Collective Description
Fashion House is a collective project that speculates on the spatial implications of a redesigned fashion industry by envisioning a pan-European cooperative and regulatory body to address the damaging effects of fast fashion within the contemporary global fashion industry across five former post-industrialized cities — Berlin, Marseille, Rotterdam, Valencia, and Zurich — that are emerging fashion hubs that together form the Red Thread. The Red Thread - like the Blue Banana preceding it - is an imagined discontinuous urbanized corridor connecting these five cities - which have made deliberate municipal efforts to shift their economies towards creative industries - that operates as a confederation throughout their provincial regions that encourages intercity exchange of resources, services, and expertise to enable brands to operate within the “Made in Europe” framework, while simultaneously regionalizing production and consumption chains within a decentralized network towards the European Union’s goal for a climate-neutral future by 2050.

Fashion House challenges the existing paradigm of the contemporary global fashion industry by articulating the necessity for mutual cooperation between all participants that is integrated into an emphasis on regionalized production networks that curtail the distances traveled and minimize the complexities and vulnerabilities associated with the procurement, manufacturing, and consumption of fashion products. Within the cooperative, regional brands synergistically supply, produce, and retail for each other within their immediate locales or in remote European regions and everywhere in between. To facilitate cross-fashion brand cooperation and ensure minimum

standards to achieve Europe’s broader ambitions, Fashion House introduces a certification system that establishes a single baseline criteria for how regionalized and sustainable production operates - from production-quality standards to garment sizing, from protections of craft knowledge to authenticating resources’ provenance among others - while also providing small and medium-sized brands economic incentives, industry services, and consultancy to grow their businesses while also meeting the criteria for 2050.

Fashion House operates physical locations across all five cities in the Red Thread, recalibrating the spaces in which the products and services from the future fashion industry - including made-to-order production, certification facilities, showrooms and wholesale retail, and training - exist, while also providing an attractive destination in each city that functions as both public disseminator and gathering-place, and collective workshop for fashion practitioners.

Fashion House considers the spaces of a reconfigured fashion industry across the Red Thread at all scales - ranging from the components within Fashion House locations (S), the building types and programs associated with production and consumption supply-chains (M), the civic presence of the fashion industry’s extended [network/community] within urban centers (L), to the extensive repositioning of supply chains and knowledge-sharing networks (XL), all the while framed by the redefinition of a “house of fashion” (OS).