Openwear is an open source brand which makers, fashion producers, small local enterprises, educational institutions can use to foster a new vision of fashion based on micro-communities, technology and sustainability. Get in touch, drop me an email: zoe [at] wemake.cc

Openwear started as an EU funded Life Long Learning project and was active from 2010 to 2012. I created this website to collect links of archived materials like ebook, pictures, videos, blogposts, digital patterns. I keep exploring Openwear concepts and vision locally at WeMake Makerspace Fablab in Milan and internationally, collaborating with other collectives working on similar approaches - Zoe Romano

Read blogposts about Openwear on my blog!
Send me a message: zoe @ openwear.it

Why Openwear

Openwear was a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education based on co-making, skill-sharing and ethical branding. Fashion, a basic cultural expression of our society, seems trapped by forces, powers and passions which prevent it from evolving in synch with society. On one side, you have the fashion system, made by actors (major fashion designers, multinational companies, media events, trade fairs) that compete and collaborate to attract customers, gain market share and access to resources and visibility.

On the other side, thousands of creatives and independent fashion producers are engaging with alternative practices of responsible design, aimed at building new types of relations between producers and consumers, more concerned about their impact on environment and society. This must be considered next to the growth of new tastes in people not really interested in “fashion” any more, but ready to wear smart clothes at convenient prices and wanting to know what’s the score: curious to know what’s their story, how they were built and be able to give their personal contribution to it.

Openwear concept wants to reconcile these emerging social trends promoting an alternative approach to fashion through an environment where you could benefit of:
• A public space where students, independent micro-fashion producers, creatives and social enterprises, educational institutions could present personal profiles and find collaborators for their creations/activities
• Online tools to discuss best practices, find common solutions to shared problems and discover learning opportunities
• A series of Collaborative Collections that freely downloadable, replicable, customizable
• An open source brand liberated by a licence. As Creative Commons liberated copyright, Openwear licence is giving some freedom to use the brand. The licence was inspired by the work of Serpica Naro Collective

Openwear Manifesto

>> The era of high fashion is on Sunset Boulevard. The age of mass-customization clothing is at hand.
>> Open Fashion is open to cultures and genders of the planet.
>> Open Fashion is collectively produced style and value, thanks to the cooperation of networked artisans, local hubs and creators of taste.
>> Open Fashion is a process towards ethical fashion, from the rights of textile producers to the environmental conditions in which the fabrics were obtained: a fair wage to all garment workers, a fair share to all p2p fashionistas.
>> Open Fashion is predicated on the premise that open source hardware, software and peer networked social production are radically transforming all sectors and industries.
>> A commons-based peer-production economy is emerging and open-source fashion will be its stylistic apparatus.
Open Fashion is locally harvested, globally consumed and its customers are direct creators.
>> Fashion is increasingly immaterial, and legions of immaterial laborers are behind its wealth and power. Open Fashion is enlived by the creatives precarized by the Great Recession.
>> Street fashion doesn't exist: the poor have style, the rich have fashion. What exists is a world space of fashion media fought over by established and emergent actors in old and new fashion capitals.

Openwear Brand License

Openwear is an open brand. Openwear is a type of collective trademark that recognizes the productive role of co-production, engages in strategies that aim at redistributing the value thus produced and seeks organizational solutions that give co-producers a say in determining the overall governance of the brand. Openwear wants to be a practical experiment to institutionalize mechanisms of revenue sharing through which co-creating consumers can benefit from the value that they produce and involve consumers in determining the overall social values towards the brand should contribute to.

Openwar community members are authorized to use Openwear brand by anybody who complies with the standards defined by the Openwear License.

If you are subscribed to Openwear Community you can:
— download the codes (Lookmaps) of any Openwear Collaborative Collection
— produce garments and accessories based on those codes
— produce garments and accessories based on a customization of those codes
— sell the items labeling them with Openwear brand and also add your own label to it.

If you do so, you agree to:
— Produce handmade or partially handmade the garment or accessory
— Publish on your Openwear profile at least one picture of the garment of accessory you produced
— Publish on your Openwear profile (your Showbox) the information necessary to produce the Customized (modifying the original code of the Lookmaps) version of the item or accessory