Localising Global Garment Biographies

Can garments tell stories that can help change consumer behaviour?

Localising Global Garment Biographies responds to two NWA cluster questions: ‘Can globalisation and development be reinvented in a way that, in time, will mitigate differences in prosperity between world regions?’ and ‘How can we promote and utilise creativity and innovation?’

The project brings together highly diverse people to collaboratively research how the changing value and lifespan of clothing has an impact on relationships between buyers and users, and producers. The project foregrounds diachronic as well as longitudinal perspectives to reveal the structural inequalities at play in the global textile value network.

Inviting Rotterdam residents and Indian textile producers to identify the global trajectories they are included in is intended to create means that allow such actors to redefine and increase their agency in these global production chains. The project does so by creating innovative multi-lingual interactive digital tools that attribute agency and foster dialogue.

The project invites participants to create affective and historical biographies on the origins of garments. These biographies will be shared through digital tools, drafting linkages between users and producers. This will encompass an experimental online digital environment that can be accessed by smartphone. It will be multi-lingual, presenting the history of dedicated garments, their materiality, location and transportation. It will allow for and encourage commentaries from users and makers from around the world. Localising global garment biographies thus links complementary but hitherto disconnected stories, it foregrounds heritage objects to induce the kind of behavioural transformations required to arrive at fair, sustainable and circular global garment chains.