Practising Solidarity

Practising Solidarity explores how to make and wear clothes in a solidary way. Fashion practitioners, designers and artistic researchers have engaged in a participatory practice of collectively investigating what it entails to practise solidarity in fashion. It is high time to move beyond systemic de-humanization, beyond the intersectional inequalities as well as Eurocentric and exploitative approaches inherent to the current industrial fashion system. In this book, we recognize the urgency of practising more care – for other human beings, animals, organisms, species as well as more care for nature’s matter and the other material inhabitants of the earth that we live with.

Practising Solidarity offers a variety of possible answers to the question with whom or what we need to be solidary with, and how to put solidarity into practice. How can we activate radical visions and imaginations of alternative, more solidary fashion systems? And how could we respect the agency of human beings in precarious positions, while acknowledging the lives of other living (non-human) beings like animals of different species? In doing so, this book presents critical strategies, affirmative approaches and embodied practices that help to practise more solidarity for all living beings and all (living) matter related to fashion, clothing and textiles.

By Ricarda Bigolin, Welmoed Bosch, Zinzi de Brouwer with Cassi Namoda, Daniëlle Bruggeman, Daniel and Siranee Caulfield-Sriklad, Painted Series: Saskia van Drimmelen and Margreet Sweerts, Gadha Gopal and Parul Gupta, Sanjana Naudiyal, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Femke de Vries, Jennifer Whitty with Bobby Luke (Ngati Ruanui) en Rosie Scott. Editor and conversation host: Daniëlle Bruggeman Editorial board: Chet Bugter, Hanka van der Voet