judith “jack” halberstam on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity ...

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One of Alicia Framis’s Anti-Dog designs. Courtesy of Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp, Belgium. LOUDmouth 9 Please place an X next to any of the following statements that apply to your fashion choices: Spread a message to the public Support sociopolitically conscious labels Look good By Stephanie Müller T hat’s where I placed my X’s on a questionnaire about the clothing choices of radical thinkers conducted by Alison Rasch, a London-based activist working on a project about warriors and outlaws. Answering Alison’s questions made me think about how activists’ clothing choices and fashion projects can challenge the uniform dictate of the fashion industry. Feeling connected to the long, non-official history of ladies and their cool little workaday inventions, and running my own DIY fashion label, rag_treasure, in Munich, it’s been interesting for me to see the world of “craft” collide with radical political, arts and feminist circles all around Europe. Props to the Italian DIY-fashion project Klava for doing without mass-produced accuracy and for regarding its handmade fabrics as “le detail qui tue” that is out of tune, that screeches — like when you are listening to a record and you accidentally hit the stylus — something unique and slightly imperfect that can’t be replicated. Countercultural uniqueness is also the recipe for Cloed Baumgartner’s revolutionary shop concept, Boutique Gegenalltag, based in Vienna. The architecture of the boutique, a foldaway tent, is used as a mobile service station for young designers and can be put up for performances in uncommon public locations. The idea of intervening in public space also plays a crucial role for the feminist arts platform A Room of One’s Own. For their flexible installation, “Feminist Demands Are Fitting,” Juma Hauser and more than a dozen other female activists from Vienna use the skirt, a clothing article worn by both women and men throughout history, as a metaphor for gender bending. Each skirt is printed with statements or questions such as “What I am needs no excuses” and “How political is fashion?” taken from interviews with female artists and theorists. Because of their simple rectangular cut, these skirts can be easily transformed into banners carrying feminist discourse into everyday life. Questions of gender identity and the everyday struggle with aging are usually repressed in our society. Ines Doujak’s interdisciplinary project, “Dirty Old Women,” aims to make elderly women visible. In June 2004, she organized two workshops, one in Spain and another in Austria, which invited female participants to collectively reflect on age as well as to produce their own images. On the first day of both workshops, the participants worked in pairs. One told the other how she felt or feels at ages 15, 40 and 70 while her counterpart acted as a mirror image that could be shaped or that acted out the narrative. The actors were photographed onto slides in front of a white background. On the second day, these slides were projected onto altering arrangements of white boxes, thereby producing fragmented body images, and also onto the bodies of the women, who themselves decided on the positioning and details of the images. Again, these projections were photographed. Paper bags printed with the images and costumes pinned from top to bottom with buttons showing the faces of extraordinary aging femininities will be presented in a fashion performance in spring 2005 at the Salzburger Kunstverein.
While engagement with sociopolitical issues is a given in feminist arts and DIYcraft projects, it is still unusual in the design business. Few professional labels propagate a critical attitude toward fashion. Wally Salner and Johannes Schweiger take on this challenge. Positioned within an international network of electronic music and fine arts, their Viennese label, _fabrics interseason, combines practical clothing with a profound analysis of social phenomena and feminist dress codes. Their last summer collection dealt with the brand philosophy of Tupperware. The outfits were conceived as modules representing the simple and uniform principle of order provided by the standardizing packaging system of Tupperware’s stackable plastic boxes. Adopting the typical colors of these boxes, each outfit acts as a colorful skin or surface that generates a sort of vacuum around the body. The women wearing these dresses remind you of Stepford wives, remote-controlled chicks on Prosecco hypnotized by the ritual character of the Tupperparty. With a collection made of Twaron (aramid polymer), a material that is resistant to bullets, flames and dog bites, the dark-skinned Spanish artist Alicia Framis directly responded to the xenophobia she was confronted with during her six-month residency in Berlin. Her label, Anti-Dog, was launched at the Paris Fashion Week in 2002 and has lived on as a fashionable way of making women — especially women of color — feel protected in dangerous neighborhoods inhabited by skinheads and their dogs. ANTIdogs, craftGRRLS or noMAD[E]s: As Alison says, “The greatest thing about clothing is the range of communication it offers — clothing can serve any purpose you like at any volume. Fashion is a unique medium that reflects and creates culture. I think it has equal validity and potential as an agent of social change, pure entertainment or any variation in between.” Alison hits the mark: There are noFASHIONrules Stephanie Müller, “An Estranged Green- Collar Worker.” Courtesy of the artist. in the world of revolutionary craft experiments and feminist clothing projects! Stephanie recently received an M.A. in sociology, psychology and communications at the Institute for Social Studies, University of Munich, Germany. She wrote her master’s thesis on “Grrrl Zines as Speaking Tubes for Marginalized Voices.” Her work has recently been presented at Domagk Days 2004, Munich’s biggest DIY-arts exhibition, and at Ladyfest Stuttgart/Esslingen. Contact or learn more about the artists mentioned in this piece: Alison Rasch: alirasch@netscape.net Anti-Dog: Browse for Alicia Framis at www.the-artists.org A Room of One’s Own: www.aroomofonesown.at Boutique Gegenalltag: www.gegenalltag.at “Dirty Old Women”/Ines Doujak: doujak@netway.at _fabrics interseason: www.fabrics.at Klava: www.acdshelabel.com rag_treasure: www.ragtreasure.de Metal holster from Alison Rasch’s Warriors and Outlaws project. Courtesy of the artist. TRASH-RECYCLED R ag_treasure is my own form of protest against mass-produced uniformity. Fed up with crowds of fashion victims dressed in greyish sell-out replicas, I’ve decided to set a counterpoint to my surroundings by reconstructing almost everything that is usually considered “unwearable”: broken guitar strings, membranes of scrapped hi-fi speakers or paper bags for used tampons. By combining different kinds of recycled materials, I alienate them from their original context and give them a completely new meaning. When worn, my dress-collages act as moveable images intended to raise consciousness in consumerists’ minds. One of my first rag_treasures presented in public space was a broken window-display puppet wearing nothing except for a little “safety” purse reconstructed from children’s water wings. Creating such a piece of trash-recycled fashion art is easy and takes only about 10 to 15 minutes. Here is a little guide of how to do it yourself: Supplies Zipper Needle and thread Hole-puncher and scissors Towline or any other kind of rope Water wings [floaties] or any other kind of protective material* Step One Take a water wing (or other protective material) and cut off both air chambers with your scissors. For a handmade “safety” purse you need only one air chamber. Slit it at the top and set the other one aside for a future fashion experiment. Fashion Art a diy guide to your personal rag_treasure Stephanie Müller’s water wings purse. Courtesy of the artist. Step Two Take the zipper and attach it with needle and thread to the opening you’ve just sliced into the water wing’s air chamber. If you are not so familiar with sewing, you could also staple or safety-pin the zipper to the opening. Step Three Punch two little holes into your re-constructed water wing — one on the left and another one on the right side at the top of the air chamber. Step Four Take a towline or any other kind of rope you’d like to use as a shoulder strap and pull it through each hole. Tie up the endings of the rope, and your water-repellent “safety” purse is finally finished. *Alternative Solution: In case you can’t find any water wings in a trash pile or at a flea market nearby, you could also use brightly colored washrags, discarded tetra packs or plastic bags to create a trash-recycled purse. But if you especially like the idea of “safety,” you should look for any other kind of protective material such as worn-out grill gloves or an old rain slicker. LOUDmouth 10
Page 1 and 2: Issue 9 | Spring 2005 JUDITH “JAC
Page 3 and 4: past A note: After publishing “I
Page 5 and 6: DRESS TO KILL FIGHT TO WINBy Dean S
Page 7 and 8: Joanna E. Gaspar, M.S., M.P.H. Ques
Page 9: Dear Gwen, Congratulations on your
Page 13 and 14: COTTONPICKING AMERICAN APPAREL By L
Page 15 and 16: ¿QUIEN LLEVA LOS PANTALONES T he d
Page 17 and 18: DRAG, GENDER & FASHIONABLE STUPIDIT
Page 19 and 20: when we talk about a nation as bein
Page 21 and 22: By Stephanie Abraham I. Oppression
Page 23 and 24: in widening my fashion consciousnes
Page 25 and 26: more economically vulnerable than I
Page 27 and 28: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PROGRESSIVE POL
Page 29 and 30: prestige, most 16-year-olds today c
Page 31 and 32: DOMESTICV DOMESTIC IOLENCESE XUALAS

judith “jack” halberstam on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity ...

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