State of Fashion biennial 2022 I Ways of Caring
Second edition State of Fashion biennial opens on 3 June 2022. With Ways of Caring as its central theme, the biennial highlights the urgent need to restore broken threads and disrupted relationships within the realm of fashion. The biennial takes place in Dutch fashion hub Arnhem and its programme will include exhibitions, interactive workshops, repair stations, and a series of public interventions.
With Ways of Caring as the central theme of its next biennial, State of Fashion once again calls our attention to the challenges that fashion is facing today. For this second edition in 2022, the focus is on the need to restore broken threads and disrupted relationships in the fashion world. Traditionally, fashion is a networked system of relationships through which we communicate about who we are, how we feel, and how we relate to each other, to other animal species and to nature. Over time, the industrial fashion system, with growth and profit as its main objectives, has gained a dominant position and resulted in an industry that is caught up in a cycle of overproduction, feeding a culture of over consumption. To keep this system alive, people and animals are being exploited and suppressed, and nature is being poisoned.
NOT_ ENOUGH
In close collaboration with its curator-team, consisting of Fashion Open Studio and NOT___ENOUGH collective, State of Fashion wants to find alternatives for this system, which perpetuates inequality by choosing one specific perspective and interest over many others. There are countless ways of practicing fashion that are not yet recognized in the mainstream. How do we create space for different fashion systems to co-exist? What can we learn from these diverse fashion systems? And, how can we encourage the fashion world to rethink, revalue, reconnect and care?
State of Fashion 2022
During State of Fashion 2022 | Ways of Caring, everyone – from fashion designer to industry tycoon to textile worker and consumer – is invited to participate and to practice fashion in various meaningful ways. Part of the programme is a reflective and experiential exhibition, in which NOT___ENOUGH collective invites you to see differently what has been left out, suppressed or removed in fashion. In their words: ‘Only by recognizing and acknowledging what's missing, and understanding the consequences of these omissions, plural and unexpected forms of fashion can coexist’. In and around Arnhem’s high street, Fashion Open Studio hosts a programme of activities that reconnects fashion with people in a playful yet revolutionary way. ‘A society that cares is a society prepared for repairs,’ states the team. They invite everyone to take part in their interventions: from repairing clothing to redesigning dysfunctional systems together.
Photo: Alia Ali - Hex, INDIGO series, 2021 In courtesy of Contour Gallery