Underwear: Reform from the Bottom Up!

In 2018 Human Rights Watch commission the Rational Dress Society to develop a new project addressing the humanitarian and environmental crisis in the fashion industry.

UNDERWEAR: Reform from the bottom up! offered a utopian solution to the problem of panties. The speculative proposal tackles the design of prevailing systems of production, while at the same time delivering technical design for a post-gender collection of underwear!

Like the design of JUMPSUIT, the Rational Dress Society’s UNDERWEAR comes in a range of lengths, sizes, and most critically, accommodates a range of anatomical needs.

Through the use of geometric seam lines inspired by Soviet Constructivist propaganda posters, a range of UNDERWEAR for comrades with and without penises, as well as options for tucking and packing, are possible while maintaining a visual uniformity. (High five!)

In a landscape where companies like Zara produce 1.23 million garments per day we face an environmental and labor catastrophe.

UNDERWEAR offers a strategy for DE-growth. While capitalism demands constant growth, UNDERWEAR proposes an inverted system wherein a workers cooperative collectively determines a fixed number of units that will sustain the workers for the duration of one year. Working backwards from this number UNDERWEAR is then sold via a subscription model. OR: utopian knickers to fix capitalism and the patriarchy!