Parsons The New School for Design, New York, October 2012

From open source branding to collaborative clothing

Zoe Romano@zoescope

@openwear_cc

PRECARITYis a term of everyday usage as

Precariedad, Precariedade, Précarité, or Precarietà

in a number of European countries.

It refers to the widespread condition of temporary, flexible, contingent, casual,

intermittent work in postindustrial societies.

What happens in Milano

Milano is the city in Italy with the lowest unemployment rate

Most of young people work in two main sectors

- SERVICE SECTOR - CREATIVE SECTOR

Service Industry Call CenterChainstoresPubsCatering/FairsHostess...

“Shit job”

Creative Industries

PressFashionDesignAdvertisingEvents

“My career”

6

“I’m a designer but I pay my rent working in a call center.”

“Im a journalist and I work in a pub to pay my bills”

“I earn 800 a month, work 10 hours a day. It’s fun and the money is enough. Ah, by the way... I live with my parents.”

Main ChallengesHow can we

- talk to the network of atomized workers- challenge the institutional actors (companies, chamber of fashion)

- become visible in the mainstream communication

during the main fashion event in Italy?

Precarity in the Fashion System

‣freelance‣micro-enterprises‣temp workers‣interns

SERPICA NAROis the anagram ofSAN PRECARIO

L’azione

Operation: Serpica Naro

Creation of the virtual subject

Activation of its antagonist

Channel of communication

www.Settimana

dellamoda.it

San Precario VS Serpica Naro

Entering Official Calendar of Fashion Week

Sometimes Fake means being more real than real

Sometimes Fake means being more real than real

Q: You said that you design the design, what does that mean? A: I design everything, when I wake up or when I sleep. It is a sort of perfectionism, I suppose. Even people who work for me need to let themselves be designed, there is no way around it. Design is no longer just the making of clothes, or products, even the creation of lifestyles is already outdated, not nearly enough. Today we create our own universes.

The Catwalk

Oh! We have a Trademark

Brand built to appeal

Values Cultural mix - Controversy -

Elitistic

Brand as symbolic apparatus to gather relations toward

consumer culture

Brand expressing who is nurturing it

ValuesSharing - Social innovation - Flexicurity not precarity - Alternative economies

Brand as tool to promote new values in society

What to do next

The brand creates value - how can we re-destribute it?

Over-production of creative workers - Which alternative can we build?

We lost skills - What’s the real value of garments?

Johanna Blakley

‣ Trademark Protection‣ Induced Obsolescence

Negative externalities:work and environment

2010

The Fashion System: a polarization

Big Brands Fast Fashion

A new trend: the rise of DIY and the makers scene

A brand made o empower a network of small producers and promote a different kind of fashion based on collaboration, sharing, short supply chain and else.

A Metabrand is not a Certification

A Metabrand is a bottom-up brand created buy a peer-reviewed network of small creators and

consumers who produce value for the brand and benefit from it at the same time

EDUfashion network was formed by: Poper (Slovenia), Ethical Economy (UK), Università Statale Milano (IT), Copenhagen Business School (DM), Fashion University (Slovenia)

★ Research on the Open Design and p2p fashion

★ Prototyping the community in 2010

2009 Let’s go EU application

★ Building and online and offline community to share knowledge, find support and collaborators to define a new model for crafts.

3 shared resources

★ A series of Collaborative collection with an open-source brand

★ Prototypes freely downloadable which members can produce and sell, benefiting from the social innovation created within the community.

Openwear is an open-source brand

★ A collective brand made open-source by a license

★ The pattern and the logo become a common of the community

http://vimeo.com/16541497

- Download

- Produce

- Customize

- Label with Openwear

Key point of experimentation

• Define the networked artisan as a new worker

fashion designer ------->networked artisan<------------ crafter/artisan

(highly immaterial) (highly material)

• Brand Open Source Copyright (Creative Commons License, GPL, etc.),

• Manufacturing becomes a distributed process (makers/manufacturers)

• Copy as a legitimate resource Fashion doesn’t protect the technical specification of the garments.

• The online community as a new Public Space

• Enterprise goes social: Social goals are primary, business is a way to achieve them

What about quality?Peer-reviewed Network

NETWORKED ARTISANS/STUDENTS/CONSUMERS

LOCAL HUBS(social enterprises)

EDU INSTITUTIONS(universities, schools,

learning centers)Suppliers

The new role of the freelance designer: she inhabits the global spaces of online communities and shares locally projects and infrastructures

Fablab: a place to make almost anything

How would it be a fablab for fashion?

• Seasonal collection

• Single supply purchase

• Selling in shops

• Building a fashion house

• University training

• Catalogue of items with no expiration date

• Group Purchase

• Online and offline collective shop

• Creating a mix of skills(to teach, work in collaborative projects)

• Continuous and informal training

YESTERDAY TODAY AND TOMORROW

How would if it was focused on open hardware?

Making it together is better than making yourself

‣ OPENWEAR.ORG

Twitter: openwear_ccFacebook: openwear

zoe romano @zoescope

THANK YOU!