Activism is about doing something for a cause and to bring about change. The cause might be one directly experienced by an activist, but it can also be about acting in solidarity with other people who are experiencing injustice.
Activism can be local, national or even global. It can include everyday spontaneous actions, large-scale, organised responses and everything in between.
Activism also takes many forms. American political scientist Gene Sharp grouped 198 non-violent action methods into three types. The first category is non-violent protest and persuasion. This includes formal statements, banners, picketing, wearing of symbols, vigils, performances, marching, teaching and walk-outs. The second category is social non-cooperation. This involves strikes, boycotts, ostracism of people, and disobeying social customs. The third category is non-violent intervention which covers sit-ins, non-violent occupations, fasting, establishing new social patterns and overloading administrative systems.
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/07Anderson.html
These three categories aren’t fixed and definitive. However, they can help us think about different kinds of activism, and see activism in multiple forms.
We can’t be definitive about what makes activism successful, as there are so many kinds and so many causes.
https://aninjusticemag.com/fast-fashion-brands-are-showing-us-what-performative-allyship-looks-like-19c67ce03284
Solidarity and Allyship
Solidarity, at its best, is about working with people to challenge the injustice they face, rather than assuming what they need. We can have the greatest intentions to support people, but there is a risk we can miss what people really need.
Working as an ally is one way to work in solidarity. Allyship has gained prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement
COUNTER FASHION
“the practice of dressing to express shared political beliefs”.
They make clear the distinction between counter-fashion and anti-fashion, with the latter defined as “an umbrella term for various styles of dress which are explicitly contrary to the fashion of the day”. Counter-fashion is one way of using clothes as a form of self-authorship
counter-fashion has been used for centuries in many different historical movements. Starting in the late 1700s with the French Revolution and the sans-culottes, we are then introduced to Victorian feminist dress reform in the 1800s. We look at the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and conclude with Tute Bianche in the 1990s.
nowadays we have movements such as the one by Katharine Hamnett London, infamous for campaign slogan t-shirts such as ‘CHOOSE LIFE’, ‘BE ANTI-RACIST’ and ‘CHOOSE LOVE’. Each of these designs was made for a specific cause with profits going to further the work of relevant charities and organisations.
Another example is the Pussyhat Project™. The Pussyhat Project is a social movement focused on raising awareness about women’s issues and advancing human rights by promoting dialogue and innovation through the arts, education and intellectual discourse. The Pussyhat is a symbol of support and solidarity for women’s rights and political resistance. Caroline Stevenson is Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion. In this short clip, Caroline highlights the Pussyhat as a demonstration of how fashion can be “highly meaningful and politically charged”.
https://youtu.be/M3CLfKqIkDk
or the Rational Dress Society and the "jumpsuit", which is the ungendered monogarment for everyday wear. They propose that you throw away all your clothes and replace them with a jumpsuit, the universal garment.
Jumpsuit is disseminated in two ways. It’s a pre-made garment for purchase and an open-source pattern, which is available to download free of charge. And jumpsuit comes in over 300 individual sizes that you can download the pattern for. The garment uses something called anthropometry, which is just the study of human measurements, to develop all of our sizing.
it is ungendered, which is different than unisex. In a unisex garment– typically, there is a single garment that can be worn by a number of individuals. this takes a slightly different approach using anthropometry so there remove than 300 sizes.The garment that embraces the differences between bodies but has a manufactured sameness between individuals. different garments for different sizes, weather you are tall short, thin, curvy, male or female. garments would fit in the same way. so there is a manufactured sameness between everybody.
The jumpsuit is a response to the rise of fast fashion. Fast fashion is a movement that came out of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s in which deregulation led to the rise of multinational corporations with complex international supply chains.
The rise of these corporations and fast fashion meant that clothes could be produced at increasingly rapid paces and in much greater quantities. And so our clothes now are much cheaper and more widely available than they were in the 1970s. So traditional fashion is defined by a six-month production cycle, from the moment that a designer thinks of an idea to the moment that garment is being sold on store shelves. Fast fashion is typically defined as an accelerated production cycle in which clothes are being made in a two to three-week time period. So the result of this is that we have radically more amounts of clothes than we did before.
For example, one statistic from 2015 cited that the company Zara alone produces 1.23 million individual garments per day. So in a system like this where we’re being asked to buy more and more, the strategy of industry, in order to compel us to keep buying or keep us inside this consumer cycle, is to create garments using a model of planned obsolescence. So these fast-fashion garments are deliberately made to fall apart, which compels us to then go back to the store and buy more of them. According to industry standards, the company H&M says that their garments are meant to retain their value for no more than 10 wash cycles. So this leads to the feeling that we get where we buy a garment. We’re excited about it. We’re happy about it. We wear it once. We wash it a couple times. And then all of the sudden, it doesn’t really fit us in the same way, or it doesn’t quite fit us right, right? And so we end up in this paradoxical situation where our closets are overflowing with clothes, but we feel like we have nothing to wear.
neoliberal economic policies that have produced something like fast fashion and produced moments where you are getting dressed for something, and you’re standing in front of your closet, which is brimming with clothing, and yet you feel like you have nothing to wear, right? And so that’s fashion, right? And so we needed to understand what was fashion and then what we consider, ourselves, as counter-fashion. So instead of being anti-fashion, which is a wholesale rejection, we are instead counter-fashion, which means that we’re moving parallel or thinking about new models or new ways of dressing and what it is that our clothes might signify. And with fashion, we tie it very much to rapid stylistic change and the type of rapid, really deeply accelerated stylistic change that comes about within capitalist modes of production. So in the 1850s, we see the invention of the sewing machine. Maybe it takes 14 hours to stitch a man’s shirt by hand. Suddenly, it goes from 14 hours to one.
And we see the beginning of this rapid acceleration, which has only intensified under deregulation policies that have allowed stores like H&M, or Zara, Mango, etc producing billions of garments a year.
clothing often signifies social differences such as hierarchy, it can be used in movements, creating a kind of solidarity or a kind of visual bond.
We can first really see counter-fashion coming out of the French Revolution in the late 1700s with a movement called the sans-culotte. The sans-culotte were a revolutionary movement of working-class people. And the phrase sans-culotte means without culottes. Culottes were silk, knee-high breeches that were worn by the aristocrats.
working class didn’t wear these silk knee breeches. They wore trousers. And so as the French Revolution gained steam, more and more people started deliberately adopting trousers as a signal of their solidarity with the working class. So they were refusing high fashion in order to align themselves politically with the Revolutionary forces in France.
So fashion can be about reinforcing social hierarchies, wearing what's trendy, & fashionable, certain luxury brands etc for this you need money.
The sans-culotte due to the counter-fashion movement of this period became a symbol for the common man, the working-class ethos, and the fraternal spirit of the French Revolution.
later we end up with the Bloomer outfit and feminist dress reform. starting with Amelia Bloomer donning what she was calling the Turkish dress - feminist dress reform, these women believed that the women’s clothing created what they called a slave-like mentality, or a slave mentality (corsets heavy skirts petticoats etc) . due to the fashion impracticalities it wasn’t physically possible for women to earn equal wages with men just because their petticoats weighed too much - physically was not possible. And so they wanted to create a new kind of dress that was more freeing, that allowed women to participate more fully and economically and just in life, generally. in 1851, Amelia Bloomer adopts this dress. And she publishes the pattern in the temperance journal The Lily, which we cite as one of the first open-source dress-reform garments, she wears this garment for a handful of years. But just the mere sight of discernible female legs in public was too much. in historical letters we see she wrote many letters stating that she basically was getting screamed at all the time, so it was unfortunately a fairly short-lived experiment. But it’s another moment of political and sartorial solidarity.
next, in the 1920s, we have a fashion that comes from the Soviet avant-garde, from a fashion designer named Varvara Stepanova. She was a fashion and textile designer, and she was a communist, after the Russian Revolution, her and a bunch of other designers and artists, who were known as the constructivists, set about to create design for the new communist reality. Stepanova was asking herself, if we want to create a different way of living, maybe we should create a different way of dressing? And so she came up with this theory of fashion that she called production dress, which emphasised utility and functionality of garments and also eliminated both gender and class distinctions in garments. So she made these really incredible unisex rompers that were covered in these geometric forms so that people wearing the garments would be seen, in motion, as these moving geometric paintings. So Stepanova’s idea for production dress was that instead of designing garments that would be made for pre-existing identity positions in the way that you might go to a department store and go to the junior section or the men’s section or the women’s section, instead, she would make clothes that were defined by shared activity or shared labour.
she also made a lot of sportswear. She made workwear. She made clothes for theatre and culture and art with the idea was that you and I, engaged in a similar endeavour, working together. We were playing together– our clothes would be able to bring us together instead of separating us out into pre-existing identity categories.
The next big fashion we see making a statement was in the 1960s with the resurgence of counter-fashion, which was really part of broader countercultural movements happening at this time across the world - Black Panther Party.
the Black Panther Party was a political organisation, in the US, active between the mid ’60s and the early ’80s. They combined Black nationalist ideology with socialist politics, their 10-point programme included the right to defend the Black community from police brutality and advocated for access to education, housing, and also employment. The members of the Black Panther Party adopted a common uniform consisting of a black leather jacket, black pants or a miniskirt, a black beret, and also boots. The use of the colour black derived from the 1960s Black is Beautiful movement. a celebration of the African-American body as well as a call for positive representation.
The beret references both the military uniform of the Cuban Revolutionary Che Guevara, and also the Green Berets, which is an elite military unit in the US. And one of the things that’s interesting about the Black Panther Party uniform is that, by design, any member of the community could access it, because it was all available at department stores, so it was readily available for everyone.
In the1990s we see the Tute Bianche, which was an Italian protest garment.
The Tute Bianche were a group of Italian youths who took to the street to protest their economic and disenfranchisement. These were precarious workers, part-timers, freelancers, service-industry employees who had no retirement funds or pensions or union representation. They donned white coveralls in reference to the blue coveralls of the old working class. They wore white, instead, to convey their ghostly status, they saw themselves as people who were forgotten by capitalism and forgotten by society at large. Over time, they added padding and wore football helmets to protect themselves against the police. And their anti-capitalist actions peaked at the G8 Summit, where one member was murdered by a police officer. Tute Bianche member Robert Boy said, “We’re wearing the white overalls so that other people wear it. We’re wearing the white overall so that we can take it off someday.”
historical fashion movements that have happened in the past, can be very inspiring for what can happen in the future.
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