Wear Next by Press Clare

Author:Press, Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

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In the intro to David Bollier’s book The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking, there’s a photo of a billboard that reads: ‘The next big thing will be a lot of small things.’ The image is by Belgian furniture designer Thomas Lommée, famous for his OpenStructures project that makes modular designs not just freely available to anyone who cares to build them but modifiable too – ‘where different people all contribute to a bigger thing (rather than each building their own thing)’. Lommée has said that built-in obsolescence and overconsumption spurred him to act. Another way is possible.

If we accept that consumerism, and what Bollier calls ‘the state/market system’, won’t deliver the ‘less’ that the planet needs, what’s the alternative? The practical one, if we stop short of revolution, and accept that capitalism isn’t going to disappear tomorrow? Bollier’s answer is lots of different, local, commons-based solutions. ‘We must imagine new and better ways of being, doing and knowing,’ he writes.5 The good news? It’s already happening.

Bollier is an author and strategist who ‘studies the commons and works as an activist to protect it’.6 He defines the commons as ‘a resource + a community + a set of social protocols’. It’s more complex than simply ‘sharing’, as you might an apartment, or lunch with a friend. Rather, the commons ‘is about sharing and bringing into being durable social systems for producing shareable things and activities’. Core to the idea are participation, inclusion and fairness, and ‘enabling people to co-create a sense of purpose, meaning and belonging while meeting important needs’. Bollier talks about ‘provisioning’, which implies sufficiency over excess and reminds me of packing to visit Carry at the beach. Note that it’s also a verb. This whole commons idea is anchored in action.

When I approached him to ask if he’d talk to me about the future of fashion, he warned me he was no expert in my field. ‘However I do have some ideas about how contemporary fashion design and commerce might be re-imagined and re-built,’ he wrote in an email. He’d been ‘sporadically engaged with a variety of fashion commoner’, including Sandra Niessen and the team at Fashion Act Now, he explained.

In fact, his fashion connection goes back to 2005, when Bollier was working for the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and his colleague Laurie Racine suggested they put on an event to explore fashion’s relationship with open-source access. Generally speaking, there are no patents on standard items of clothing but, at the time, there was a push to introduce more copyrights, and Racine’s idea was ‘to show that intellectual property was potentially stifling, and that creativity in fashion is all about sharing and collaboration’.7 Bollier, being someone who ‘always found it wise to raise a ruckus about the first attacks on the integrity of a commons’, agreed to work on the conference. ‘If Levi Strauss [was] granted rights in denim jeans or if Burberry were allowed to “own” the trench coat, everyone would be hostage to a coterie of monopoly vendors selling pricey clothes,’ he wrote in a blog post.

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