The Empowering Reality of Fashion Pascale Gatzen
Fig. 1 Questioning the Concept of a Uniform / 2014 Image: Yurie Nagashima
How do we create actions and activities that are of benefit to others? How do we engage the transformative power of fashion to empower ourselves, and our communities? How can we shape our (material) fashion practices to become catalysts for social, economic, ecological and cultural change? These questions are at the core of the new curriculum for the Master of Arts in Fashion Design programme, “Fashion held in Common” at ArtEZ, University of the Arts, Arnhem, in the Netherlands, that I am currently creating and, that I am in the process of implementing. “Fashion held in Common” seeks to actively engage fashion's potential for compassion, in order to meet our common needs for connection, belonging, exchange, mutuality, and wellbeing. This programme has been informed by many experiences I have had, and projects that I have developed, over the last few years. One of the most exciting and beautiful projects has been "Questioning the Concept of a
Uniform" in 2014 in Mito, Japan, as part of the exhibition “You reach out – right now – for something: Questioning the Concept of Fashion” at Art Tower Mito and at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Marugame, Japan. This project has shown me a glimpse of the absolute transformative power of fashion. Two weeks before the opening of the show I worked with 8 of the 32 female guards of the museum, teaching them how to construct and sew their own uniforms (Fig. 1). Most of the women had never sewn before and I had to teach them from the beginning. For example, we did a five-hour workshop on how to set in a sleeve. I engaged with the women in collective decision-making processes to decide on the shape of, and the inspiration for, their uniforms. We decided on a fairly simple dress, with a distinctive collar shape, as the base upon which they could elaborate their own designs. By the evening of the opening, all eight women had successfully created their own uniforms. They were extremely proud and some were very emotional. For the first time in their 51
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