WHAT IS
Community-driven clothing cultures offer an alternative to the dominant fashion system, emphasising sufficiency and wellbeing and reconnecting people with traditions and culture. These communities practise visible mending, craft revitalisation, and regenerative fibre production. However, these alternatives have often been fragmented, erased, eroded, and ignored. We propose to address this by building a translocal digital commons to unearth, explore, connect, and support diverse clothing communities demonstrating regenerative practices. Our goal is to contribute to the visibility and viability of alternate systems and encourage participation in them.
This is the beginnings of an online platform to enable this commons. We are looking for funders, partners, communities making fashion, and people who want to be part of an alternative clothing ecosystem. If that's you, please get in touch at hello@fashionactnow.org
WHY WE BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE COMMONS
What do we mean by the commons?
When we talk about how our economy works, we often talk about three things: the market, the government, and the consumer. An important fourth element—the commons—is often neglected. The commons is all about communities working together to take care of the resources they share, like land, water, or cultural heritage, for the benefit of everyone in the community. Unlike the market and its need for ownership, enclosures, extraction, and excess, the commons are people-led systems that promote sufficiency and care for culture, ecosystems, traditions, and wellbeing.
What are clothing commons?
In clothing commons, clothing culture exists not to serve the market, but to serve the customs, culture and needs of ordinary people. This will look different in different places and among different groups; there’s no single way to build a clothing commons. Around the world, there are communities and fashion projects that are upholding and celebrating traditional practices and others who are reimagining what fashion could be. This could mean groups that are upcycling and hosting clothing swaps, or equally those practicing regenerative community-led agriculture or preserving traditional techniques. The Common Market celebrates a world of diverse, community-rooted clothing systems.
Why do we think the fashion commons needs support?
Fashion is culture that has become entwined with capitalism. It has become an extractive industry that must grow at any cost. Fashion projects that exist within the commons don’t need growth. They exist to provide for the needs of communities and steward their collective wealth for future generations. But with little need for growth, they become hidden under the shadows of Fashion advertising. By joining together a network of clothing commons, we can move away from excess and towards sufficiency, regenerative practices, and a thriving diversity of clothing cultures. The Common Market can help connect and support these local projects, creating a space for learning and solidarity between different communities and cultures.
WHAT TYPES OF PROJECTS AND COMMUNITIES DO WE FEATURE?
OCM is home to people and communities that build relationships.
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Do you campaign for fairer clothing cultures that exist in harmony with nature?
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Do you try to give back as much as you take?
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Do you share knowledge, ideas or designs for others to use?
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Do you make from or redistribute textile waste?
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Do you serve the needs of your kin, community or locality and its clothing customs?
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Do you participate in seed-to-closet activities, forming bonds with all those that make with you?
This is not the place for you if…
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You are here to find customers for your produce rather than share what you do, find people to participate in what you do and try to grow your community
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You don’t know the hands that grew and made the materials you use (unless you make from waste)
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You are a business producing in bulk, to sell at wholesale
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You are reliant on labour priced at much less than your own
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You are making for other than your own kin, community and locality
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The owners of your enterprise earn more than can be justified by the work they put in
*OCM is not a place to sell goods. Thank you for respecting this space.
Our Common Code
We preserve biodiversity
We work to protect and reproduce life, cherishing all its diversity
Today’s Fashion System has exploited and hidden nature from view. Many don’t understand that clothing is made from nature. What does fashion look like when we create, considering nature as our kin? What if all fashion practices start from asking the question, what is needed to reproduce human, animal and plant life, in all its diversity instead of producing commodities? What do our communities need from our clothes in order to thrive? What if we, not only cherish nature’s diversity but also human diversity, rejecting binary categorisations? In action: Not-for-profit ‘Design Lab’ Liflad is on mission to ‘support the emergence of new material culture born from care of all living (and future) beings.’ Liflad is working on building networks and knowledge commons for bioregional and regenerative fibre production.
We act with radical care
We treat all individual human and non-human beings with fairness and care, respecting the right to a dignified life
Today’s Fashion System relies on cheap lives, both human and animal. On average, garment workers are paid 2-5 times less than a living wage, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign. Billions of animals every year are exploited and killed by the industry. What if we asked with every step of the fashion process, from seed to closet, is this fair and just and does it respect the right to a dignified life? Are we considering the consequences of our treatment of others, human or non-human? In action: Collective Fashion Justice is an advocacy group campaigning for what they call Total Ethics Fashion. When considering justice and fashion, individuals tend to silo humanitarian, nature and animals justice. Total Ethics Fashion believes these stem from the same root causes and we must tackle all three instead of side-lining animal rights.
We respect cultural diversity
We celebrate pluriversality, respecting the significance of different peoples’ cultural expressions and give space for a divergence of cultures, ways of knowing, thinking and living.
Today’s Fashion System, deems the capitalist Fashion System as above others, so much so it is perceived as THE fashion system with others subjugated to non-fashion, craft, costume and so on. Robin Wall Kimmer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.” Fashion too can be seen as a language. The dominance of one type of fashion has led to the erasure of others. What if we lift up and give space to other fashion cultures to flourish? What if the capitalist Fashion System is perceived as just one of many diverse systems? In action: The Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF) is a ‘global network of local fashion coalitions’ that work in multidisciplinary ways, coming together to share and create knowledge. They do so through the lens of fashion as a ‘multitude of possibilities rather than a normative framework falsely claiming universality.’
We build community
We nurture and build social relations of cooperation and collaboration to reach shared goals.
Today’s Fashion System is dominated by industry and market forces. The role of fashion has become to provide economic growth and the promise of development to the global south. Meanwhile it extracts from the south to accumulate profits for billionaires, increasing inequality through unequal exchange. 188 million years of embodied labour was extracted from the south in 2015 according to research by Jason Hickel. What if instead, clothing culture returned to communities? What happens if fashion practices are a result of community. Through community and the commons, we can revive our common senses - a desire to care and preserve for generations to come. In action: One Army is an online network of online and offline communities. They collaborate to try to solve big global problems. When One Army put its collective brainpower towards fixing fashion, they built Fixing Fashion, a website of free and creative ‘repair, care and upgrade’ tutorials.
We defend the right to self-expression
We collectively nurture creativity, cultures and customs relating to dress, clothing or bodily adornment.
Today’s Fashion System promotes competitive individualism. Our ability to fashion our individual selves according to ever changing and unsaid codes, means the inclusion or exclusion within modern society. Isolation from the community drives people to consume material goods to satisfy a lack of belonging and compete for social status. Materialism has become central to who we are. What does fashion look like when we nurture collectivism and a do-it-together approach? Fashion is providing freedom for freedom's sake instead of meaningful self-expression. Collectivism shouldn’t mean conforming and losing the right to self-expression but thinking about how clothing practices can provide true belonging and collective wellbeing rather than putting a plaster over feelings of isolation. In action: Uli Pangabean is a weaver, born into a weaving family from the Batak ingenious group of North Sumatra Indonesia. She strives to keep her clothing culture alive against the pressures to produce industrially. In this short film, she explains how the know-how of weaving is passed down from generation to generation and how her cloth embodies discovery, knowledge and community.
We nurture reciprocity
We recognise the interconnectedness of all things and the imperative for relationships of mutuality and exchange.
Today’s Fashion System relies on extraction and exploitation stemming from a mindset of domination and entitlement. What if fashion practices came from an acknowledgement of the complexity of the world and the interconnectedness of all things? What if we perceived the earth’s wealth, as well as our culture, knowledge, wisdom all as gifts? Gifts are not to be sold for profit but require acts of reciprocity in return. In action: Craft Forward is a London based organisation that runs free workshops, teaching communities new skills and bringing people together to make for a social cause. Their Blankets for London project knits and crochets blankets for homeless people in London.
We strive for sufficiency
We work towards systems that enable enough without overproducing.
Today’s Fashion System relies on complex, lengthy and opaque global supply chains that extract value from the global south to be embodied in commodities and consumed in the global north. In Fashion Revolution’s 2023 Transparency Index, 52% of brands disclose their first tier manufacturers, just 1% of brands could report how many in their supply chain received a living wage and just 6% are willing or able to say the facility their raw materials originate from. The further down the supply chain, the more opaque, allowing slave labour and poverty wages to thrive. Fashion brands benefit from keeping supplier relationships at a distance, denying responsibility. What if instead, fashion practices were commons based, meaning that a community stewards their shared wealth through fair and collaborative ways, to meet the needs of the group? In this system, the resources, producer and consumer exist together in a relational system and the distinction between owners and workers is removed. The impacts of giving and taking are evident. Production is not for profit but to provide enough for life in the system to thrive. I asked Ashish Kothari how we might transition to or revive such systems. He proposed three steps: (1) Create transparent and relational systems of clothing; (2) Create systems in which the producers are able to wear what they create; (3) Create localised exchange systems - perhaps partially monetised - within a local, self-sufficient economy. In action: Growing Arc is a ‘playground’ that involves the community, particularly marginalised people, in farm-to-closet processes, including agriculture for textiles and natural dyes. Growing ARC creates ‘PLAYDATEs’ for people to activate and cultivate reciprocal relationships with all beings.
We share our common wealth
We see nature’s abundance and our wealth of knowledge, skills and creativity as gifts, belonging to us collectively.
Today’s Fashion System promotes false scarcity to create desires for new clothing when there’s already enough produced for many generations to come. 8 - 60 billion garments a year go onsold. While wardrobes have so many clothes lying unworn, many still feel they don’t have enough. Whilst the market is oversaturated, the marketing machines create the illusion of exclusivity and limited supply. False scarcity and the hoarding of resources, leads to economic growth. What if instead, our fashion practices were grounded in the reality that our resources - both from nature and human ingenuity, are abundant and are gifts to be shared? In action: Ros, founder of Repair What You Wear, has a lifetime of experience in the making of clothes. She shares free tutorials on how to mend, making mending accessible to people of all skill levels.
We practise democratic governance
We are independent grass-roots systems empowered to choose what we produce through radical democracy and co-ownership.
In today’s Fashion System, big corporations exploit the cheapening of labour and resources that result from neo-colonial structures. Countries in the global south are coerced into producing for the global north. In Bangladesh, for example, 4.2 million people work for the garment industry to create clothes for the global north instead of participating in their own clothing needs and cultures and preserving their ancestral knowledge. The world over, Fashion Corporations extract and exploit to increase profits for wealthy shareholders. What if instead, people that make clothes have autonomy over what they create through co-ownership of their initiatives and democratic decision making? What if trade happens on the basis of equal exchange? This doesn’t solve the problem of structural adjustment policies and debts inflicted on the south, but it creates pockets of hope which can lay the ground for global solidarity and economic democratisation. We should all be able to debate what our economies should produce. In action: Niskua Mola is a cooperative of 30 indigenous women from the village of Guna Yala in Panama known for their traditional Mola embroidery and applique. They are an autonomous group, co-owning their enterprise. Their collaboration has led to growing and naturally dying their own cotton and moving away from buying materials from china. They create using their artisanal skills for overseas and local markets but also for their own communities, keeping their traditions alive.
We redistribute any surplus
We put purpose before capital accumulation and ensure surplus is fairly distributed.
In today’s Fashion System, excess profits are amassed by fashion billionaires, making them some of the richest people on the planet. Putting profits before life is the norm. Whilst it's argued that the fashion industry provides jobs to the needy, sustaining their survival, they are also sustaining poverty and worsening levels of inequality. When people are isolated from communities and land removes the ability for subsistence. Preventing access or development of universal basic services leads to precarious livelihoods and the need to rely on poverty wages. Fashion brands exploit this, using their bargaining power to negotiate low prices. Profits flow upwards instead of going back into communities. Whilst a garment worker in Myanmar earns just $4 a day, the CEO of Zara earned €1.3 billion in dividends in 2016. What if social and environmental purpose was put before capital accumulation? What if surplus was distributed in radically fair ways, providing decent living standards and avoiding excessive accumulation? In action: Blue Tin is a black and brown worker owned cooperative. 60% of their revenue goes towards labour and benefits and all profits are equally distributed amongst members of the cooperative, far above the industry standard. Decision making is controlled by its worker-members who believe in thriving salaries and a work environment that centres mental health. As immigrant mothers and mothers of colour, they put sustainability at the heart of their practices.
WE ARE POWERED BY
Fashion Act Now (FAN) is a London-based activist group active since 2020 with international members including educators, writers, students, and others who have come together to explore possibilities for a just and regenerative fashion future. The members give talks and workshops on crafting a crisis response for transitioning away from the endless extractivism of the industrial fashion system.
Find us at FashionActNow.org