Abstract

Frau Fiber’s Mission to Stop Shopping and Start Sewing investigates how fictionalization can expand historical narratives; analyzes participatory performance as a pedagogical model; and explores hybrid authorship and fabricated narratives as challenges to capitalism. This research examines how strategies such as satire, socialist labor iconography, and performance of labor can critique both capitalist and socialist labor systems.
This thesis features the work of Frau Fiber: my long-term performative alter ego, founder of the Sewing Rebellion, and co-collaborator of the Institute 4 Labor Generosity Workers & Uniforms (ILGWU). The framework of projects forms a participatory movement resisting the exploitative practices of the global garment industry. Created by me in 2006, Frau Fiber is a fictional former East German garment worker turned textile superhero who embodies the aesthetics, ethics, and bureaucratic tone of socialist labor culture within contemporary neoliberal contexts. Through this persona and as her biographer and archivist, I investigate the intersections of performance art, fiber and materials studies, skill sharing, labor history, while critiquing global apparel production systems.
The Sewing Rebellion and related projects from the archive disrupt the culture of disposability inherent in fast fashion, reframing sewing as an act of resistance and solidarity with global garment workers. Drawing from early 20 Century garment worker strikes in the United States and East German socialist brigades, the rebellion aligns with feminist art traditions that position domestic skills as tools for political intervention.
The Sewing Rebellion operated for thirteen years as a socially engaged performance offering free monthly workshops in multiple locations around the United States that taught sewing, mending, and making as acts of resistance to the fast fashion system. This work was supported by public libraries, universities, LGBTQAI+ centers, museums, galleries, and community groups.