My Role as a Designer

Boa noite friends,

I write this post with my deepest sincerity and candor. ReciclaGEM is world is an open world to which you are invited to enter, play dress up, deconstruct garments, reconstruct identities, leave preconceptions at the door, and bring a mind and a heart and a fashion sense ready to challenge fashion's previous and currently destructive hegemony over people and our planet. If you ever felt excluded, if you ever felt confused in a sea of leather jackets and handbags wondering if cruelty free fashion is truly possible, if you ever wondered how fashion could answer to its history and present hand in slave labor and environmental disregard, if you ever felt alienated by monochromatic palettes, tailored shift silhouettes, and trend books conceived scientifically but without a notion of soul, this world is for you.

(Photo Cred: Kat Soutar)

While I oscillate between the business-minded "we" to refer to the behind the scenes work I do, I am writing this post to let you know that WE are together in the imaginative creation of this world.

Whether via social media or in person, I write to reassure you that you have been given the keys to the city of ReciclaGEM with the opportunity to help craft a world where fashion is a prominent, self-reflexive, and dynamic vehicle for social balance, image activism, environment justice, peace and love.

(Photo Cred: Kyra Frierson)

 

Each collection, post, encounter, and interaction reflect a chiseling away at a vision of what recycled fashion, culturally inclusive fashion, cruelty free fashion, and people and earth conscious fashion can do to add to the creation of more beauty and harmony in this world.

(Photo Cred: Stephen Elliot, Mud Productions)

With that, I will see you breakfast,

Peace, love, and collectivity,
T*

The First Workshop of ATELIER RECICLAGEM: Apply July 31st

Hello again! Bom dia! Bonsoir!

The first official workshop of ATELIER RECICLAGEM will take place at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Los Angeles (UCLA) for the HEMI Graduate Student Convergence. I will be co-facilitating alongside PhD candidate and burlesque performer, Kelly McKay a workshop on how garments facilitate conversations with gender, internal conversations, social conversations, and how dress up and play can be a medium through which we can dialogue in ways that change the world.

**These garments will be muslin mock ups of the Spring 2014 ATELIER RECICLAGEM Couture collection, the first couture collection of the project. So in your participation you will shape and mold the silhouettes as they shape and mold your conversations.

In essence, playing dress up WILL change the world, and we want to explore how to do that.

The process of participation in the work group requires an application: a 500 word research abstract and resume, which you are to send to hemigsi@gmail.com by JULY 31ST 2013. More info can be found here.

And to find out more information about our workshop, please find the official description on the site as well as below:

7. Playing Dress-Up: Fashion, Gender, and the Politics of Embodiment

Co-conveners: Tamara Leacock (NYU), Kelly McKay (University of Minnesota), Sean Metzger (UCLA), Jack Halberstam (USC)

How do our garments and adornments shape our ways of seeing and being in the world?  This working group takes “fashion” as a starting point from which to initiate a critical and artistic dialogue around questions of politics, identity, queerness, and embodiment.  We seek participants to join us in beginning a collective exploration of how fashion functions as a technology of identity.  We are interested in the political potential of adornment, affective attachments to garments, and the relationship between adornment and embodiment.  As we approach these topics, we are deeply committed to engaging play as a mode of investigation.  We welcome imaginative contributions from scholars, artists, and activists working in fashion studies.  We envision the work group as both a discussion forum and an experimental, artistic research laboratory, a place for sharing our projects-in-process but also for making new work together.  We hope that our collective conversations will speak to the emerging field of fashion studies with a voice distinctly situated in a hemispheric perspective, recognizing the United States and Latin America as playing key roles in shaping the realities of the global fashion economy.  Broadly speaking, we ask: how do we understand the complex relationships between people and clothing?  What kinds of political, social, emotional, and other attachments shape our relationships to our garments?  As we combine our practical work as artists with our scholarly work, we eagerly seek collaborators and interlocutors in this experimental process.  Come play dress-up with us!

We look forward to playing a revolutionary game of dress-up with you.

Peace and play,

T*

Rebirth: Welcome to the Atelier

Oi minha gente, minha familia, tudo bem??

So if you have been following me on instagram or facebook (@reciclagem), you are aware of the journey that has transpired thus far.

But if you haven't let me tell you.

So after doing quite a few fashion shows (from Fashion Envie to One Night of Jungle Fever) in New York, I have moved to Paris for the month to study haute couture, to make "American Thrift Couture" real.

And thus far, I have worked backstage at couture fashion week, learned the special techniques of Madame Gres and shibori dyeing, and started designing pieces that transcend.

I am rethinking the function of ReciclaGEM as more than just an indie locavore line, but something that will serve as an Atelier, a workshop, for re-thinking the ways in which clothing can facilitate conversations on our social world.

When we put on clothes every day, what conversations are we having with ourselves, with our higher spiritual worlds, with each other, with the planet? Are these conversations about gender, race, spirit, earth, love, hate, progress, regression, confusion, clarity?

What this is is a workroom, a think tank to rethink, rethink and rethink some more the ways in which clothing serves as a medium for our humanity.

And once we do that, I think, we will have a more amenable relationship with the planet and with ourselves that is conscious, evolving, potentally imperfect, but ceaselessly empathetic, kind and forgiving.

I shall support all movements of fashion that are for progress, but release the labels that may alienate such conversations from the audience that most often times is the one that needs to hear it.

Ase. Rebirth in Paris. More to come, more to post, more to reveal.

I am and we are re-thinking the way clothing functions as social recycling, recycling the social elements of our world.

Peace, love, and consciousness.

Beijos and bonsoir,
T*