The Martlet

An eclectic group of girls and women and a handful of men gathered in the Student Union Building (SUB) for the workshop “Unlabeled Fashion 2009: cut up stereotypes” on Feb. 28.

The Unlabeled Fashion workshop has been an annual event for the past four years. The event, hosted by antidote (a self-described multiracial girls’ and women’s network in Victoria) celebrates and scrutinizes fashion in modern culture.

“We are concerned with deconstructing mainstream fashion and reconstructing it as a means of expression and empowerment,” said Letitia Annamalai, one of the organizers of Unlabeled Fashion 2009. “We are taking back fashion, and making it our own to fit our bodies, and to make us more conscious and aware about where it’s from and how it’s made.”

Annamalai has several concerns regarding mainstream fashion, including the use of unrealistic images of beauty and who is represented in fashion campaigns.

“We are also concerned with masculinity, femininity, hetero-normativity, glamorized violence, hyper-sexualization and infantilization,” she said.

Throughout the day, participants had the opportunity to partake in several events, such as discussing the negative impact of the fashion industry and media on female body image, as well as participants having the chance to create some of their very own garments at the conference, then strut down the runway in their creations.

“We wanted to make the event interactive and appealing to youth especially, and have made it a day’s long conference with various workshops concerning issues related to fashion, body image/health, media representation/misrepresentation, cultural appropriation and the manufacturing industry in the global South,” said Annamalai.

The conference began with small group workshops. One workshop, facilitated by the Go Girls (an antidote-like group from Vancouver) discussed negative body image created by the fashion industry, and focused on the negative and wrong information the media gives women about their menstrual cycles.

In our culture, menstruation is so completely taboo that it’s become almost shameful. Advertisements for feminine hygiene products even use a blue liquid in place of what we all know is really red blood. The leaders of the workshop said that pads and tampons have a lot of chemicals in them that are not good for you. They also said that the bleach used in these products can actually causes women’s bodies to bleed more than they naturally would so that they will need to change them more frequently and it won’t be long until they’re back in the drug store buying more.

Luckily, the Go Girls had a solution. They taught the group how to make their own sustainable, economical and chemical-free pads.

The rest of the conference combined a construction and deconstruction of fashion. The deconstruction included discussing the ways in which the fashion industry and media facilitate the stereotyping and the racialism of women, and how this can lead to poor body image and a lack of self-esteem.

The construction aspect included learning how to silk-screen. Participants had the option of using pre-made prints that said “Feminism is for everyone” and “Feminism loves you,” or to create their own original design.

“My hope is that people leave this event inspired by creative initiatives in the fashion workshops, but most importantly have an awareness of our concerns and issues we bring to the table,” said Annamalai.

For more information on antidote or to get involved, check out their website at antidotenetwork.org.

- with files from Gemma Karstens-Smith