OC.M News
Download our Report: How to Build Fashion Alternatives
Our New Report Provides Lessons from and Guidance for Community-based Fashion, Clothing and Textile Initiatives
Words by Ariel Fabbro
Download the report here:
As 2024 comes to a close, we are releasing our new report that explores how the time-tested practice of creating commons, or “commoning,” can revitalise the clothing and textile communities that have been erased and eroded by the fashion industry. Commoning is a paradigm shift for how societal needs can be served from the bottom up through participatory and cooperative practices.
Our report provides insight on how to support and encourage commoning in clothing systems. It is based on the premise that expanding the existing pluriverse of clothing communities can meet most of our material and cultural needs for clothing without relying on the wasteful and extractive industrial fashion system. It aims to support clothing communities that are resisting industrial fashion through: craft revitalisation; clothes swapping; visible mending; upcycling workshops; farm-to-closet initiatives; campaigning, and more.
"[OC.M] provides a much-needed showcase for the surging global movement to relocalise and rehumanise fashion in eco-minded, commons-based ways.” - David Bollier, activist-scholar of the commons at the Schumacher Center
The report encapsulates key insights and learnings from OC.M’s first year in action working toward clothing commons that prioritise wellbeing and sufficiency. These insights were gathered through community assemblies, conversations, surveys, and interviews with grassroots clothing communities and practitioners in Europe and beyond. This work has been supported by the European Cultural Foundation and Naturesave Trust.
The report details what clothing, textile, and fashion commons are, how they align with degrowth, and what current forms of clothing commons look like. It then outlines guiding principles of commoning. It also provides practical guidance on building clothing commons, through alternative financing pathways, educational reform, and inclusive collaboration.
"Non-industrial fashion practices exist all around us. We need to give them the importance and visibility they deserve and need so they can overcome the dominant extractive fashion system. This grant has been invaluable in starting us on our mission, allowing us to meet communities in person and document and share their stories, and form vital human connections.” - Lara Fank, Communications Coordinator for OC.M
Download the report here:
This report is sponsored by the European Cultural Foundation as part of the
Culture of Solidarity Fund. Our work has also been supported by the Naturesave
Trust and powered by Fashion Act Now and the community within and outside
of OC.M. We are grateful for connections we have made, the support we have
received and the community of communities we have been able to build.
Editor in Chief: Carolyn Edmondson
Editorial Team: Sara Arnold, Lara Fank, Sandra Niessen & Elizabeth Savage
Contributors: Ariel Fabbro, Zoe Gilbertson, Karishma Kelsey, Sanda Niessen &
Sophie Monseu Gonzalez
Design: Not here to be liked & Lara Fank
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