Independent Fashion Designers of Madrid

On Friday, Decemer 11, the workshop of Community Garment Production went out into Madrid to scout the independent fashion designer sections of the city.

We began at Plaza de Dos de Mayo, looking for independent designers represented in small shops. We then went to Calle de Espiritu Santo, Calle Luna, Calle Corredera Alta de San Pablo, and others. 

At each shop, we asked the shop attendant about the person made the clothes in the shop and where the clothes were made. Usually, they said they carried local fashion designers, and sometimes the clothes were made in Madrid. In one shop, the clothes were made downstairs, under the shop!  In all cases, the shop attendant was a friend of the designers, was on the team to create the clothing , or was the designer! So we believed the answers to our questions are significant to our research.

We asked the person in each shop whether they or the designers might be interested in knowing more about open source tools for the fashion indusry. Generally they gave positive responses, and they were quite interested in having us contact them via email to further the discussion.

Using the email and contact information gathered during today's excursion, we will create a designer dictionary and use it to create a community for exploring the use of open source tools for independent fashion in Madrid.

Ginger Coons, a mentor for Interactivos?'15, with the assistance of several fashion designers attending Interactivos?'15, has created a draft questionnaire to discover more about how we can serve the fashion design community.  This questionnaire will be improved and used for gathering data to determine which tools are needed in addition to Valentina.