diy fashion blogs_4c
TRANSCRIPT
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DIY Subversion:Anti-Consumerist Rhetoric of Homemade
Fashion Blogs
Elizabeth Chamberlain
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The Internet offers a new space for “liberating praxis.”
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Web 2.0 tools make Internet learning dialogic and interactive
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Sources are linked, much text is Wiki-editable,and there’s always more in the comments.
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The Internet also helps like-minded activists organize.
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Word travels fast and far on the web.
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Modern American life revolves around stuff—but we’re distanced from it.
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Store
Home
Trash
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Capitalism.Industrialization. Mechanization. Alienation of labor.
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There’s a growing counter-culture Internet movement about taking back the means of production.
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DIY Underground
(Allen St. John, Popular Mechanics)
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If stuff is going to rule our lives, shouldn’t we be a little more connected to it?
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What does it mean to “own” something, anyway?
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Isn’t part of “owning” something being able to dig into it with your own hands?
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Let’s make stuff. Fix stuff. Mod stuff. Hack stuff.
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The DIY Underground is a revolution through the sewing circle, the garage, the workshop.
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Clothing also follows aBUY USE DISPOSEmodel.
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Most fashion is designed in New York lofts and made in China, India, Pakistan.
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DIY fashion blogs argue… that fashion doesn’t have to be just consumptive,
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that making clothes can help us find some limited autonomy,
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that DIY clothes can challenge the capitalist, patriarchal ideology of people around us.
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Clothes that “make a statement” are a big part of punk ideology—swastikas, studs, grunge, metal, holes.
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Vivienne Westwood calls this “confrontation dressing.”
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DIY fashion bloggers “confrontation dress,” too, challenging the fashion hegemony.
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Natalie Purschwitz, “Makeshift”
Sept. 1 2009 – Sept. 1 2010
Made everything she wore: shoes, underwear, purses, sunglasses
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Fluxus Influence
“Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional & commercialized culture”
Anything can be art, audience is self-sufficient
Year-long project (Fluxshoe, Yam Festival)
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“Beyond being a nail-hammering, speed-sewing, room-pacing, hair-raising, life-enriching personal challenge, I hope to gain some understanding of the limitations of clothing and how they affect the development of ideology. Ultimately, I would like to examine the role of clothing as a form of cultural production.”
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Wearing the “right” clothing has significant cultural capital.
Wearing clothing you’ve made yourself means you don’t “fit in.”
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Sheena Matheiken, “The Uniform Project”
May 1, 2009 – Apr. 30, 2010
• One dress• Accessorized with
vintage, handmade, reused, or donated pieces
• Raised $100,000 for the Akanksha Foundation
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The site “enables a socially connected world of consumers to converse, donate, and transact compassionately and sustainably, via the use of its evolving digital networks.”
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Year 2: “U.P. Pilots”
Each month:• a new fashion
maven• with a new dress
designed herself• donating to a
new cause
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Marisa, “New Dress a Day”
Nov. 27, 2009 – Nov. 29, 2010
• New item each day
• $365• Thrift stores,
hand-me-downs
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Marisa’s “confrontation dressing” is turning “frumpy” into “fashionable,”and telling people she did it herself.
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$1 $48 $78
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Becoming a Movement
Almost 2 years later, Marisa still posts daily, sometimes her own work and sometimes fan submissions.
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Wardrobe Re-Fashion
• Nichola Prested• May 2006 – Nov.
2010• 754 pages• Thousands of
pledgers• Spawned a copy-
cat site, refashionco-op
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The next three bloggers all make clothes for their kids and sell patterns and/or finished creations on Etsy.
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“Throughout the twentieth century women have made clothes by hand, aided latterly by a sewing machine finding space on the kitchen table, and squeezing sewing between other domestic responsibilities” (157).
– Cheryl Buckley, “On the Margins: Theorizing the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home.”
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Sam Caffee, “The Handmade Dress”
• Posts about dressmaking, raising goats, homeschooling
• Has four children
• “Modest, feminine dresses”
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Deb Chase, “Spindle Jigs”
• Crafty “patchwork” style
• Has three children
• Often “upcycles” her own old clothing for her daughter, Nellie
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Kaja, “Kaja Design”• Swedish • Works in IT
but loves to “create things with my hands”
• “Eco-quality, economic and ecologic”
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Erika Domasek, “P.S.-I Made This…”
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Domasek says P.S.-I made this… “is a movement. It’s a call to action to reimagine, reuse, & reinvent. I see it. I like it. I make it.”
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But P.S.-I Made This… has been sponsored by Mercedes Benz, WhoWhatWear, Kate Spade, Dasani, Sharpie…
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Where are all the men?
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Izzy, “The Dandy Project”
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Steve, “The Style Salvage”
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– Jacob Kamara, “Fashion Beans”
“This is when you can reply with a funny man joke like ‘your Mum’ or you could just say ‘ah thanks, yeah I made them from some old Jeans.’ I strongly recommend the latter.”
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Liberating Praxis
DIY fashion bloggers are liberated from the one-way consuming relationship with clothes, from the stylistic domination of the traditional fashion world.
They are empowered by the Internet to do more with their own hands.
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Implications for the Classroom
Writing that’s purposeful, communal, and not sanctioned by publishers can make a powerful analytic subject
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Implications for the Classroom
Feminist rhetoric beyond the canon—how do women write in spaces not defined by traditional essay structure?
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Implications for the Classroom
Writing that “does something”: these writers see themselves as part of a movement.