Leute machen Kleider - Fashion Revolution Basel 2022 - IfTF
As part of the Fashion Revolution Week 2022, we travel through the Basel shopping streets with a mobile embroidery frame. We contrast the speed on the streets and the consumption of fast fashion with a slow, repetitive activity that invites you to pause and talk. For this occasion we developed a participatory performance in which collaboration is in the foreground and where we want to enable spontaneous immersion in a manual activity. We
invite passers-by in downtown Basel to embroider with us on the mobile embroidery frame. Two embroiderers position themselves on either side of the frame and embroider a prescribed slogan by passing on the needles. In this way, the work can only be influenced by one stitch at a time, then you give up the needle and pick it up again at a point that the other person has chosen. We are interested in evoking a certain type of cooperation through this very specific activity: An equal one based on trust, in which I embrace what is shown to me and develop this further. Embroidery is an activity that, due to its repetitiveness and the slow creation of a textile, represents a counterpoint to the busy shopping streets where fast fashion is consumed. With our presence we want to provide an alternative to the consumption of cheap clothing: our own manual work and with it an awareness for textile materials and manufacturing processes. As a slogan, we let the passers-by embroider the reversion of the German proverb "Kleider machen Leute" - translatable as "clothes make the man" or in it's reversion "people make clothes" - and want to refer to the people behind the production of the clothes and to the lack of transparency that the globalized clothing industry brings with it.
From the Institut für Textiles Forschen
Photos
Barbara Muff
Lydia Sonderegger
Pascal Heimann
Laurence Müller