The Most Brilliant Lookbook I've Ever Seen...

In my quest for other amazing people who are truly dedicated to using fashion as a vehicle for real social justice, I came across the incredibly informative blog of non other than Otto Von Busch and his graduate design students at Parsons. I've blogged about Prof. Busch quite a few times, as he is BRILLIANT!, and am so glad to have found this digital, blog database of all things fashion and social justice.

One of the "case studies" featured was of Retrofit Republic, a vintage and recycled fashion retailer, style agency, and event planner started by two amazing women who started a company from their love of fashion, social justice for LGBTQ and communities of color, and outreach to make the world a more fashion and cultural energy-efficient bohemia (play on word "retro fit").

In the advent of video lookbooks, this is the most brilliant one I've seen yet. Their lookbook manages to not only showcase their amazing Fall 2012 looks but highlights some powerful people dispelling and conquering the myths that haunt our fashion, aesthetic, cultural, and sartorial worlds. The fashion industry needs a lot of social healing- imagine if every design house used their look book as a platform for activism.

Watch and-with conventional fashion magazine in hand-take notes:


The Real Bodies Manifesto Lookbook Video, Fall 2012 from Retrofit Republic on Vimeo.

Happy Sunday
T*

DesignBoost: Fashion Debates and Hactivism at Parsons

 Excuse my delay in responding! Graduate school has been quite a doozy. Additionally, I am costuming two wonderful, socially inspired productions that go up in the next few weeks! Both plays address themes ranging from the complexity of childhood, how children process trauma, and the power the subconscious. I will be talking about this more in a subsequent post...

Now back to the thought provoking design Sweden-based conference: Design Boost.

The Second Annual DesignBoost Conference on the topic of "Design Intellience" took place at the Parsons School of Design/New School last Tuesday and Wednesday and consisted of a set of two dynamic days of roundtable discussions and presentations from designers, professors, politicians, philanthropists, activists and lay people representing design conscious individuals from the U.S. and Sweden. This cross continental, cross cultural, and cross institutional event generated plenty of ideas around how we can re-think "Design Intelligence"  and "Sustainability in Fashion."

Some of the thought exchanges were:

• Fashion Hacktivism: the ability to hack into the systematic fashion matrix and create your own fashion voice using the tools and codes of familiar fashion images.
• Nation-States: What does it mean to use the role of nations and nation states in design?
• Nurturing Our Relationship with Clothes: As fashion images have forced us to loose touch with clothes, now treating them as mere commodities, how do we reform our relationship with them?
• Fashion as Mass Spectacle: is it about the garment or the show (both runway and street)?
• The Mind of a Fashion Exec: How do you get someone to care about sustainability when they merely look at fashion as a corporate account where even the slightest risk to the status quo would cost them millions and potentially their job?
• Thoughts from the Perspective of a Fast Fashion rep: The world needs more design, not less. And these esoteric, artistic approaches to fashion are useless. Really?

So much more can be said, but instead of lumping everything into one post, stay tuned as I break it down, post by post, piece by piece, speaker by speaker and concept by concept. Media is to engage, not to overwhelm. This is a conversation.

But in the meantime, feel free to post your thoughts to the questions and provocations above,

Peace, Love, and Design Intelligence,

T*

Hack it Up! An Intro into the DIY Ethos

In the same breadth that we know all of these eco- and not so eco brands. we should know Otto von Busch. Fashion is not something simply to be consumed; it is to be directly involved in. Let's stop recreating this Pedagogy of the Oppressed top down fashion tastemaker approach, where our vision of style, our closets, our brand choices are the ones others should in Twitter-like masses follow. Let's try something a bit more active and empowering. Yes, I know, wind of bold for me to say as an artist who wants to eat, have health insurance, and have funds to do these road trips, but really, true sustainability is putting the powers of production and image creation back into the hands of the people. DIY or support local/independent like r*GEM if you don't have the time (info@reciclagem-themovement.com! :)

reciclaGEM is a movement. A movement of activism, information exchange, and the aesthetics of empowerment. Yes, YOU have the power to be the social-economic-political-aesthetic change you want to see. Even outside the U.K and the E.U, where eco-fashion activists seem to be in droves, whether you're from Panama, like Hackist artist Gianna G of Hacking Couture, or one of the many DIYers featured in U.S. based women's mag, Bust, you have the power to bring sustainability into your own hands.

As an emerging designer, I want your support. In fact, I'd love your support and will happily be providing some custom garments, high end thrift, and DIY lessons for your eco-fashion pleasure. But I also believe in diversifying the streams of consumption and production, so that you're not just buying things from a limited set of designers and brands without feeling empowered to change and create. Our country and our hemisphere would look a bit more like America, the Beautiful, if we started actively changing it into the hemisphere we want to see.

Don't just eat a burger, even if it's veggie. Learn the recipe so you choose your ingredients :)