'Affordance Play'

'Affordance Play' celebrates the unshrinking creativity of young girls. The project transforms found garments and everyday objects into fashion through DIY, craft, playful misuse, meticulous pattern cutting and styling. What happens when style is not bought, but claimed? Through autonomy, invention and the courage to wear things differently, this project transforms my teenage girl friendgroups budding search for identity into a plausible design method for fashion. The question I seek to answer now is little different in essence to the one I tried to ask as a kid: Can I offer a stage and highlight the value of these voices as viable creative methods within fashion, through putting our methods and expressions to practical use?

To set the scene, picture a setting of boring suburbs outside of Copenhagen, middle class families in repetition of similar one floor houses for kilometers. Fashion wasn't the priority and our wardrobes consisted mainly of off sized hand-me-downs from siblings, strangely proportioned knock-off's and a general klondyke feeling of put-togetherness. Girl culture and womanhood is constructed through the material and media that girls and women are surrounded with, and presented to, but what happens when the material isn't representative for the kind of girl you are becoming? 

Not having access to fashionable goods, my friends and I utilised what we did have access to, creativity and invention, and found our fashionable clothes in cellars, in family lofts, in various dress up boxes and through seemingly random objects around the house. 

One day my friend came to school in a yellow plastic grocery bag as a skirt and as a top, in an act of affordance play that shocked us all, but that stuck with me and turned on a light in me. This simple but brilliant act would spark my interest in fashion design which has led me to this point, and has shown me that fashion participation, can begin before purchase, through creativity and use.