Uselesswear
Zheng Lu
USELESS -WEAR
Autonomy + action + sustainability = useless wear
Competitiveness + instrumental rationality + desire = wear
-wear：to have something on one’s body as clothing, decoration, or protection. -wear is not a product or a collection of specific garments.
USELESS wear keeps itself away from causal wear, suits and uniforms.
USELESS wear is an approach to achieve a living aesthetics of low material desire and high life experience - reducing the pressure and anxiety of marketisation and monetization today.
USELESS wear is a frame where participants connect one another with their community and explore their identities in ‘useless culture’. Everyone is empowered to create their own values. Useless wear does not deny the power of commodities, but wants to transform or reset it to generate a new recognizable and traceable meaning.
USELESS wear is a system, standing on the opposite side of utilitarianism and instrumental rationality and it is not expected to achieve a desired end or outcome. Rather, it wants to fight against a profit-driven and efficiency-oriented working system, to examine the fashion system from a decommodification perspective, and to question if fashion fundamentally benefits what group of people and from which class.
USELESS wear is a weapon, armed by participants to resist the hegemony of neoliberalism. Calling for an environment without competitiveness and filled with rich living resources.
USELESS wear is a new luxury, which can neither offer participants a practical promise nor better realistic life conditions in the current circumstances of a NOW HIGHLY COMPETITVE SOCIETY.
In the era of automation, what is human labor? What is productivity? Are you tired of overtime work? Of being exploited? Is your balance of life and work destroyed? In an era that promotes sustainability, our bodies also need to be sustained! In my project, I have explored the synchronization of human labor and machinery, from repetitive and mechanized interactions to assembled bodies and meaningless gestures. By way of a ‘uselessness as a resistance’ strategy, I’ve made every mechanism useless.Reducing the functionality of labor and calling for a combination of low-tech and high-life.
Through full automation, we enter the post-work world where people are free to create. If we don’t need to work in the future, do we still need workwear? Even if this is utopian thinking for now, in preparation for that age, we need to call for reduced hours and a more flexible working world, and simultaneously stand on the opposite of the capital’s fashion narratives, suggesting an open-source, copyleft, cooperative fashion community.
A letter to Future – “Sorry, I’m off duty.”
An automata chair with an assembled jacket — Machinery in Body. We use machines and simultaneously machines use us.
Medium:
labor, plywoods, stainless steelSize:
640*620*830
A labourer sitting on a machine
Medium:
plywoods, stainless steel, sink
The human labor/machinery/behaviour
Medium:
labor and mix media
The mechanical body — Every element and material used can be seen.
Medium:
Plywoods, stainless steelThe replaceable attachments
No button and zipper used in my practices.
Medium:
Plywoods, stainless steel
The selfie machine — Shooting during lockdown
Medium:
mix media, cardboard, water, labortime record — Model: Bao https://instagram.com/mcfee_b?igshid=9qixeyh4a10c Zheng https://instagram.com/je_zhenglou?igshid=1p9djdhcyhthp
Medium:
labor, timeIncluding One-coin hand bag, One-USB tote bag, Happy birthday bag and so on