old into the new, and still be in fashion. It ena-
bles new interfaces that are open for fellow amateurs (lovers) and other laymen to
share their skills and together grow what anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen
calls “clothing competence”, the cultivation of sensibility for clothing aesthetics
(Tranberg Hansen 2005: 114). A breach has been opened in the system, an interface
for new explorations of layman craftsmanship, yet one still in relation with the
haute couture and the exclusivity “dictated” by the fashion system.
To return to Gills’ interpretation of Margiela, she means that the act of unstitching
can be defined as “a practice of ‘undoing’ as deconstructionalist fashion liberates
the garment from functionality, by literally undoing it.” (Gill 1998: 35) This notion
of liberation here is no coincidence. We can compare it with the example of YO-
MANGO in the chapter on heresy. It can trigger us to further explore the hidden
logics of fashion that are at the same time trapped in and performed through every
garment, more than the ”functionality” of the garment.
Perhaps this process opened by upcycling can also make us update the world of
fashion in small and beautiful steps and upfashion it with our own craftsmanship.
We can use fashion as a workshop for collective enablement where a community
shares their methods and experiences. Liberating one part of fashion from the phe-
nomenon of dictations and anxiety to become instead a collective experience of
empowerment through engaged craft. In this way the sewing machine can become
an instrument for liberation and not only a symbol for sweatshop work. It can be
a tool for the development of craftsmanship, and a path to freedom.
To understand this better and get an example from the overlaps between decon-
struction, upcycling, craftsmanship and hacktivism we should take a closer look an
example of fashion hacking.
giana gonzález and hacking-couture
One fashion designer, that I think engages in a hacking design practice and that I
would like to discuss more thoroughly is Giana González from Panama. I followed
her practice during her workshops at the Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics exhi-
bition I organized at Garanti Gallery in Istanbul in September 2007.
González, having a background in computer programming, labels her fashion
projects “Hacking-Couture”, in which participants reverse engineer fashion brands.
In workshops the participants de-program material and sign systems of famous
fashion brands, to open their expressive source code into various forms of charts
and diagrams. The participants track the brands basic building blocks, or the
“Lego” parts of how the brand is built and the identified components form the
“code” from which a brand and its garments are constructed. This code is mapped
and used in her workshops.
From the practical process González creates a workflow similar to computer pro-
gramming, building every workshop on a thorough research of a famous fashion
brand. She starts by presenting the brand history and basic expressions as she has
identified them and shows detailed images of the various elements and expres-
sions. These can be certain details, silhouettes, patterns or material combinations
that go through the history of the brand and Gonzaláz highlights how they have
evolved over the years. The expressions become subfolders of the brand, in which
Symbiotic power relations.
González uses the power and intensities
of famous brands, like Chanel, to power
up the recycled creations made by the
workshop participants. This also creates
a special form of attention among the
participants, and many appreciate the
brands more after the workshop as subtle
differences between brands are revealed
and discussed.Brand mapping. In the Hacking-
Couture projects, González reverse engineers
a fashion brand’s components into sub-
functions and folders to analyse the building
blocks of the brand. These are used as
pedagogical tools for introducing the brand
for the workshop participants who then
make their own interpretations using the
maps of the open source fashion code.