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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.

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From the Institut für Textiles Forschen

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Photos

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Barbara Muff 

Lydia Sonderegger

Pascal Heimann

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Laurence Müller

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