A streetwise curtain call
Runway as a civic tool. Fashion as systems change.
SHEBANG is an annual, street-level fashion runway and a laboratory where waste is re-imagined into culture, employment, and policy. It is an official entry portal into the ReclAIME’d 100 Trashion Global Club and a working tool inside IMAGI-NATION’s Residence for Systems Change: RECLAIMED / WASTE-TO-ENERGY. On this runway, materials become story, and spectators become participants in redesigning an economy that works for all life
SHEBANG emerges from the Buntu Wellbeing Experience Network (BWEN) and the IMAGI-NATION ecosystem. We begin with relations: to makers and markets, to rivers and soils, to wearers and the more-than-human world. Relating to culture as curriculum and runways as civic classrooms, rehearsing a different economy in public—one measured not only by output, but by trust built, skills transferred, waste diverted, and habitats restored. A stewardship ethos that is simple: build what works, share it openly, and return IP to nature.
We began by asking a simple question: What if fashion remembered its kinship obligations—to makers, wearers, water, soil, and the more-than-human world? The answer became a pathway: use the runway as a civic tool to repair relationships and rehearse a different economy in public.
THE 2025 RUNWAY...BACK TO THE STREETS
From Kikubamutwe to the world, SHEBANG returns the runway to the people. Pavements become catwalks, classrooms become ateliers, neighborhoods become supply chain theaters . Street-level stages, open workshops, and public pledges transform spectators into participants. Every garment is a brief for policy. Every model, a messenger.
This is where circular fashion meets civic choreography. Tailors, youth, market traders, artists, and city leaders co-design live: repairing, remaking, and revealing the true story of our clothes. We measure what matters waste diverted, skills transferred, wages dignified, water and carbon saved; so beauty arrives with proof and policy can follow practice.
Kikubamutwe is our pulse and our promise: local action, shared tools, global learning. The runway is a commons; the audience, a coalition. Come stand in the slipstream of possibility—help stitch an economy that works for all life.
