Portal #004 - Exercise and Coloring Book for Children

PORTAL 004 | Exercise and coloring book for children is the result of PORTAL 004, a workshop in which children from the public primary school OBS Twiske, under the supervision of students of the MA Fashion Strategy, investigated the different values of clothing. In this book, which is based on the questions and outcomes of this workshop, children can actively learn more about their clothing and the different values attached to it. In this way they become more aware of how to deal with the value of clothing.

PORTAL is a research project that explores the economic, social and emotional value of clothing and offers a ‘way in’ to understanding garments from a multitude of overlapping and intersecting perspectives.

For every edition, participants are asked to take off a garment, lay it down on a large Tyvek sheet, outline their garment with tape and answer a series of questions regarding its production (Where was it made?), materials (What is it made of?), ownership (Is it yours?) and value (How much did it cost? What is the emotional value?). Subsequently connections are made between the garments by literally drawing lines between the items of the various visitors, creating a network that reveals connections between and intersections of personal, economic, social, cultural and political realms surfacing a complex and layered system of the reality of clothing.This culminates in a map, or landscape of personal stories that connect to form a fashion network which inverts our gaze, shining a spotlight on the intricacies of our own outfits and extraordinary aspects of the everyday as opposed to the myth of the exclusive fashion image. PORTAL thus provides an entryway to a vision that begins to prioritise values that are ephemeral and yet integral in “influencing hearts and minds and shaping the way we live together”. It captures and visualises information that circumvents established hierarchies and disrupts the homogeneity of the commercially driven fashion system with the refreshing diversity of fashion that is worn; embodied and imperfect.

The collected information of each PORTAL edition is visualized and brought together in a reader using the sixteen PORTAL questions as their starting point.