Our 10 mini-community gatherings of Swap&Fix Fashion have come to an end last June. And we can safely say, after this collective experience, that the greatest pleasure that both us at OpenDot and the approximately 400 participants brought home was a motivating consideration: making the difference in a world dominated by fast fashion is possible. Even in our own small community, acting bottom-up. Even for people who consider themselves uncreative. Because what matters is the willingness to do something about a phenomenon that we disagree with and to empower each other through the act of making, and reasoning about it.

The idea for Swap&Fix Fashion started in 2023 to support OpenDot’s role in the development of the urban model of the 15 minutes city in Milan, and it is part of the international network “Fixing Fashion” – a community of makers, designers, people who want to make a change and raise awareness.

Operating as the epicentre for our local area and being a point of reference in the local manufacturing for the whole city, we decided to produce a series of community gatherings to create awareness on the impact of fast fashion within our community and to provide practical tools to help people become active players against the phenomenon: through ideas sharing and inspiration, through swapping, repairing and creative hacking of existing garments, to create further emotional attachment with them. Another purpose, possibly a more ambitious one, was to create an economy of proximity through two approaches: demonstrating that creating active networks opportunities arise for those who wish to develop skills and use them, even in view of a possible professional future and that applying good practices, such as fixing and hacking, we extend the life of clothes and, consequently, the life of the product itself.

Like it often happens with projects, also Swap&Fix Fashion underwent a progressive development: we steered and perfected the format as we went along through continuous evaluation.

The first sessions were indeed social gatherings where – in an informal setting, including an aperitif – local community members could swap clothes and make small adjustments and repairs on the garments that they wished to keep, or even upgrading them through personalization.

After a few successful sessions, we decided to add a more inspirational and practical element, inviting participants to be actively involved in small activities that could extend the life of clothes or repair and upgrade garments by using digital fabrication processes and machines.

With the ambition to create a local network of people and companies that share common values and belief towards the way we relate with garments, we focused on providing our audience with a mix of contents. Local design studios and young talents who work within the field of sustainable fashion presented themselves and experimented with us on multiple levels.

On one hand, with people that could explain the rationale behind their creative approaches. Like Ebe Collective, from Milan, an innovative, research-based design studio that provides reuse alternatives to discarded textile materials. They showed us how they envisage what to create according to the available scraps and what’s the thinking behind this process. Or Collettivo 0331, that specialises in upcycling second-hand denim which they collect from Humana, the Italian service for used garments that functions throughout the country. They explained their very particular approach to fashion, showing how their custom-made machines work and inspiring towards a high degree of personalization opportunities.

There was also a lot of room for deepening topics related to sustainable fashion also from a theoretical and systemic perspective. For instance Rayon Vert, a research clothing brand founded on the belief that everyone is capable to produce their own garments, illustrated the key issues to consider when evaluating the sustainability of clothes: informed control over the sourcing, production, use, disposal and re-entering of garments and gear in the cycle of production.

While Spazio 3R, an associative project that welcomes women in difficulties and helps them re-build their lives through learning jobs related to fabrics and textiles making, showed how knowing how to work materials can be a life-changing activity, for some more than for others.

Enriching the appointments with presentations from external studios gave a huge stir to the Swap&Fix Fashion series and confirmed our belief that communities get activated if they are provided with various and mixed contents, ie practical and theoretical inputs, as well as with a non-judgmental environment built on a shared innovation belief and approach.