Comic Relief

A few years ago I worked on an art project called Peoples Jeans. The site isn't up anymore, but archive.org has most of it here.
The idea was to create a business that generated capital out of the surplus product of clothing manufacturers. If you remember, about 5 years ago blue jeans with machine-produced holes in them were all the rage. We thought that people might prefer genuine holes to the artificial ones. We also realized that there was a seriously under-utilized form of potential labor we could capitalize upon: the lived experience of the worker. In today's marketplace authenticity is one of the most valued commodities. And who's more authentic than sweatshop workers, prisoners, or urban youth? Our idea was to have the people producing the jeans (and other people whose authenticity was being wasted) wear them as they worked, producing a line of pre-worn apparel that had authentic, lived experience worn right into the product. My favorite part was that you would get a little baseball card with the picture and story of the person who wore your jeans. And also, a "portion of profits" would be put back into the communities that wore the clothes, so consumers could feel as if they were actually combating sweatshop labor (or poor prison conditions, urban poverty, etc.) by purchasing the product (click on "Company Vision"). As a business model, I think it would have worked. The art project part of the idea was to go to a bunch of fashion trade shows and pitch our repulsively offensive product to manufacturers and produce a documentary film of it, but unfortunately we couldn't come by any funding.

I thought this project was relevant to a lot of the issues we've been discussing, so I thought I'd post about it. When I went to see if the website was still up though, I saw this.
I don't know what's going on there. Maybe whoever bought the domain name thought the project was real.

Edit: found another image from the site: