Togethering: A Manifesto for Collective Fashion Curating

A Response to Fashion as Encounters at State of Fashion Biennale, NL 2022, curated by Not Enough__________Collective. By Caroline Stevenson

1. Togethering emerges through conversations based in mutual friendship, commonalities, affinities and exchange.

2. Togethering names an impulse within contemporary fashion culture to challenge the neoliberal agenda of the creative individual through the plurality of the collective.

3. Togethering finds criticality in situated curatorial practice. Context is its impetus.

4. Togethering is gloriously and wonderfully heterarchical.

5. Togethering is a verb; an imperfect and iterative process. Sometimes it is short-lived, sometimes it lasts forever.

6. Togethering reinvents itself with every new project. It is an anthology of modalities.

7. Togethering creates curatorial situations that challenge the organisational principles of the fashion system. It is a political, material and theoretical practice that gives public form to fashion’s relational properties.

8. Togethering embraces the potential in fashion’s porosity.

9. Togethering operates in the margins, while being critically aware of the centre.

10. Togethering is more than a set of professional protocols related to the display of objects. It gathers all aspects of exhibition making into its folds creating rupture in the narratives of fashion history.

11. Togethering makes visible that which was latent.