In December 2024 I attended an event at the University of Nottingham to showcase research and projects from academics at Nottingham Trent and the University of Nottingham. One of the projects, created by Amy Twigger Holroyd, Fashion and Sustainability Professor at Nottingham Trent University, immediately drew my interest.
Whilst fashion and literature don’t immediately seem to go together, Amy’s project and subsequent book, Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds is filled with, and crafted by stories and literature. She opens by situating the book in the context of what sustainability means for the world, and why, and where fashion fits into discussions of sustainability. Her introduction places the book and reader in Nottingham. Amy opens with the mention of a shopper, walking across Market Square with a bag from a well-known fashion shop. Capitalism is personalised in that moment – it becomes you and I as we buy the item that gets placed in a brown, paper, recyclable shopping bag and we feel better about our choices. The bag is recyclable, right?
Amy places her project in the context of the ‘need’ for continued growth as the result of a capitalist society, where more sustainable methods and ‘green growth’ are presented to consumers. She states that the fashion industry cannot deliver the absolute reduction in resources that we need. Capitalism cannot fix the sustainability crises we are currently facing, and Amy advises us that it restricts our possibilities, as we cannot imagine a society that functions differently. She calls it a self-fulfilling prophecy and says that
“through imagination we can think beyond our present reality to engage with the possible, or what we believe could be.”
Imagination offers us the space to investigate the seemingly impossible. To do this, Amy takes us back to the historical concept of Utopia. She talks us through Thomas More, who coined the phrase, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World which depicts the empress of a utopian kingdom, William Morris’ News from Nowhere and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland which explores social and feminist utopias. Amy situates the fictional utopias historically, showing a tradition of exploring societal change and its potential, through fictional worlds.
Amy talks about the literary inheritance of the book – she recalls reading fantasy novels as a child, which helped her to form her understanding of possibilities. The project explores contemporary parallel worlds which have split off from our own – these worlds enable people to question fashion norms and to look outside of what is currently possible. Fashion Fictions discusses the three main parts to the project; part one sees participants writing a 100-word flash fiction which outlines the fictional fashion cultures and systems. This is the world. For stage two, we see participants generate visual and material prototypes, as though they had visited the world and brought something back – this could be a magazine or a ticket. For the final stage, participants get to ‘live’ the world and experience it firsthand.
World 27
In World 27, garments have value in the number of stories they tell. I loved this world, as it didn’t feel dissimilar to our own – think of the value placed on a wedding dress – and words like ritual, value and sacred which were used in the stage three video (which you can watch here) gave it a religious, otherworldly feel. Stories become the religion and clothes become sacred and not disposable. World 27 rebels against the idea of a fast fashion, throwaway culture.
The book offers a kaleidoscope of possibilities and lessons for our own individual and shared worlds. It sets out a blueprint for people to create worlds, and all three stages at home. It offers activities and ways of engaging at home, using “structured speculation as a route to open-ended wonder.”
The concept of wonder is usually used to explore the natural world. It is lovely to see it being used to describe fashion and to re-situate fashion within the natural world, not just creating sustainable worlds to support the natural world but as a reminder of where clothing physically comes from.
Re-mixing in progress
I was invited by Amy to chair the launch of Fashion Fictions at Mammoth Cinema on 23 January and you can listen to her discussing the subversive nature of the book here. As part of the launch we all got to create our own fictional worlds. I can’t accurately explain how much fun it was to think about and craft a 100-word flash fiction which could go on to be used as part of stage two (creating the artefacts from the world) or stage three (enacting the world). Mine is now on the Fashion Fictions website and you can take a look at it here, or you can draft and complete your own flash fiction for the project and upload it, or you can just read the hundreds of worlds already created by other people.
Stories frame our understanding of the world, and Fashion Fictions helps us to create new narratives to understand our own relationship with clothing and how we can challenge the fashion industry. Reading the book opened up a dialogue with myself about where I buy my clothes from, what stories my own garments hold and how I can make better, more sustainable choices.
If this has piqued your interest, you can take part in a Fashion Fictions workshop on Thursday 26 March at Antenna (Beck Street) or listen to Amy give her inaugural lecture on the project, tickets are available here.
After studying her BA and MA in fashion and textile design, Amy created and ran an experimental knitwear label, Keep and Share for ten years. Amy studied a PhD at Birmingham City University, and this research formed the basis for her first book, Folk Fiction: Understanding Homemade Clothes, in 2017. She went on to a postdoc research role at the University of Leeds and joined Nottingham Trent University in 2016. She has been awarded research funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, including a fellowship that enabled her to develop the Fashion Fictions project, which has now engaged over 6,000 people in activities spanning six continents.
She has worked on several other book projects, including the co-authored book, Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion: Inspiration for Change. In 2024 she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme prize for visual arts.