a few months ago a local group organized the first YOMANGO
fashion show in barcelona.
Its july 5th of 2002. The end of the season sales are at
full swing and the area is full of the weekend shopping
crowd. The fashion show
took place at Breshka, one of the most popular stores
geared towards teenagers. The YOMANGO models cross the
imaginary frontier between the store and
the street dressed in huge mouths, eating everything that
comes their way. Giant forks push merchandise around from
one shelf to another. This
arbitrary frenzy, creates chaos in the store, and a
reckless happiness in the hearts of the public present. A
criminilizing media campaign, using the police as a main
source,
is cleverly countered by YOMANGO's communications strategy:
while newspapers report: "alternative youth and
antiglobalization activists vandalize and cause damage
in Barcelona's city center", YOMANGO exhibited publicly, as
part of a famous cultural festival, the rediculous result
of the fashion show's 'expropriation': an ugly blue dress,
on
sale for 9 euros and 50 cents. Not even a misdemenor
according to spanish law.


10 style tips for a more YOMANGO life
because you can't BUY happiness

1. YOMANGO [Mango is a popular Spanish clothing chain.
YOMANGO, in spanish slang means 'I steal'. 'manga' -
spanish for sleave, hence 'mangar', to sleave, to steal]
is a brand name whos principal objective, as is the case
with all important brands, is not the selling of things,
but the mass promoting of a life-style. Specifically, the
promoting
of shoplifting as a form of civil disobedience and direct
action against multinational coorporations.

2. Dare to desire: YOMANGO is your style: risky,
innovative. It is the articulate proliferation of creative
gestures.
YOMANGO is not about theft, its about magic, about the
liberation of desire and inteligence cristalized in the
"things" offered for sale. If YOMANGO has a politics, it is
the
politics of happiness, of putting the body first. Be happy,
insultingly happy. YOMANGO: feel pretty!

3. Because you can't BUY happiness. Capitalism currently
works through the exploitation of collective intelligence
and creativity. The
market nurishes itself on the ideas, the life forms and the
multiple ways in which people express themselves through
words, clothes, gestures, sexuality...Commerce appropriates
your desires, your expectations, your experiences and gives
them back to you, alienated, distant, converted into
"things" for you to buy. Buy your own happiness, from
concentrates. The YOMANGO style proposes reappropriating,
legitimizing and extending the "expropriation" of what is,
in effect, previously to its conversion into "things",
was part of the commons. YOMANGO, its very much inside of
you.

4. Inventing new gestures that, once repeated, open new
worlds for us to inhabit. "Buying" is an excercise in
passivity. Boring and alianating, it is a socially
predetermined act. YOMANGO is a creative and exciting
practice. "Stealing" is understood to be a crime, but
YOMANGO
does not acknowledge legalities or illegalities. More so,
it speaks of a kind of legitimacy which comes from below,
the legitimacy of daily life, of wanting to live freely,
creatively.
Buying is an action based on obedience. YOMANGO is a
disobedient style. YOMANGO is the hand, which in an
irreducible insubordinate dance, draws an unmediated
arch of desire from the stand to your pocket, without money
or credit cards.

5. YOMANGO is not the propogation of private property
through other means. It does not propose accumulation. It
consists in taking to the extreme the free circulation of
goods. Potlacht!: reapropriate and make circulate, satisfy
the desires and necessities of your loved ones. Have people
over for YOMANGO dinners. Steal this magazine!

6. The market offers us a false alternative, a false
liberty to choose between one way to spend our money or
another. Your hopes and dreams be them of one brand
or another, almost always benefit the same guy. YOMANGO
affirms the real alternative: Its either MONEY or YOMANGO!

7. YOMANGO turns the mall into a playground. These supposed
public spaces, where the market commercializes, regulates
and controlls
our basic wish to live shared experiences, these human
antfarms that cross leisure and culture. YOMANGO breaks out
of the isles and defies dreary routines.

8. YOMANGO is with you in every daily gesture you make. Its
with you during your best moments. Those that don't cost
money.
YOMANGO systematizes daily acts. In Barcelona, the YOMANGO
franchise held civil disobedience workshops adapted to the
YOMANGO
lifestyle, as well as workshops where imaginative and
usefull tools were produced. Also, encounters, discussions,
dinners, parties,
all for the public to enjoy.

9. YOMANGO is a franchise you can form wherever you want.
The YOMANGO style is an open ended process, generating
tools,
prototypes and dynamics which flow and proliferate, waiting
to be reapropriated and to circulate. A brand name that's
everyones. That is born from and for the commons. Remember:
YOMANGO, only in your closes multinational.

10. YOMANGO.
you want it?
you got it.