JOIN Collective Clothes Manual

The JOIN Collective Clothes Manual is an open-source manual that invites everyone to participate in JOIN, a project by fashion designer Anouk Beckers and graphic designer and art director Beau Bertens, that proposes fashion as a collective practice. The manual encompasses the patterns of a modular clothing system that consists of four different shapes which can be combined into a full outfit (a sleeve, a top, a trouser leg and a part of a skirt). As it is easy-to-use everyone can make the pieces themselves. This manual can also be downloaded at the JOIN website.

The pieces made by various makers from all over the world, subsequently form an ever-growing collection that can be seen on the JOIN Collective Clothes website.

The fashion industry focuses mostly on designer status, brand identity, commodities as magical results of invisible processes and an adoration of values such as originality and ‘the new’. And although it is often perceived as something that is not for everyone, fashion surely is a collective practice. By making and wearing clothes together, the design and research project JOIN Collective Clothes proposes fashion as a collective practice.

Beside participating by downloading or buying the manual the project consists of a series of workshops and designer commissions. Everyone is invited to join one of the 4-hour workshops to design and make a garment-piece. At the end of the workshop, the results from the participants are joined into one complete outfit. The process is playful, but at the same time it critically questions the characteristics of the fashion system exploring ownership, identity, (intellectual) property, production methods, alienation, mystification and value creation in fashion together.

Initiator Anouk Beckers on JOIN Collective Clothes: “What if we open up the fashion system and explore it as a non-fixed entity, a system where people can playfully join in, where everyone is invited to create fashion together?”

Type: hard cover folder with loose JOIN patterns
Dimensions: 225 mm x 178 mm x 20 mm portrait
Art Direction: Anouk Beckers
Graphic design: Beau Bertens
Research Assistants: Ilse Bloemendal and Zoe Philine Pingel
Contributor: Femke de Vries
Pattern development: Tanja Bindels
Release date: Spring 2019
Edition: 500
Pages: 7 JOIN patterns
Color: black & white
Printer: Wilco Art Books
Language: English
Made possible by: Creative Industries Fund NL and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts
Production: Warehouse