1 Anti-Factory's Stephanie Syjuco
Black-market babe
Issue #24
Anti-Factory designer talks about the politics of her handmade fashion
By Caralyn Green
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 3:01pm
While Stephanie Syjuco’s not scribing her graduate thesis at Stanford or exhibiting futurist botanical prints at the Whitney Museum, she’s working on Anti-Factory (anti-factory.com), her one-woman house of fashion launched in early 2004. Syjuco, a 31-year-old San Francisco-based artist, handcrafts reconstructed garments from vintage fabrics, trims and buttons, but advises that her designs aren’t just about looking unique — they’re about fusing art and politics in a decidedly DIY way.
What’s the whole ideology behind Anti-Factory?
It started when I had an art idea to see if I could make every single item of clothing that I wear, just to get out of the system, because there’s a dark side to all of the cheap clothing that’s in circulation. We’re paying all this money for things while people are only getting pennies for their labor overseas, but the reality is that we’re capable of crafting our own products.
How did you initially get interested in the anti-sweatshop movement?
I’m originally from the Philippines, and a lot of clothing is made in Southeast Asia. I’ve always been aware of that if I was born at the wrong place and the wrong time I could have been making the clothes that I wear. I feel there are other ways of being political than traditional activism. If someone purchases an Anti-Factory garment, in the end their money does not go back into the system and it doesn’t feed a corporation; the money goes to support a small business.
I noticed that most garments come in small, medium, or large, but what about bigger girls? Do you do custom designs?
Because I work with a lot of knits, things stretch larger than actually said. On some of the garments I list bust sizes, and I have a bunch that go up to a 44 bust. As for custom designs, it’s too hard because usually I use whatever is at hand and see how I can re-work existing things. It also helps keep the prices low if I don’t do custom. I try to budget what I think is a reasonable compensation for my time and labor. It’s my own version of fair trade.
Do you see fashion as an extension of your visual art?
Right now I’m finding images online of marketplaces in the Philippines and thinking about how black-market items circumvent regular flows of capitalism — they take money away from global multinational corporations. The companies don’t control bootleg items, and in a sense, Anti-Factory is trying to do the same thing on a much lesser scale. Essentially, I’ve always thought that every DIY person is participating in something wonderfully political, even if they’re not conscious of it.
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