EDUfashion

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Description

Url: http://www.edufashion.org

EDUfashion is a two-year project for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding (Openwear, http://openwear.org/). The project is funded with the support of the Lifelong learning programme of the European Union.

Discussion

In an age of discontinuity, fashion and its related universe are prisms through which many contemporary issues are being refracted.

We are experiencing a twin trend diffusing across the fashion sector. On the one hand consumer demand is being increasingly oriented toward "ethical" fashion items, meaning no sweatshop, ecologically sustainable, locally produced, and fairly traded apparel. On the other side, we're witnessing the emergence of self-organized employment focusing on independent, socially engaged, critical and multitasking creative production driven more by communal needs than market imperatives or consumer fads. We think that here lies a new perspective on fashion that can be translated into reality by exploring the forces that are behind these consumer and producer trends. How

EDUfashion project's main objective is to foster community, collaboration and innovation to provide a new vision and practice for fashion. Our main goal is to support the dissemination of knowledge, skills and practices so to empower a self-managed workforce, in order to create an alternative learning environment for sustainable garment crafting and selling. Itʼll connect various individuals and groups, to enable them to act as small, sustainable enterprises, which will gather under a single open-source participatory brand whose benefits will be shared.

Manifesto

Manifesto. A Work in Progress

EDUfashion is the project by which we intend to express a new approach of fashion creation and production and seek to make it practical and workable. We will do so by following certain guidelines that inspire our search for solutions.

We want to rethink

- Professional development as a triangular process between top-down permanent education and horizontal practices to meet the diverse needs of current production processes and know-hows.

- Corporate culture and consumerism for a new form of entrepreneurship: business as a way of achieving and sustaining social goals and not the opposite.

- Branding tools and intellectual property in order to foster social bonding and redistribution of value instead of exploitation and accumulation of rent.

- Online community as a new public space where to share knowledges and skills, so to produce culture and wealth.

- Material and immaterial production as venues to empowerment via multitasking without falling under the threat of precarity and unemployment.

- Patterns as the source codes of garments and copying as legitimate resource of the fashion industry.

Partners

Poper Conceptual, creative and tactical interactions http://www.poper.si (Maja Hawlina, Oliver Vodeb)

Ethical Economy Offers tools to help live values and build ethically significant relations with your stakeholders http://www.ethicaleconomy.com (Nicolai Peitersen, Zoe Romano)

University of Milano Faculty of Social and Political sciences http://www.scienzepolitiche.unimi.it (Adam Arvidsson, Bertram Niessen)

Creative Encounters - Copenhagen Business School Department of Intercultural Communication and Management http://www.cbs.dk (Oleg Koefoed, Lise Skoev)

University of Ljubljana Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engeneering http://www.ntf.uni-lj.si (Almira Sadar)