OpenWear. Sustainability, Openness and P2P Production in the World of Fashion

This e-book is based on the research reports produced during the first year of the EU financed project EDUfashion, a two-year project for the development of a col- laborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. 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 ex- ploring the forces that are behind these consumer and producer trends. 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. It will 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.