Beyond Fast and High Fashion: A Third Way of Making.
What if the future of fashion is not about producing more, but producing differently? Blue Monkey explores a third model beyond fast fashion and high fashion: a local system connecting plants, discarded textiles and people.
Instead of separating agriculture, production and consumption, we bring them closer together. Colour is grown locally, waste becomes material, and citizens become part of the making process. Blue Monkey asks whether fashion can move from a global supply chain towards a local network of resources, knowledge and participation.
The City as Field and Material.
Blue Monkey grows indigo across Amsterdam and experiments with vertical hydroponics to bring colour production into small urban spaces. But growing colour is only one part of the challenge. Producing textile fibre locally is far more difficult. Instead, we treat discarded clothing and textile waste as an urban resource — a material already produced and already present in the city.
These recovered textiles are combined with locally grown indigo and transformed into new garments. The city becomes both the field and the source of material: a place to grow, collect, dye and make.
Beyond Capital: The Value of Involvement.
But building a local production system needs more than local materials. It needs people. Indigo plants distributed across the city depend on citizens who help water, care for and harvest them. Blue Monkey uses MKY, a blockchain-based project token, to recognise these contributions and connect participation back to the project.
MKY tokens are given as a reward for different forms of involvement — from watering, harvesting and indigo extraction to donating materials. The idea is that the value of the token grows together with the value created by the project. Rather than asking only how much capital is needed to make something, we ask another question: what can we produce through involvement?
By connecting biological resources, urban waste, digital tools and human participation, Blue Monkey experiments with a new infrastructure for craft in an urban context — one in which participation itself becomes part of the production system.
