DIY Subversion:Anti-Consumerist Rhetoric of Homemade

Fashion Blogs

Elizabeth Chamberlain

The Internet offers a new space for “liberating praxis.”

Web 2.0 tools make Internet learning dialogic and interactive

Sources are linked, much text is Wiki-editable,and there’s always more in the comments.

The Internet also helps like-minded activists organize.

Word travels fast and far on the web.

Modern American life revolves around stuff—but we’re distanced from it.

Store

Home

Trash

Capitalism.Industrialization. Mechanization. Alienation of labor.

There’s a growing counter-culture Internet movement about taking back the means of production.

DIY Underground

(Allen St. John, Popular Mechanics)

If stuff is going to rule our lives, shouldn’t we be a little more connected to it?

What does it mean to “own” something, anyway?

Isn’t part of “owning” something being able to dig into it with your own hands?

Let’s make stuff. Fix stuff. Mod stuff. Hack stuff.

The DIY Underground is a revolution through the sewing circle, the garage, the workshop.

Clothing also follows aBUY USE DISPOSEmodel.

Most fashion is designed in New York lofts and made in China, India, Pakistan.

DIY fashion blogs argue… that fashion doesn’t have to be just consumptive,

that making clothes can help us find some limited autonomy,

that DIY clothes can challenge the capitalist, patriarchal ideology of people around us.

Clothes that “make a statement” are a big part of punk ideology—swastikas, studs, grunge, metal, holes.

Vivienne Westwood calls this “confrontation dressing.”

DIY fashion bloggers “confrontation dress,” too, challenging the fashion hegemony.

Natalie Purschwitz, “Makeshift”

Sept. 1 2009 – Sept. 1 2010

Made everything she wore: shoes, underwear, purses, sunglasses

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)

“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.”

Wearing the “right” clothing has significant cultural capital.

Wearing clothing you’ve made yourself means you don’t “fit in.”

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

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.”

Year 2: “U.P. Pilots”

Each month:• a new fashion

maven• with a new dress

designed herself• donating to a

new cause

Marisa, “New Dress a Day”

Nov. 27, 2009 – Nov. 29, 2010

• New item each day

• $365• Thrift stores,

hand-me-downs

Marisa’s “confrontation dressing” is turning “frumpy” into “fashionable,”and telling people she did it herself.

$1 $48 $78

Becoming a Movement

Almost 2 years later, Marisa still posts daily, sometimes her own work and sometimes fan submissions.

Wardrobe Re-Fashion

• Nichola Prested• May 2006 – Nov.

2010• 754 pages• Thousands of

pledgers• Spawned a copy-

cat site, refashionco-op

The next three bloggers all make clothes for their kids and sell patterns and/or finished creations on Etsy.

“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.”

Sam Caffee, “The Handmade Dress”

• Posts about dressmaking, raising goats, homeschooling

• Has four children

• “Modest, feminine dresses”

Deb Chase, “Spindle Jigs”

• Crafty “patchwork” style

• Has three children

• Often “upcycles” her own old clothing for her daughter, Nellie

Kaja, “Kaja Design”• Swedish • Works in IT

but loves to “create things with my hands”

• “Eco-quality, economic and ecologic”

Erika Domasek, “P.S.-I Made This…”

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.”

But P.S.-I Made This… has been sponsored by Mercedes Benz, WhoWhatWear, Kate Spade, Dasani, Sharpie…

Where are all the men?

Izzy, “The Dandy Project”

Steve, “The Style Salvage”

– 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.”

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.

Implications for the Classroom

Writing that’s purposeful, communal, and not sanctioned by publishers can make a powerful analytic subject

Implications for the Classroom

Feminist rhetoric beyond the canon—how do women write in spaces not defined by traditional essay structure?

Implications for the Classroom

Writing that “does something”: these writers see themselves as part of a movement.