Category: shopping

How shop-dropping can contribute to the Fashion Revolution: the Craftivist Collective’s Mini Fashion Statements

It’s Fashion Revolution Week this week. To mark this, we’re showcasing our favourite examples of cultural activism which have supported its #whomademyclothes call to action. Yesterday, we highlighted the 2014  ‘guerilla projection’ work of documentary photographer Ismael Ferdous. His photos of people dead and injured by the Rana Plaza collapse were projected on the High Street stores of companies which were refusing to acknowledge that their clothes were being made there. 

Today, we turn to the gentle activism of shop-dropping. It’s the opposite of shop-lifting, where activists leave things in store – in garments’ pockets, for example – to highlight to people who find them, and brands and retailers challenged by them, inequities in their supply chains. For Fashion Revolution Week why not make and leave behind in store a ‘Mini Fashion Statement’? He’s the Craftivist Collective‘s 2016 ‘how to’ video.

Further information

Sarah Corbett (2017) Mini Fashion StatementsCraftivist Collective 19 April [includes a MFS kit to purchase and a ‘Why To’ video with Sarah]

Further reading

Randall Bezanson & Andrew Finkelman (2009) Trespassory art. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 43(2), 245-322 [download here]

Ian Cook et al (2015) The 13 best examples of shop-dropping… ever.  followtheblog.org November

YesMenLab (2011) Shop Dropping Product Labels – by the Yes Lab. Destructibles 7 July

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Shopping and subversion

This week, for the module behind our website, we held an arts and activism symposium at the University of Exeter. One of our speakers was artist Louise Ashcroft, who worked with us on our sister project the Museum of Contemporary Commodities earlier this year (what she made is here)Never have we heard students laugh so hard and be so inspired in an academic classroom. Watch Louise’s TED talk and you’ll see what we mean.