On the occasion of the URBX Festival organized by the city of Roubaix, Anti_Fashion project gave carte blanche to Sophie Bramly to follow young people in the neighborhoods, in order to show a city and its youth in full effervescence, creative and combative.

Since 2019, the photographer has been following this youth, discovering Roubaix through their eyes, finding reminiscences of the creative energies she experienced in the Bronx at the beginning of the birth of Hip-Hop. 

She says : "As a foreigner to Roubaix, all I knew about it was the anxiety-inducing picture painted by the media: a succession of alarming figures focusing on poverty, a catastrophic unemployment rate, rising delinquency...

Until 2019, when I discovered an alternative landscape that quickly swept me away.

Through the Anti_Fashion Project association, I met dozens of young people from the neighborhoods, functioning as tribes, finding their strength as much in the group as in the creation of upcycled clothes, with which they free themselves from any notion of fashion. Here too, clothing is not used to claim a higher social status through the accumulation of logos, but to stage an eccentric code, which draws on all kinds of wardrobe to achieve flamboyance. Clothes are an outlet for their need for extravagance, a palliative for a complex entry into what is so strangely called working life. Although the group is a priori heterogeneous, differences are abolished: neither gender, nor religion, nor skin color, nor social background seem to have any place in the equation, and it's hard to say why.

I chose to follow them, to discover Roubaix through their eyes. As I watched them, it seemed to me that this new generation from Roubaix was announcing something formidably contemporary and promising for the future."

Anti_Fashion project is a platform of expression that aims to highlight and support all dynamics, initiatives, ideas and players contributing to the renewal of fashion, and furthermore, to a more virtuous economy. Since today all the sectors are trying to reinvent themselves. Anti_Fashion Project is an initiative open for everyone, in which all the actors, manufacturers, designers; entrepreneurs academicians, students and citizens can meet in order to exchange views, collaborate, propose and create together new projects and networks. It’s a participatory platform, a research lab that enables collaborations based on different skills, and the creation of new projects during Workshops, Rencontres and Mentoring programs.