Accidentally (or not) madly stylish dormroom cities

Accidentally (or not) madly stylish dormroom cities is a project about using fashion as a liberating tool while being a working class teenager in the slums of barcelona.

In the late 80's, Thirstin Howl the 3rd and Rack-Lo, obsessed with Polo Ralph Lauren, start stealing the luxury clothing they can't afford in Brooklyn and found the so-called Lo Life culture. At the same time, stolen goods are sold in a car’s trunk, belonging to a man named Dapper Dan. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, trucks from El Corte Inglés are stolen, and all kind of products are bought later on in the peripherial cities by lower class citzens. Alongside, the underground culture emerges in the US with the rise of artists like Nas, who start spreading the word about life in the suburbs. Through the production of high-budget video clips that mixed power, luxury and characteristic elements of the suburbs’ aesthetic, big record companies start capitalizing and romnticizing the narrative leaving the marginal reality behind.

In line with the rise of that hip-hop culture in the 90s, the Lo Life robberies became key in the process of bringing high fashion brands to the working class, Dapper Dan ended up printing the logos of luxury brands, taking them over and creating his own business —which was at first condemned and eventually embraced as a commercial opportunity by these same brands—, and my mother ended up buying the camera that I would later use to shoot these photos in one of those stolen trucks.

Because of the belief that it belongs to the upper-class, fashion is left behind by the institutions and cannot develop nowadays in the suburbs of Spain. Paulo, the fashion and pattern-making student from the outskirts, and his friends, face a clear dichotomy in which —despite loving the streets they frequent, the socio-economic situation and the culture that being born there has offered them— feel forced to imagine their future as artists outside the suburbs; outside the dormroom city. I, for my part, am currently portraying the actions they perform as a complaint to this situation —the backstage of self-organised runways showing off clothing lines highly attatched to this topic— in what has so far developed as a newspaper of images that spread this concept, travelling through the trains of the outskirts of Barcelona like every other newspaper.