Manifesto

Here’s to the pony tails and locs, to the tattoos, to the fringes, zippers and buttons, to the corduroy, the denim and the silk. Here’s to our preferred lingerie and our office suits, here’s to our smart shoes and night slippers, here’s to the party dress, turbans, niqabs, and the hijab. Here’s to maternity pants, to working overalls, to combat boots and our grandmother’s pearls. Here’s to animal prints and polka dots, here’s to our favourite band t-shirts and the dirty sock forever lost in the washing machine.

Here’s to the outrageous and the commonplace, to the implicit and the obvious, to the confronting and the comfy, to the daring and the safe, to the revealed and the hidden, to the fun and the sober: nothing in dress is ever ordinary.

Here’s to clothes as witnesses of our stories and documents of our memories.

Here’s to clothes that make us dream, wish, and travel in time.

Here’s to clothes that are armours, canvases, and cocoons.

Here’s to the gifted and the thrifted, to the purchased and the inherited.

Here’s to those who feel emotionally impacted by what they wear.

Here’s to those who channel power through their dressed bodies.

Here’s to those who behave and move differently under the mysterious spell of a

garment.

Here’s to those who believe that getting dressed is an act of humanisation.

Here’s to those who think that clothes have nothing to do with them, here’s to remind them that nothing we wear is ever random.

Here’s to those who agree with us that clothes and dress aren’t trivial nor superficial. Because what could possibly reveal more about ourselves than the way we chose to present the bodies we inhabit to the world?

Here’s to dress as a medium to dig into the political, the personal, the environmental, the sentimental, the collective, and the historical.

Here’s to using dress as a tool to explore what “myself” and what “community” means.

Here’s to the multiculturality expressed through dressed bodies.

Here’s to all wearers,

IN LONDON

AND THE WORLD.