Enacting Fashion Fictions: letting in and letting go

Fashion Fictions is an international participatory speculation project that brings people together to imagine, explore and enact enticing fictional visions of alternative worlds as an unconventional route to real-world change in the fashion system. The aim is to generate an expanded sense of possibility – a feeling that radical change can happen, and might involve ideas that currently feel impossible – in order to influence and enable meaningful action. Although the speculative nature of the project implicitly points to future possibilities, the framework for speculation is based on ‘speculating sideways’ into an endless array of parallel worlds. Over 6000 people have taken part in more than 150 affiliated activities spanning six continents since 2020.

In this newly developed enactment workshop, we will turn our attention to the process of transition in the fashion system. With the help of a dossier of parallel-world archival materials and a few pages torn from the underground Manual for Transition, we will step into a time and place when long-sighted strategies are leading to disruptive changes in everyday life, when people are asked to let in new possibilities and let go of old assumptions, to see what insights we might discover.

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Designed and facilitated by Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd of Nottingham Trent University. 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 and researcher since 2004. Amy is author of Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion: Inspiration for Change (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her latest monograph, Fashion Fictions: Imagining Sustainable Worlds, will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2025. She was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts in 2024.