by Doris Domoszlai-Lantner
With mountains of clothes piled up in the Atacama Desert, microplastics polluting our waterways, and burning textiles contributing to the rise in CO2 levels globally, it can be hard to feel optimistic about fashion and sustainability. In fact, sometimes it feels hopeless; as if there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory we’re on. Every now and again, though, something comes along that reminds us that there is hope, especially if we can harness our creativity, and work together. Fashion Fictions is that kind of thing.
Imagining Sustainable Alternatives to the Fashion System
Fashion Fictions is the brainchild of Amy Twigger Holroyd, Professor of Alternative Fashion Systems at Nottingham School of Art and Design (UK). It is a collaborative, multi-tier, speculative project that “brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems… to gain new perspectives on challenges, possibilities and pathways for change in the real world.” Participants can create alternate fashion “Worlds” in Stage 1 workshops, then build upon them in Stage 2 “Explorations” and Stage 3 “Enactments.” Contributions have addressed environmental and social aspects of sustainability from a plethora of rich angles, such as regenerative farming, mending, natural dyeing, labor laws, education, and more.
Fashion Fictions in Practice: Workshops, Education, and Collective World-Building
I first came across Fashion Fictions in 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, while searching for programming for Fashion Forward, the fashion think tank I was running. We held a Stage 1 workshop and suddenly, it felt like the proverbial doors to our government-mandated isolation were opened again. After that, I held workshops in my fashion classes, semester after semester, at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, to overwhelmingly positive feedback. After several years, and hundreds of Worlds, Explorations, and Enactments later, Holroyd has published a comprehensive guide to her team’s observations.
Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds — An Open-Access Book
Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds is out now through Bloomsbury, and true to its ethos, it’s open access—meaning, it’s free for everyone to read on the publisher’s website. Even the datasets used to form the basis of the book are accessible online, providing rare insights into the backend of fashion academia, usually hidden behind paywalls. There’s a wealth of knowledge to be gained from this impressive project: what people view as problematic in fashion and what alternatives and solutions they envision.
Overproduction, Speculation, and the Power of Parallel Fashion Worlds
In her introductory chapter, Holroyd asks a question that forms the backbone of the project: “If we want to tackle the globalized fashion system’s culture of overproduction, where do we start?” Overproduction, the culprit that spurred the project, is thus counteracted by imagination and fantasy. In “Speculating sideways,” she explains how the goal of world-building is not to invent a fictional scenario, but rather, to imagine a parallel world. In the Stage 1 workshops, this is done by writing two 50-word paragraphs.
Stage 1 Rules of Speculative World-Building in Fashion Fictions
- Describe a contemporary reality in a parallel world, not the future in our world
- Explore a positive and enticing culture, in terms of individual satisfaction, social justice and sustainability
- Be physically possible but push beyond what feels plausible (to you) in the real world
In Stage 2, participants make prototypes, by “generating [sic] ideas for an object or image that you could create to represent every day in the fictional world,” then writing a text to accompany their visuals.
In Stage 3, participants create enactments of the worlds and prototypes “as a way of experiencing an alternative fashion culture in an embodied way.” Keeping the creative outputs of these stages realistic is key to the success of the project; it’s what might manifest some of the speculations from alternate worlds in our actual world.
Patterns, Themes, and Insights from Speculative Fashion Worlds
After amassing hundreds of contributions, Holroyd grouped, categorized, and coded them in order to illustrate the emerging patterns and outcomes. Holroyd organized these insights into topics, and then, further into chapters such as “Stories and language,” “Place and togetherness,” and “Organization and adaptation.” The chapter “Nature and spirituality,” highlights concepts such as “post-nature communities,” with an example being World 28, in which shortages in synthetic dyes during WWII created a demand for foraging and natural dyeing in Great Britain. “Organization and adaptation” includes scenarios in which fashion worlds function through specific types and levels of organization, including through “clothing libraries” of uniforms in schools in World 26, or more radically, World 49, in which a law abolished the production of garments from raw materials.
Through these explorations, Holroyd notes that she has “observed that when people take part in the project’s activities they often experience a sense of wonder: they see the real world as if through fresh eyes.” Speaking with No Kill contributor Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, Holroyd notes that the most important thing she has learned is
“there is evidently a real thirst for radical, creative and challenging ideas for how we could live differently with our clothes—that go far beyond the sustainable fashion propositions in the industry, which are essentially tweaks to business as usual.”
That thirst may very well be the catalyst for change in our real world.
What’s Next for Fashion Fictions and How to Participate
Although the book is a result of the cumulation of data generated thus far, the Fashion Fictions project is still live and accepting new contributions. Holroyd makes sure to point this out in the book, stating, “Despite its basis in the speculations generated by participants in the first years of the Fashion Fictions project, this is not purely a retrospective book: there are various invitations to get involved… invitations to step into a speculative world for yourself.” Holroyd is currently planning her next phase of research. “I’m exploring a few ideas that have developed from Fashion Fictions. One of these focuses on the theme of organisation, as examined in the book—I’m exploring how the fashion system could be organised differently in a post-growth economy,” she says. Moreover, she’s looking to expand the project’s localized, community-based work—an open invitation to step in and take part.
—Doris Domoszlai-Lantner is a fashion historian, educator, and archivist. Read more about her work at www.dorisddl.com and follow her on Instagram and X @doris_ddl
All images shown from Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds with permission from Amy Twigger Holroyd
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