A conversation with Otto von Busch

After two years, this will be the last in the Denier series. Thank you so much for subscribing, and for those who are new, you can read the archive here. 

It has been a transformative project for me; I have learned so much about clothing and fashion on a theoretical, philosophical, practical, and material level. The impetus for Denier was rooted in a quest for knowledge about clothing and “sustainability.” There was a naivety to its origins; I wanted to answer: could fashion become sustainable? The simple answer is no – the way the fashion industry is set up now, it can not move to a place where it’s not destroying people and the planet. That said, it is complicated, and there are many interesting projects and initiatives out there that could have an impact. 

The fundamental transformation has been personal. Fashion was such an important part of my identity as a young person, a tool for escape and shape-shifting. Recently it hasn’t held the same sway, and in some ways, this project has helped me to say goodbye to its former significance. In September, I am beginning a new chapter to train as a gestalt therapist, which I imagine will bring many further readings of the significance of clothing and fashion to society and the individual. 

It is fitting that my last interviewee is Otto von Busch, the artist, designer, researcher, and associate professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design in New York. Otto has written several books, including Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism (Designing in Dark Times), The Dharma of Fashion: A Buddhist Approach to Our Life with Clothes, and The Psychopolitics of Fashion: Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion. His work profoundly questions the role of fashion today; through it, he asks why we wear what we do, why we buy so much, and how we might be able to reimagine the role of the fashion auteur. 

Shonagh Marshall: I want to start by asking you to describe your practice? 

Otto von Busch: I'm educated both as a designer and what we could call a theorist. I studied art history and fashion related to fashion theory. And at the same time, I also studied design. 

I identify as a designer, so I approach my scholarly practice as a designer. Of course, I am a teacher and an academic – but I approach these both as a designer. That means the focus is not necessarily on the analysis or scholarly writing but on how to turn ideas and perspectives into a manageable and inspiring form, allowing designers to build on them. That is how I see my challenge as a scholar and academic.

Shonagh: For your Ph.D. thesis, you applied hacking to fashion. What brought you to that at the time, and why did you make the connection to fashion? 

Otto: To me, hacking was a very rich metaphor and practical lens to approach fashion differently. Twenty years ago, when this work started, hacking meant something else – it was more grassroots, activist, and anarchist than it is today when states are hacking and surveilling and so on. 

At the same time, this was when the so-called "new media" was still new. There was an idea that Web 2.0 offered a different approach to authorship and participation and that we could reinvent democracy and more participatory forms of social organization. This may sound absurd today, but there was hope around the rise of these new technologies. 

Hacking was a lens to try to reform fashion along these lines. What if we imagine fashion as an operating system of contemporary capitalism? In a larger sense, fashion is accessible and in many ways taken for granted in western consumer societies. How could it be hacked so it could be more participatory? Could it be reformulated from a bottom-up approach? Perhaps we could think of a wider variety of ways of being with fashion, in terms of consuming and engaging with it. Hacking means you try to break open the black boxes – and questioning authorship – to find room for your agency within the system which previously excluded you. You can do that with an activist purpose, meaning that you're trying to promote hacktivist thinking: you're not trying to go along with what the market proposes or the established channels of ideology. You can challenge how agency is distributed across the social field. 

Hacktivism was a vibrant component 20 years ago to think about a broader sense of agency and a more comprehensive engagement. That was what was super inspiring to me. I should add that with that metaphor, hacking is not sabotaging; it's not about trying to undermine fashion or be anti-fashion; it's a way of trying to find rooms to be in a more meaningful and more prosperous world of agency within an existing system. 

Fashion workshop at “Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics” exhibition at Garanti Gallery, Istanbul, 2007

Shonagh: You use the word fashion specifically. How do you define fashion? 

Otto: I always play with Swedish fashion journalist Susanne Pagold’s definition. She argues that fashion is “to dress like everyone else but before everyone else.” I'm working with the everyday definition in her perspective, which I share and build from. I am not looking at the fashion system in Paris, the economy, global supply chains, or who defines fashion. I'm interested in it as an everyday phenomenon that happens in and across many different cultures. Of course, so far, the West has determined the system and it is constructed under capitalism. Still, one could argue that dressing like everyone else, before everyone else, can happen in many worlds. 

I find it fascinating because it also points to the fact that fashion is something slightly different than just clothes. I often play with the idea that clothes are the hardware and fashion is the software. Clothes are the nourishment; fashion is the sugar – that little extra sweetness to the starch diet of existence — the passion that comes with a little difference, a little sense of competition or exclusion. There doesn't need to be fashion fashion: influencers, movie stars, and what Anna Wintour says should be fashion. But instead, this everyday thing that plays out in the schoolyard, on the street, or in the nightclub is just that little extra thing that catches someone's attention and makes them look twice. At that moment, they see you, and you feel acknowledgment. There's a rush in your body, and you think, Wow. This quotidian form of fashion is something that fascinates me a lot. 

That is why I continuously use fashion as this thing I think we should cherish more. But at the same time, I think we should be more skeptical about how it is preyed upon and used by large economic systems. Capitalism, a condition of our time, entangles us so firmly that we do things that we do not necessarily agree with. In the realm of fashion, we judge people; we exclude people; we backtalk people; we give people side looks. We do tiny, subtle things that we don't necessarily agree with, but it happens through the realm of fashion. We must be more conscious about these aspects of how fashion operates in our everyday lives, and I try to put emphasis on this when talking to students. I want them to see the economic, socio-political, and psychological world in which they will use their creativity and spend their lives. So they can be more aware, understanding, and knowledgeable about the tools they are using in their design and creative practice.

Shonagh: In your work, you look at the function in fashion of who is "in" and who is "out." What have you found the power of this delineation in fashion to be?

Otto: One can argue that, of course, the distinction between in and out is not as sharp as it was a generation ago or when the fashion system was centralized around fashion capitals, specific brands, designers, and a few media outlets. What we call the "system" had a much stronger power in defining the direction of fashion and what is in and out of season. 

At the same time, I'm fascinated that we say anything goes these days, but if you look at the school corridors, there is still a sense of what is hot, new, and the latest thing. What is that thing that gives status? What makes it attractive? What is it that we are striving to own and display? The idea of in and out helps to show that there is still a conflict. There is this inherent fear that is still there and is still very present. When we say fashion is about self-expression, we must be aware that there is a keen sense of status and exclusion between what works and what doesn't work within many different social realms.

Fashion is not for everyone. As much as we want to make fashion inclusive, we also have to be aware that it is, perhaps by definition, a phenomenon that as much as it produces "in" groups, it also creates "out" groups. As much as it lifts and makes someone feel special in a circumstance, another person will not feel special. I want to point to that tension and the challenge for us, as designers and practitioners in this field. If we want to make fashion more inclusive and more generous, there is a paradox going on that we need to be aware of. If it was to be more inclusive, would it still be fashion as we define it? If it was totally inclusive, is there inflation in its value? The more inclusive it is, the more it spreads out amongst people. Will it deflate in value? That is a tension and conflict we have to be aware of.

Shonagh: In your work, you also reimagine the role of the fashion auteur. How do you envisage it for the future?

Otto: Firstly, with the hacking aspect, the basic idea would be broader participation, where the auteur would be more of an educator. How could the designer not withdraw into the mysticism of an artistic role? How could they not become a figurehead for the brand? Instead, they would be someone who tries to reach its users and educate, like a coach or a doctor or a healer. There is something about how the auteur lives within fashion now; they are someone who comes with dictates: I'm popular so you better buy my stuff. We buy a part of their fame, an association with them. What the designer does there is prey on people's lousy self-esteem. The fashion designer becomes someone who, on the one hand, has to lift people's self-esteem, but at the same time, if people were satisfied, they would not necessarily come back. So the designer continuously exists in a situation where they need to provide the drugs of fashion to people because otherwise, they'd be unemployed. At its foundation, it is a corrupting system. 

So, I'm questioning this relationship that we take for granted with the auteur. Can we imagine the fashion designer being more of a coach, or a healer, learning from doctors, or someone who sees their client, their patient, and asks: where does it hurt? What are your problems and pains? What can we do about your loneliness? Can we try to work with that rather than being a figurehead for something that radiates coolness, and people try to buy into it without seeing the user. We invest in education, but we have no focus groups; there are no user studies. As designers, we don't talk to anyone about their issues and why they should buy our designs. In much fashion education, it seems the idea of producing fashion means to build an ego strong enough for others to buy into. Unfortunately, this is where we are with so much cultural production within fashion. And it's fascinating looking at the other design fields where it's all about user engagement and participation. How is it that we don't even have room for that? All the fashion system looks to one type of fashion designer. How can we not have a richer continuum or palette of options for being a fashion designer where you work closer to people's suffering? Where you try to help them rather than building your own greatness.

Shonagh: Is there a point in history where we lost our autonomy regarding our clothing choices?

Otto: The fashion historians have to help me here, but of course, there have always been people looking at how royalty or celebrities are dressing. Not everybody was sewing or making their own clothes. Instead, styles have been defined from the outside all through the ages. 

I'm not going to speculate necessarily about how and where this happened. To me, it's more interesting that we live in a time where democracy, agency, and inclusion are the leading words of our culture. We also speak of this in economic terms; there are ideas of the market using the agency of choices. Individual agency is hailed as the way we should be – the values that are guiding our culture. So the idea of increased agency is there. However, in the world of fashion, as in many other fields, under our economic system, money buys you agency; money is freedom – actionable freedom. The more money I have the more I can do what I want. Money means agency. The poor cannot afford to do as much as the rich. 

If we say that fashion is about identity and self-expression, rich people have more identity; they have room for more self-expression, a richer language, and a richer way of being, expressing, sensing, and participating in the world than the poor. So, when we say H&M and other fast fashion brands democratize fashion because it's cheaper and more accessible for on-trend looks, do we really offer people more agency when they shop? Sure, they can still “vote with their dollars.” But if we compare to other design fields, the idea of agency is that people have the capabilities to engage more freely in the world. Fashion is not about making people more capable of doing things. It only means selling them more stuff. So they may have richer forms of expression but not necessarily have the tools and capabilities to explore a richer or more meaningful sense of self. 

When I started this work, it was about how to reclaim the sewing machine to feel that we can repair, update, and remix things we have. It was about reviving garments that are dying in the back of the wardrobe and are going to go to recycling. How can we use those garments to educate ourselves and inquire or acquire skills through cultivation? At the same time, I thought this tension between clothes and fashion was interesting. Some of these skills in sewing make me able to sew a shirt or a pair of pants, but will they become the fashion? What is the relationship between what I sew and make and this magic that happens when someone sees me and puts me in connection to the things that they value higher in society? That's where I felt this interesting tension happen. How do I foster not only the capabilities of sewing and remaking things with the materials of used clothes but also engage with the more mystical, magical parts of what we think of as fashion? These are not necessarily the same thing. 

Agency is not only about how I can sew things, or I am an army of one that can build things in the DIY sense. I see it more as this relationship between the making skills and the skills that build my self-esteem, like being seen, and having a sense of self-authorship — developing a way to use the realm of fashion to shape my sense of being.

"Vital Vogue” - experiments in mapping fashion as biosocial energy, 2018

Shonagh: This is interesting to me and something I have thought a lot about on a personal level. You have explored the realm of fashion as addiction in your book Suffering in Style: A discussion about fashion, addiction, and endless aesthetic cravings. What was the impetus behind the book?

Otto: It also started with my personal experience. Sometimes if I had a bad day at work, or something didn't work out well, on the way home, I would just take a quick peek in H&M or another store. I would get myself something small, and I would feel a little bit better about myself. I could have gotten some sugar, a Snickers or a bag of gummy bears, but instead, I went to a fashion store because that was where my interest was. I thought, wow, I'm using consumption to quell my disappointment; I was subconsciously drawn into that habit. I started to question how consuming fashion gives me a sense of control when I feel low about myself. Buying something new means imagining myself as someone slightly different or better. And the outlet for this emotional rush is so close to me; it's just within reach on my way to the subway. 

At the same time, I was going to Dharma Punx, where Josh Korda is the Dharma teacher. I started thinking I should talk to Josh. That conversation became, firstly, the little book Buddha Style and then the second one Suffering in Style: A discussion about fashion, addiction, and endless aesthetic cravings. And then, I combined these into what became The Dharma of Fashion: A Buddhist Approach to Our Life with Clothes, which has a bit more of my contextualization. Its idea is centered around a Buddhist approach to our life with clothes. From a Buddhist perspective, life is to be dissatisfied, to live with a sense of suffering in the world – life will not be fulfilled in the way we imagined it to be. Slowly, we are approaching aging, sickness, and death, yet we try to ignore this. In my perspective, we use fashion to be engaged in the world, to feel in control of our world. But at the same time we deny aging, sickness, and death, as they are not present in the realm of fashion, where everyone is always youthful and beautiful, there are only perfect bodies, and there are no sick bodies. Fashion saturates our culture with a denial of our mortality. So the books ask questions around the topic: What would be a wiser way to be with clothes. Could we reflect more on how we use clothing to escape these truths of our awaiting doom? 

At the same time, they also highlighted a tension around what we do with desire. Asking: how do we live wisely with desire? Not in the sense of who should be ascetic and just say no to everything. Should we deny all desire, and wear uniform or overall for the rest of our lives? Well we're not going to die from doing that. But we would lose a sense of aliveness; we will not taste some of the sugar of life. What is a wise way of being with this sugar, with the desire and consumption of fashion? How can we still celebrate it as intensity of lived experience and a sense of growth, personally and emotionally, that can happen through clothing and fashion? At the same time, we have to not fall into the trap when the market is saturated with cheap, accessible, and meaningless garments that are just a click away, and as soon as I'm having a bad day, I can just go clicking a little bit, and I will feel better about myself. These small fixes pile up with a sense of shame in our wardrobes. So how are we to relate to this? This is something that these short books tried to address.

However, they don't make fashion a villain, which I think is, unfortunately, happening a lot in sustainability discourse. We blame everything on fashion, that fashion is always wrong. Fashion is an illusion, it's corrupted, it's capitalism, it’s exploitation, and all that. Yes, it's so many things, but it's also this little sugar. So how do we make sure not to lose this sweetness and aliveness when trying to make the system more sustainable and make fashion more inclusive?

Shonagh: I am interested in how fashion positions itself as a space of self-expression. You have touched upon this; how do you think it can be a way to celebrate the spice of life separate from the agenda of capitalism?

Otto: Many people look at my critique against the auteur and ask, is everybody just going to sew their own clothes? What will happen to real fashion designers? My response would be that home cooking is not threatening the restaurant industry. Instead, the more I home cook, the better cook I become. The better I study cookbooks, the more I will appreciate well-made food and pay for it, too. These are two different things to start with; expertise exists, and we praise expertise; there's a realm for that; it's important in human culture. It's not that I am trying to undermine that. Still, it's about educating and cultivating a more democratic sensibility to participate and feel that you are training your taste buds for the pleasures fashion can give us.

I often compare fashion to mixtapes and how we try to express ourselves through playlists. Other artists have made the songs, but the mix can say something about me. Something about my mood, taste, and approach to the world comes through in a mixtape. A mixtape can be some of the most intimate things we can share with others; something that is not just on the surface of me will be communicated to someone else. We must take for granted that mass-produced things make our sense of identity and self-expression. But hopefully, a sense of unicity and personality comes out in my mix of these things. 

But more than that: putting together a mixtape and having that agency is also the start of a band. I will start by making covers of the songs I love. That is the process of me learning to become a musician. It can be crappy musically, but an energy comes out of that, and a rich, rich sense of self-expression comes out of it. 

What I feel we are not so good at speaking about when it comes to identity, self-expression, and so on is that we often say either you have an identity or don't have an identity. Either you can self-express, or you don't. How do you get better at these things? Can you become better at identity? Can you become better at self-expression? In my opinion, you can; we just don't often talk about how we improve our skills in articulating identity or the richness of the vocabulary we can use to self-express. We cultivate more of a sense of self-expression through the way we use clothing.

We also have to recognize that fashion does amazing things. Joshua Miller has this beautiful paper where he writes about fashion and democracy and how fashion, at best, when compared to authoritarian and traditionalist societies, does allow for some social mobility. It does allow for the cultivation of tolerance, in that we see that people are different people, have other wishes, and want to live different lives. We can see that in the way they dress. It also produces some sense of community. We can connect to other types of communities by using clothes. These opportunities are not necessarily there in the same way in societies that hold back self-expression and where fashion does not thrive in the way it does in a liberal society.

But we need to see how we use clothes in self-expression means more than I have an existing and ready-made self that just wants to be communicated. As if “The Book of Otto” is already written, and I just need to put a cover on it. What fashion helps me do is experiment with my self too. With fashion I can write another “Book of Otto.” If I engage in this and play along with fashion, I will discover other aspects of Otto that I did not know. I will experiment with myself innew ways. Another Otto may emerge, other than I knew of when I woke up this morning. People also use fashion for self-transgression. I can use clothes to be someone radically different from what I am in my everyday life. I can dress up for this club to live out a part of myself that I otherwise do not dare, and I did not perhaps even know that it was there. 

Fashion can give this immense sense of growth that I can use to transgress myself. I can become someone radically different from my parents, my partner, or even my closest friends thought I was. This radical possibility is something we should not forget. It may be part of the richest experiences of aliveness people have in life. Yes, identity and self-expression are important when thinking of fashion, but the radical potential is so much more.

Shonagh: That is a great segue because I've heard you run a workshop where you ask participants to bring clothing they have bought but never wear. What happens next?

Otto: There's been much discussion in the fashion sustainability community around working with memories and stories of garments. I love the work of Emily Spivack and her book Worn Stories. I think memories and stories of garments can help us cherish clothing in new ways. At the same time, I thought it was fascinating how this is just one perspective of the way we use garments. 

I was more interested in the unworn stories than the worn stories. By this I mean the hopes and dreams people put into garments when they bought them, the hopes and dreams that never played out. It has worked well to get students thinking of the double lives that garments live, in our dreams as much as in our lived lives. Especially at Parsons, when students were packing up their life where they lived before and imagining a life they would have in New York. They brought specific garments that they thought they were going to dress in. Then those garments remained unused. Why? What was it that didn't happen? Or what social group didn't you find? What was it that felt awkward about these old clothes? Some students take the easy way of getting out of that question and say “I grew out of this one.” I think the interesting part is: what is this hoped self that we project into these garments we buy? We think; I will become this other person, I will boost this aspect of myself, and I'm going to live this rich sweet life in this garment. And then it doesn't happen. Why? What is it that held me back? You have that dream inside, the hunger for that life, and you bought this garment in the hope that this person you envisaged would come out, but something smothered that self. What made you not become that person you hoped to be? 

We made what we called The Museum of Smothered Selves from these exercises. We built small cardboard monuments to those lost selves. The stories might be: I bought this choker, a bold nail polish, or thigh boots. They were things people had bought in the hope of being able to show it off and become this image of themselves, a phantom self. But this self got squashed through a social dymanic, or shame, or whatever. Overall, I found these garments produced such a rich discussion about how we use clothes for dreams. They are vehicles for these journeys towards our goals, and how they so often also fail, unfortunately. I ask how do we as designers take these dreams more seriously? Because people want to go on that journey. How can you serve that journey for people rather than focus on your own authorship and yourself as a designer? 

Monuments from the "Museum of Smothered Selves"

Shonagh: Thank you so much, Otto, for talking to me today. My final question is, what's your fashion utopia? What would it be like if you could wake up in Otto's world tomorrow?

Otto: This is tricky. Firstly, there will be a wide variety of roles for a fashion designer and a fashion consumer. There will be many different ways in which one can engage in and with fashion. 

I often play with the idea that one can think of the fashion store as a ladder of engagement. At the entrance, you buy ready-to-wear, as we have in the usual fashion stores. Perhaps a little further in, there is a repair center where you can borrow sewing machines and spare parts: there are buttons and other things you can engage with. If you come a little further, you get help and assistance where people can give you advice and help you improve your skills. Further still, you become a co-designer of the collection and thus engage more deeply in every aspect of design. So you have a depth or levels of engagement. You could remain a passive consumer, and that is of course fine, but there's also a richer interface between the design studio, the classical auteur, and the passive consumer. And there is a whole landscape of ways for them to reach each other. And not least, there would also be a fashion therapist that would help me talk through my deeper dreams of what I would want to become with my dressed self. Utopia has to be a place of dreams. My dreams, not the designer’s dreams. There are many more ways of being with fashion than following in the shadow of the auteur.