Fashion Fictions World Tour

by Amy Twigger Holroyd

World 54, Exploration A: Garment production has been severely limited in this parallel world, leading to a creative and resourceful fashion culture. People dress up in items that they find around the home, including those we would not think of as conventional garments – such as this inventively styled curtain. Created by Johnny O’Flynn, Gillian Allsopp, Kate Harper and an anonymous contributor (UK), developed from a fiction by Wendy Ward (UK). Photograph: Jade Bramley.

Fashion Fictions World Tour is a pop-up exhibition of objects and images created to represent an array of fictional post-growth worlds. These crowdsourced visions of enticing fashion systems have been collaboratively generated in the international Fashion Fictions project, which I founded in 2020 and has already involved more than 5,000 participants around the world.

The exhibition takes the form of twelve images of visual and material prototypes, including a poster for a community laundrette-cum-nightclub, in which clothes care provides crucial social "glue;" a Textile Baptism Dictionary that contains a rich language to describe the material and spiritual qualities of transformation; and a magazine from a world in which garments are exchanged in place of money. This collection was first compiled for an exhibition trail in Nottingham, designed to share speculative ideas generated in the project with a public audience.

Interest in post-growth ideas has been developing for a long time in the fashion context, with notable contributions including Kate Fletcher’s Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion (2016); the manifesto of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion, founded in 2019; and activist organization Fashion Act Now’s degrowth-influenced call for "defashion" in 2021. The Fashion Fictions project builds on this work and responds to three interrelated phenomena: the huge reduction in resource use that will be needed if we are to develop fashion systems that work within ecological limits (Coscieme et al. 2022); an awareness that such systems will involve radically different ways of living with our clothes (Urry 2010); and a recognition that many people find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine alternatives to the status quo (Wright et al. 2013).

World 4, Exploration C: After some dark times in this parallel world, the thriving of nature has become the foremost concern for humanity. This handmade memoir, produced by an elderly ‘high fashion witch’, documents the shifts in understanding that have happened over time through the use of old and new dictionary definitions for terms such as ‘beauty’ and ‘fashion’. Created by Benjamin-Rose Ingall (UK), developed from a fiction by Amy Twigger Holroyd (UK). Photograph: Adam Shaw.

Fashion Fictions "speculates sideways" into parallel worlds rather than real-world futures in order to disrupt the assumptions of technological progress that are so entwined with ideas of the future (Norgaard 1994). In each fiction an invented historical juncture has led to a familiar-yet-strange scenario such as those outlined above. Contributors are encouraged to imagine enticing and positive worlds, in terms of individual satisfaction, social justice and sustainability. Their visions should be physically possible but push beyond what feels plausible today. Hence, the project’s ethos is not about anticipating what we think will happen, but rather exploring our collective desires for how life with clothes might be different (Hopkins 2022).

The project has a three-stage structure, underpinned by Creative Commons licences. At Stage 1, we create brief written outlines of fictional fashion cultures and systems; at Stage 2, we build on these outlines, generating visual and material prototypes (such as those shown in the World Tour exhibition); at Stage 3, we find ways to enact and experience the prototyped worlds. Anyone, anywhere is welcome to participate in any stage of Fashion Fictions at any time; the project is built around an open-ended invitation to participate and to build on the contributions of others. More than 100 activities have been run by facilitators in various contexts across six continents, including universities, schools and community groups.

Degrowth is not explicitly addressed in any of the materials created to guide participants through the process of contributing to the project; they focus instead on the creation of positive and engaging worlds. Yet many of the diverse ideas generated, which give a sense of the fashion systems that participants are yearning for, resonate with ideas familiar from degrowth discourse such as resourcefulness and sufficiency. The visions include an array of intriguing topics including storytelling, language, nature connection, spirituality, local distinctiveness, ritual, rebellion and adaptation that push far beyond conventional sustainable fashion discourse. These themes are discussed in a monograph based on the project (Twigger Holroyd 2025).

World 27, Exploration A: In this fictional world, ‘storyfull’ clothes are highly valued and garments are regularly exchanged. Wearers document their garment-related stories as ‘deeds’ for future generations. These jeans have been handed down from wearer to wearer for decades. Their deeds, in the form of recorded oral stories, are accessed via a hand-stitched label. Created by Sally Cooke, Charlotte Tupper and an anonymous contributor (UK), developed from a fiction by Jeannine Diego (Mexico / USA).

Fashion Fictions uses creativity and speculation to work for change in three distinct ways. First, the project’s activities nurture a capacity for collective imagination and expand participants’ sense of possibility. A sense of possibility is argued to be essential to enable radical change; after all, as Alex Steffen notes, ‘We can’t build what we can’t imagine’ (Rinde 2016). Second, the project generates stories which, collectively, expand our collective vocabulary of post-growth fashion possibilities and create the seeds for new ‘socio-climatic imaginaries’ (Milkoreit 2017) in the fashion context and beyond. Third, the project can be used to create prefigurative organizations and practices that actively blend fiction and reality and call new worlds into being.

The Fashion Fictions website (fashionfictions.org) acts as a hub of activity and includes hundreds of contributions spanning all three stages in the form of written fictions, images and films. It also provides extensive materials for organizing and facilitating affiliated activities, which can be adapted for use in a variety of settings and readily applied to aspects of everyday life other than fashion.

Bibliography

Coscieme, L., Akenji, L., Latva-Hakuni, E., Vladimirova, K., Niinimäki, K., Henninger, C., Joyner-Martinez, C., Nielsen, K., Iran, S. and D ́Itria, E. (2022), Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space (Berlin: Hot or Cool Institute).

Hopkins, R. (2019), From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination (White River Junction: Chelsea Green).

Milkoreit, M. (2017), ‘Imaginary Politics: Climate Change and Making the Future’, Elem Sci Anth, 5:62, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249

Norgaard, R.B. (1994), Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future (London: Routledge).

Rinde, M. (2016), ‘Imagining a Postcarbon Future’, Distillations Magazine, October 11. Available at https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/imagining-a-postcarbon-future/.

Twigger Holroyd, A. (forthcoming), Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds (London: Bloomsbury).

Urry, J. (2010), ‘Consuming the Planet to Excess’, Theory, Culture and Society 27:2/3, 191–212. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640935599

 Wright, C., Nyberg, D., De Cock, C. and Whiteman, G. (2013), ‘Future Imaginings: Organizing in Response to Climate Change’, Organisation 20:5, 647–58.

Bio: Dr. Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design. She has explored the emerging field of fashion and sustainability as a designer, maker, researcher and writer since 2004. Her Fashion Fictions project invites people all over the world to explore fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems as an unconventional route to real-world change; a related book, Fashion Fictions: imagining Sustainable Worlds, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Amy is also author of Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2023). Amy was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts in 2024. https://fashionfictions.org/