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Archival Poetics of Fashion Labels

Abstract

In this article, I introduce Labeltry — a poetic and critical method / practice that reworks discarded fashion labels into micro-texts of resistance and reflection. By collecting, cutting, and reassembling these fragments of consumer language, I engage in a form of poiesis that exposes the affective, semiotic, and ideological codes woven into fashion’s surfaces. In dialogue with Barthes’ semiotics, Ahmed’s affective economies, and Latour’s material agency, my practice becomes what Athena Athanasiou calls a “minor poiesis”— a subtle yet insistent re-articulation of meaning from the underside of consumer culture. Here, the label shifts from silent tag to performative archive, unsettling the smoothness of the commodity and inviting new ways of reading identity, value, and desire.