Fashion Diggers: Transgressive making for personal benefit

Abstract

As a designer-maker-activist, I am interested in encouraging wider participation in fashion making – particularly knitting – for individual wellbeing and broader sustainability benefits. To enable my activist approach, I have developed a metaphor which treats fashion as a commons, comparing a shared fashion culture with a shared land resource. I take the view that the contemporary system has ‘enclosed’ fashion and given great power to a few large stakeholders, just as the enclosure of common land during the Agricultural Revolution in Britain benefitted the rich and forced the poor into a dependence on waged labour. Fashion enclosure makes us dependent on professionals and limits the agency of individuals in making independent fashion decisions, leading to feelings of anxiety.
Continuing the metaphor, I take inspiration from the activism of historical and contemporary groups that take direct action to gain access to land. In this paper, I explore alternative approaches to
enclosed fashion terrain. For example, the appropriation of mass-produced garments – such as a wearer interpreting their own meaning from a purchased item – could be compared to a ramble across private land. However, this appropriation is subject to perceived rules and the fast-paced adoption of subverted meanings by retailers. Furthermore, a dependence on mass-produced items means a continuing relationship between fashion activity and the purchase of new garments, which has implications for sustainability. I link the home making of fashion garments with those who grow their own food, thereby expressing a more physical relationship with the earth. Making offers many benefits in both process and product, such as the possibility for greater diversity and the rigour of craft providing concrete reality in an unstable fashion world. However, I am concerned that much contemporary amateur textile craft takes place within a ‘safe’ area of practice, doing little to threaten powerful retailers and limiting the potential of making to address fashion anxiety. Groups who grow food, or even flowers, on private land as a means of symbolically claiming shared ownership – from the seventeenth-century Diggers to today’s guerrilla gardeners – suggest the possibility of a more transgressive practice. Amateur makers can physically appropriate existing mass-produced garments and styles for greater personal benefit, with the materiality of the process playing an important role. Historical and contemporary examples of ‘Fashion Diggers’ provide insights into motivations for, and barriers to, the wider adoption of such transgressive practices. This metaphor forms the first stage of a PhD project, which will employ practical knit-based workshops involving amateur participants to further investigate methods of material intervention, and their potential benefits. This creates a model of design activism appropriate to the autonomous designer-maker, in which design skills are used to support individuals to take personally beneficial material-based action.