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!