XEROXED x LOUFP

‘All Work is Women’s Work’ is a project by Library of Unruly Fashion Practices in collaboration with XEROXED. It is an exploration of feminist labour history and the power of radical publishing. For this collaboration, we were asked to create a series of wearables and artworks starting from a selection of archival material belonging to The Seamstresses’ Union, one of the first all-female labour unions in the Netherlands.

Date

December 2025

VOLUMES

Contributors

‘All Work is Women’s Work: On The Seamstresses’ Union’s Radical Publishing Practices in Early 20th-Century Amsterdam’, is a collaborative project by Library of Unruly Fashion Practices (Hanka van der Voet), XEROXED and Beau Bertens.

The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices is an emerging project—a library in flux—that seeks to platform anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches to fashion, textiles, clothing, and identity. By challenging capitalist patriarchal knowledge systems, it interrogates the conventions of fashion education: what we teach, how we teach it, and the broader dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination. The library also explores publishing as an artistic practice, engaging critically with archives through acts of (re)publication and reinterpretation. It treats the archive not as a site of knowledge retrieval, but as one of knowledge production. Its inaugural project, All Work is Women’s Work, recovers the radical publishing history of Amsterdam’s Seamstresses’ Union.

*All Work Is Women’s Work* was featured in the group exhibition *No Place for Mannequins: Remaking the Fashion Archive*, curated by Dr Todd Robinson and Dr Ricarda Bigolin at UTS Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

All Work Is Women’s Work uncovers the forgotten story of De Naaistersbond (The Seamstresses’ Union), one of the first all-female labour unions in the Netherlands, and their radical use of print media to challenge patriarchal and capitalist systems in the early 20th century. This project delves into the struggles and triumphs of working-class women who fought for fair wages, dignity, and autonomy. Through their newspaper, De Naaistersbode (“The Seamstresses’ Courier”), the union created a vital communication channel that connected women across Amsterdam, amplifying their voices and fostering solidarity in the face of exploitation.

No items found.

All Work Is Women’s Work is a feminist intervention into the archives, drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s assertion that “documentation is a feminist project.” It brings to light the radical publishing practices of The Seamstresses’ Union, situating them within a broader history of leftist and anarchist print culture. In a Cixousian act of “writing the body,” the project reinscribes the seamstresses' struggle into the present through the body of the text, the fabric of the city, and the materiality of dress.

By mapping key sites of labour activism, republishing archival materials through XEROXED wearable publications, and providing a sticker to mark these hidden histories in Amsterdam's urban landscape, this project reimagines the archive as a space of “active recollection” rather than a static repository. The material is sourced from De Naaistersbode (The Seamstresses’ Courier), published between 15 October 1898 and 15 February 1901, collected at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.