OurCommon.Market (OC.M) is the brainchild of Fashion Act Now. And just as every child, it retains strong ties to its mother, especially when young. And as every child, as it grows into its own and matures, its unique identity will grow ever more distinct and strong. For the time being, Fashion Act Now is still feeding OC.M: shaping it, developing its foundation, searching for funding for it, building its separate website, brainstorming its future, planning for ‘when it grows up’, in short, taking full responsibility for it.
Fashion Act Now is a volunteer community of "activists, thinkers, practitioners, creatives, problem solvers and concerned citizens ….” all of us bone weary of being implicated in the destruction of cultures, people and planet through the clothes we wear, and all of us dedicated to sorting out how to be part of the solution. We are a radical group, uninterested in tinkering around the edges, uninterested in duplicating the work of other activist groups, working to find effective solutions, to ‘defashion’. By ‘defashion’ we mean to liberate clothing culture from the domination of the Fashion industry. Our radical choice has been to pull away entirely from the destructive Fashion industry, and not to try to reform it. Our radical choice is precisely to highlight alternatives to the industry, alternatives that have been erased, ignored, plundered and undermined, alternatives that are struggling bravely to survive or revive, and alternatives that are being invented to counter the Industry. Our choice is restitution, restoration, revival, and resistance: redress.
OC.M is FAN’s foremost and, to date, most powerful way to work towards this goal. FAN does not care to perpetuate dominant structures by opposing them. FAN cares to dream of the alternative. OurCommon.Market puts the Fashion industry on its head. OC.M is grassroots, not top-down. It is collaborative and open. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It celebrates, activates and highlights commons. It acknowledges what has been erased by the Fashion industry and insists on its value.
OC.M is not about money, not about growth, not about mass-market trends, not about (over)consumption and corporate profits. It is about real people and real clothing. It is about community participation. It is an enactment of the pluriverse of Fashion, not the monoverse of industrial dominance. It is a FAN strategy to “stand for clothing cultures that nurture people and planet.”
And so OC.M is distinct from FAN. It has its own goals, a separate website, its own dynamics. FAN is nurturing the OC.M so that it may grow, remain healthy, self-regulate and, in due course, overtake the Fashion industry. It is a dream, an immense gambit with no shortage of ambition. Like a parent, FAN is standing by and will eventually stand back.
OurCommon.Market is intended to be co-owned and co-created, a space made by the communities it serves. We hope you will join us. Together we can action the points discussed in the assembly. If you would like to get involved, please reach out at: hello@ourcommon.market
By Sandra Niessen
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