How to Party Like an Alumni...

A group of recent Wesleyan grads living the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York hosted the Freegan Fashion Show #3: Green Goddess Dressing last month as a fundraiser party to benefit the Freegan Bike Workshop, a free workshop in the basement of the 123 Community Space in neighboring Bed-Sty. The party raised a little over $400, a whole month's rent for the workshop! Good job kids: partying as community service. Several Wesleyan alums and students have been involved with the Freegan Bike Workshop for many months, using it to make repairs and connections with other like-minded bicycling enthusiasts.

What is a 'freegan,' you might ask? Well, here's the short answer from a major website for many freegans in New York and the U.S.: "Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed." If you have the slightest idea of some of the stereotypes about ("crunchy," "activisty," "anti-capitalist") Wesleyan students, I think you'll be able to understand the appeal freeganism might have for some Wes alums just from this brief description. But, back to the show...

In preparation for the party, fashion show participants made their own clothes to flaunt on the runway out of recycled and found materials at one of several clothes-making workshops hosted by alternative fashion designers and freegan folks over the week. Designer atom Cianfarani of the Gowanus Studio Space hosted one such workshop, giving advice to a group of freegans on how to use various clothes-making implements. Cianfarani specializes in the area of recycling discarded materials into wearable fabrics, using the most unusual "signature material" in fashion today: recycled bike inner tubes. Cianfarani's website describes using the material: "Even though the process of transforming bicycle rubber into useable fabric is arduous, we to create our signature material for our commitment to the environment. We save 2 tons of rubber from entering our landfills every year (and this number is growing)... This process of creating fabric from what most would consider garbage, speaks of Gaelyn and Cianfarani's commitment to preserve while creating."

The flyer for the party is as colorful as the clothes. It reads: "Celebrate this spring with a new line of Freegan fashion at the Freegan Fashion Show #3: Green Goddess Dressing! Our self-made models will walk the plywood runway in one-of-a-kind handmade costumes spun out of scavenged scrap material. Hip digs recently dug out of college dumpsters, fabric from the 1950s recovered from a Park Slope housing renovation, all stylishly assembled with the guidance of environmental clothing designers from New York City. This is a night to reject commercial control of our self-images and reclaim pride in the beauty of our creativity."

The party and freegan fashion show will be repeated every few months to raise more funds for the Freegan Bike Workshop, so look out for those flyers. And start collecting odds and ends to recycle into lavish fashions at the next freegan clothes-making workshop! 

See also:

More about Freeganism:  www.freegan.info

123 Community Space / Freegan Bike Workshop: http://123communityspace.org/

Gowanus Studio Space: http://www.gowanusstudio.org/

Gaelyn and Cianfarani Eco-Fashion Designers: www.gaelyn.com/materials.php