Draft for a New Anti-Fashion Manifesto

CCC Germany, with SÜDWIND Institut, organised an online editing session in Germany. Jule, one of the participants from Berlin shared her "Draft for a New Anti-Fashion Manifesto". It is from the viewpoint of a Fashion Student:

I refuse to recognize the capitalist logic of exploitation, growth, and profit maximization as the only functioning system. I refuse to participate in it and want to establish a system based on appreciative collaboration.

I refuse to close my eyes to the consequences that the fashion industry must answer for toward people and the planet; on the contrary, I expose them and demand that its system must fundamentally change—if not dissolve altogether!

I refuse to take the visual as a starting point or as content. For me, the visual is a means to an end, and that end is to convey the message or to enable feelings or functions within the interplay between body, clothing, and environment. Beauty is also a purpose, but the visual on its own is too superficial for me.

I refuse to be cool and trendy and instead place authenticity above everything else.

I refuse to see fashion as a fixed concept made of economic structures and desirable products. I refuse to draw a line between fashion, art, and activism.

I refuse to regard models as interchangeable objects and therefore work only with friends and people who are substantively involved.

I refuse to design clothing within gender categories. I want to contribute to a future in which gendered assignments become unnecessary.

I refuse to view financial success as the highest measure of achievement. Integrity is more important than profitability. Financial failure does not necessarily mean conceptual failure.

I refuse to bow to supposedly unchangeable, nonnegotiable practices when those practices are destructive. This applies to production methods, systems, and philosophies.

I am aware that I cannot fulfill all my own demands at once, because the transformation of the fashion industry is a process that can only succeed collectively with many allies. In this context, a reference to the Just Transition Manifesto:
https://manifesto.cleanclothes.org/processes/about-just-transition