Zoe Romano

Barcelona, July 2012

From open source branding to collaborative clothing

Zoe Romano@zoescope

@openwear_cc

In 2005 San Precario collective based in Milan organized an action to highlight the exploitation of workers in the fashion system

★ We created a fake fashion designer and managed to insert it in the official calendar of Milan Fashion Week

★ We presented a brand identity and the immaterial reality of her existence.

★ A collection of allegoric outfits expressing our experiences of work and, at the same time, showing our skills

★The action involved 200 workers and creatives living and working in Milan

Precarity in the Fashion System

What to do next

After the Fashion Week and the successful action we decided to create a no-profit association to

★ keep reflecting on work in the creative industries - over-production

★ being active on experimenting self-production and craft - understanding quality

★ start a reflection on intellectual property, open-source and branding - value Fashion garments are not protected by copyright, only the brand is protected by trademark

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

The Fashion System: a polarization

Big Brands Fast Fashion

A new trend: the rise of DIY

The values, the imageries and the desires expressed by our brand are not manufactured to foster consumerism and based on exploitation but

to 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

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

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

NETWORKED ARTISANS/STUDENTS/CONSUMERS

LOCAL HUBS(social enterprises)

EDU INSTITUTIONS(universities, schools,

learning centers)Suppliers

★ 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 open-source

★ 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

Peer-reviewed Network

WORKSHOP - Make it with the laser!

Making it together is better than making yourself