Re-Making Clothing, Re-Making Worlds: On Crip Fashion Hacking

Abstract

This article explores how Disabled people’s fashion hacking practices re-make worlds by expanding fashion design processes, fostering relationships, and welcoming-in desire for Disability. We share research from the second phase of our project, Cripping Masculinity, where we developed fashion hacking workshops with D/disabled, D/deaf and Mad men and masculine non-binary people. In these workshops, participants worked in collaboration with fashion researchers and students to alter, embellish, and recreate their existing garments to support their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. We explore how our workshops heeded the principles of Disability Justice by centring flexibility of time, collective access, interdependence, and desire for intersectional Disabled embodiments. By exploring the relationships formed and clothing made in these workshops, we articulate a framework for crip fashion hacking that reclaims design from the values of the market-driven fashion industry and towards the principles of Disability Justice. This article is written as a dialogue between members of the research team, the conversational style highlights our relationship-making process and praxis. We invite educators, designers, and/or researchers to draw upon crip fashion hacking to re-make worlds by desiring with and for communities who are marginalized by dominant systems.