World 219, Enactment i: report

This Enactment explored World 219, in which a Law of Social Responsibility of Clothing shapes fashion consumption.

It was organised by Laura Perdomo, Mariana Restrepo, Mariana Pulido, Maria José Echeverri and Daniela Lara, third-year undergraduate BA Design students in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

It was one of a number of enactments that were created by students for a public event, Wearable Speculations, at Juanita Echeverri’s gallery in Bogotá.

The text guiding this Enactment:

In World 219, purchase and sale depends on what is established by the Law of Social Responsibility of Clothing.

According to this law, the price of a garment is defined according to the buyer’s sustainable responsibility over the entire life cycle. The higher the taken responsibility, the lower the price will be, regardless of the brand of the garment.

Thanks to this law, the way of acquiring garments has become a ritual through which clothing is displayed in stores in such a way that the energetic weight of its manufacturing process is understood, this with the purpose of raising awareness and holding people accountable.

The enactment invited visitors to enter a World 219 store and select a garment, considering its aesthetics, material and construction along with supplementary information regarding the item’s environmental, economic and social footprints.

After selecting an item, the visitor is asked to go to the checkout to make their final purchase. There the garment is packed in a bag that reflects the weight that their purchase has implied.

For more details, see the group’s report:

The whole Wearable Speculations event was a great success, attracting a big audience to experience the fictional worlds. The students were proud of their achievements.

Here is an excerpt from the World 219 group’s reflections:

Many of the people who engaged in the interaction were completely driven by the price and how the garment looked, completely ignoring the numbers. Some realized the impact at the moment of purchase and regretted it, but many preferred comfort and aesthetics and still bought the items. We noticed that the “social” penalty of wearing the color permanently did not have a significant impact; there were those who didn’t care and only asked if there would be a monetary penalty.

Many others were affected by the activity; they were surprised to see the numbers and even more surprised to see that they were indeed real figures. At that moment, they began to question the impact of the clothes they were wearing.

This Enactment was devised by Laura Perdomo, Mariana Restrepo, Mariana Pulido, Maria José Echeverri and Daniela Lara, based on a World contributed by the same group, using
a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.

Photographs: Alejandro Barragan.