Zoe Romano on Open Source Fashion

Zoe Romano is one of the founders of the OpenWear project. She is interviewed here by Costa Rican design and fashion researcher Oscar Ruiz Schmidt:

Interview

ORS: Do you think that designers resign to authorship by making their work methodology open?

ZR – That’s one of the main thing we need to clarify: open-source doesn’t mean to resign authorship. It’s more about opening up the codes to creating collaboration. The more you involve people transparently in a process the clearer it becomes who started the process, who’s collaborating and who’s doing what. Exactly the opposite of what happens in the fashion system where is functional to have a single entity getting all the attention, being it the brand or the fashion designer, while hiding the complex work behind each product and the various skills behind innovation (that is always a collective process). We are finally realizing that open innovation is able to revitalize stale innovation processes happening in established enterprises.

ORS: If a designer places all of his methods online, can he still make a living from selling his clothes?

ZR – Actually, in the last 20 years most of the small-scale designers have been having problems in make a living from selling their clothes even without sharing a single thing. The market has become too polarized, big brand conglomerates and fast fashion take it all. At Openwear we believe that networking could be a possible solution. We are experimenting a networking based on sharing and collaboration, and also on the creation of a consistent brand expressing the framework in which many small firms and individuals produce value and can benefit from an economy of reputation.

ORS: If clothing competence is developed to the extent where everybody starts sewing, will the fashion business die?

ZR – Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and partner at Google Venture said: “The 20th- century mass-production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people”, so as home-cooking is not killing restaurants and home-taping didn’t kill the music industry (but p2p is forcing it to change its business model), home-sewing won’t kill the fashion business but it is very likely to go through changes. We shouldn’t also forget that we live in a world facing the problem of sustainability and goods won’t be able to travel as much as they used to be.

ORS: Do you think that the fashion industry will remain as it is, or do you think that open source fashion will rise to a point where the industry will be modified? If yes, how?

ZR – I partly answered above. There are different trends that are challenging the industry from different perspective: open source movements are rethinking intellectual property, digital manufacturing is rethinking distribution and production, the emergency of ecological sustainability attacks the concept of programmed obsolescence and long supply chains… There could be many viable solutions, not only one.

ORS: Karl Lagerfeld collaborated in 2010 with Burda magazine by publishing two of his patterns. Hedi Slimane had done the same for Die Zeit Magazine in Germany. Do you see this as open source or rather as a commercial opportunity? Does this compell the open source movement?

ZR – Most of the patterns that you can find online are freely available for personal use but rarely for commercial use. I’m not talking about the possibility of re-selling the digital pattern itself but to be able to produce and sell garments starting from those shared codes. This is what we are doing with Openwear Collaborative Collection and this is what we think it could bring collective benefit. Open source movement is not only about sharing items, it’s more about creating a different ecosystem of relations, especially to avoid exploitation and abuse of rent.

ORS: How do you believe your own actions have modified the fashion industry?

ZR – In 2005 with Serpica Naro we challenged the Chamber of Fashion of Milan, who accepted our fictions fashion designer in the official calendar of the fashion week. In that event a group of precarious workers demonstrated that coordination, collaboration and focused skills can beat the gatekeepers with the same weapons, giving voice to all the workers through a real collective brand. Now, the ideas born in that context are taking shape and strength in a bigger project like Openwear. Our main aim is not really to modify the fashion system but to support and inspire people who are imagining new ways of producing fashion, with more respect for the workers, the environment, personal development and the social sphere." (http://openwear.org/blog/?p=1708)