What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
Amy Twigger Holdroyd
APOLOGIES FOR SOME SOUND ISSUES RIGHT AT THE START AND END OF THIS RECORDING.
Amy Twigger Holroyd is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham School of Art & Design (website). Through design-led participatory research, she explores plural possibilities for post-growth fashion systems: alternative ways of living with our clothes that meet our fundamental human needs and respect ecological limits.
Her main project pursuing this is Fashion Fictions, which invites you to to imagine, explore and enact enticing alternative fashion worlds. Stage One: Worlds is to write an enticing, possible parallel world (as I type, there are 213 which you can still add to here). Stage Two: Explorations is to generate visual and material is to prototypes of those worlds (eg a mocked-up WhatsApp chat). Stage Three: Enactments is to try and experience the prototyped Worlds.
Our conversation covers:
-How fashion (the clothes people wear, and how those are created) are an expression of society.
-Her motivation: using participatory fiction to expand the sense of possibility, because so many people feel hemmed in.
-She's currently excited by the realisation that we can write stories, and then, by enacting them, we can make them real. It is a sort of magic.
By the way, the sound problems come from having to use the back-up recording. I hope they don't interfer with your enjoyment too much.
Links
Book Amy co-authored: Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion.
Arturo Escobar -- Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
The Great Transition Initiative, expressed in a book called 'Journey to Earthland' by Paul Raskin.
Diana Wynne Jones' series with numbered worlds is Chrestomanci.
Timings
0:51 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
12:43 -- BONUS QUESTION: What is your project, Fashion Fictions?
22:41 -- BONUS QUESTION: What are the themes in your findings from Fashion Futures?
29:41 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
33:58 -- Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
41:10 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
44:31 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
46:12 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
48:02 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
More details here.
Twitter: Powerful_Times
Website hub: here.
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Thank you for listening! -- David
Welcome to What can we do in these powerful titles? I'm your host, David bent, and I've been working in the field of sustainability and climate change for some 20 years. It feels like the need for change is growing faster than the impact we're delivering. So I'm wondering what I can do next that's useful. Speaking with others, they have that same challenge, which is why I'm doing this interview series in 30 minutes bites. I asked some brilliant people what they're doing now and why, or to inspire and enable the audience, which may just turn out to be me through stories grounded in experience. And today, I'm delighted to be joined by Amy took a Holroyd and she is the Associate Professor of fashion and sustainability at Nottingham Trent University. Hello, Amy. Hi, David. Hello. So first question, what are you doing now? And how did you get here?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Hmm, that's quite a big question, isn't it. So what I'm doing now, in terms of the main thing that is taking up my time is a project called Fashion fictions. And this is a international participatory sort of collective imagination project that I founded in 2020. And it brings people together to imagine, explore and enact alternative kind of parallel worlds where people live with their clothes differently. So it's a research project, but it's also a sort of open, participatory, creative collective imagination project that anybody can get involved in. Yeah, so that's currently funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council via fellowship. And I'm just coming to the end of that. So I've been very busy for the past couple of years doing lots of things associated with that running various activities where people are generating visions of parallel worlds where people with different fashion systems, so more sustainable, more satisfying, more socially, just fashion systems, creating objects or images that represent life in these fictional worlds, and participating in enactments where we try to bring them to life in some way through actually trying things out in a really playful way. The whole project is about kind of playing and tapping into different modes of interacting and thinking really, as a way of broadening our collective vocabulary of how we might think about how how, how fashion systems could be. So yeah, I've been sort of generating these doing all of these participatory activities, and documenting them for the research and analysing that and kind of trying to look for patterns in the things that people are interested in, and the kind of themes that emerge. That now I'm increasingly starting to kind of really try to open out the project and invite people to get involved. So yeah,
David Bent-Hazelwood:wonderful. I want to ask you about both the mechanics of that process of the participatory process. And also what themes are emerging. What next. But before we do that, I'd love to hear how you got to that. So you're doing that now. But what was the path which led to that point?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Hmm, well, it depends how far back you go, doesn't it? I studied fashion design. So in terms of kind of education and career kind of things, I did a degree in fashion design. And as part of that, I did a placement year in a high street knitwear supplier. And I think probably up to that point, I thought I wanted to be like a high street fashion designer. And then I went and did it for a bit, and quickly realised that I really didn't want to do that. Because it wasn't very creative. We were doing a lot of ripping off nice things and trying to make them very cheaply. And so it didn't feel satisfying on a personal point of view, but also it it sort of brought the the waste just the huge amounts of waste of effort and production and skill and materials and resources that is involved in the kind of the fast fashion machine. And this was 20 More than 20 years ago. So even like at that time, I was involved in designing some fairly not very attractive things that were going to be produced. If the if they got bought out they were samples but if they got bought by the You know, the, the retailer we were trying to sell them to, they would be produced in their 1000s. And they had the particular memorable moment was I was designing a sequined cat to be stitched on the front of a acrylic jumper. And I was getting bored working on the CAD system moving virtual sequence into place to make the shape of the cat. And I suddenly had this kind of visceral feeling of there would be somebody, probably a woman in Hong Kong, probably not very well paid. Actually stitching those sequence. So far, I found this process of moving the virtual sequence wants tedious. And then I was imagining this person on the other side of the world, moving the actual sequence and having to show them a far more skilled process. And then if it was bought this happening, 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of times over for something which I felt had no aesthetic or functional value, really, to be honest, I just felt this thing wasn't going to be used much at all. And it was just like, I don't want to be part of this, like, I'm opting out. And, I mean, the volume of clothes produced globally doubled between 2020 15. So me having that feeling of like this, so much, too much awful stuff. And, you know, just as I say the waste everywhere along this process, was at the start of that. So since then, it's only, it's only grown a huge amount. So I, I was doing that. So then I finished my fashion degree, but I was thinking, I am now not going to follow the route that or maybe had thought I would do. I did a Masters. And I in doing my Masters, I kind of discovered the emergent movement of area of design for sustainability, and kind of got interested and found resources that were exciting to me in in design terms, and develop the concept for a knitwear label, with an approach to design that was based on longevity and versatility, so trying to get more out of our clothes, and recognising how much if we were to do that it's based on emotional and cultural factors, as well as physical things that are designed in the garment itself. And after I finished my master's, I turned that into a real micro business called Keep and share. So the kind of the longevity and the versatility is in the instruction of the name of the label. And I set that up and monk just about managed to make my living from doing it alongside bits of teaching for about 10 years. So I designed a mate, knitwear and sold it to individuals directly online and a bit via shops. And also started running workshops where I teach people knitting skills, as kind of part of that and running kind of projects were kind of participatory projects that would get people making and increasingly got interested in using my design practice to support other people's making rather than me being the designer who designed to make things and I got sick of selling products to people being my way of interacting with them. Because although I was trying to make slower, more considered crafted things, I was still making more stuff and putting it out into the world. And so, at some point I sort of became interested in exploring ideas that couldn't be supported through a business structure really and I went to do a PhD. So I sort of had this idea about that about thinking about fashion as a commons that has been enclosed through professionalisation and industrialization is kind of should be this this vibrant kind of varied resource and kind of sphere of activity that should belong to everybody. But through those kinds of those those processes, it becomes a thing that seems like it belongs to businesses, really. And the way that you can interact with it is that you can buy things from some people, the buy, you can buy the things that they've designed and made for you, you can buy them and you can wear them and then you can get rid of them and you can buy some more. And then you the ways Yeah,
David Bent-Hazelwood:and you buy things which have a label and often a visible logo. And you're telling the world something about yourself through the logos you choose. So there's a lot of, instead of projecting or demonstrating identity, through just the nature of the clothes, it's also through, is it Nike or Adidas? Or is it whichever of the anymore other fashion brands? There's a lot of it, I think I came to this rather late in life, but that fashion is something which there is there's all of these different dimensions to it. And a table like, there are? No, I mean, most societies have people wearing clothes. And so there's something really fundamental about what is the nature of the clothing? What's the nature of the fashion? The way in which clothing is delivered and thought of and worn. That is an expression of the nature of that society?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's huge, you know, the, the social and cultural dimensions of that. That's why it's so fascinating, because it's like, it's some stuff, it's some garments, but it's also all of this other stuff that that sits around it. And you've got all of the kind of cultural and social side, and there's definite social functions that clothes play in identity and how we express ourselves, connect with other people, you know, it's a, it's a really important kind of social function. But then it's also implicated in economic systems, kind of material production systems, and all of these things are very inter woven to use a textile term. In a way. Yeah, it's just it's kind of endlessly fascinating. And that, but I think one of the frustrations of that is that yeah, it's absolutely universal. we all we all fashion ourselves, we fashioned our bodies in presenting ourselves to the world and using the stuff that's available to us to do that. But part of this so much cultural baggage that comes with fashion that we think it's for women, we think that it's frivolous, we think it's meaningless, we think that it's shallow with it, you know, it has all of these cultural kind of markers, which manages somehow to make it seem like a sort of, like a specialist pursuit, when actually is absolutely universal. And we should all be interested in and think about the way that we it's a, it's a central dimension of life, like food, and housing and transport, you know, for me, it's as fundamental as that, but yet, it has this kind of cultural baggage that other spheres don't have,
David Bent-Hazelwood:yes. All of which I think takes us back to fashion fictions, the project that you were describing right at the beginning, with imagining, exploring and enacting different futures or fashion or different fashions, sorry, different futures through fashion. And also some of the other keywords, or to describe it either using a participatory and collective imagination. So I think, in that last part of what we're talking about fashion as an expression, and as a foundational part of people's lives, and suddenly, which has become narrowly expressed, but they actually should be universally we have a sense of why you move for that collective. Because they're sort of trying to enact that difference. Can you unpack for us a bit of what is participatory mean, here? What are you asking people to do? That is participatory, in collective imagination?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yes, so the, the element, the elements of fashion fictions aren't unique. So there are many other collective imagination processes and kind of speculative design activities that have things in common with with the structure that I've made. But the the, the way that it works is a three stage structure in fashion fictions. So stage one is writing outlines of fictional parallel worlds. And we intentionally make it that it's parallel contemporary worlds, not futures in this world. And so, the the rule, if you like for this is that it's a 100 word written fiction. So there's like 180, some of them on the website at the moment that have been written and submitted by people around the world. And they, that the I guess, there are other rules in that. We try to imagine positive and enticing alternative worlds so we don't go down the dystopian route. I just feel like the real world fashion system is dystopian enough that going more dystopian doesn't feel helpful in this context. And we ought to the other rules, going out of my head now
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yes, short, positive,
Amy Twigger Holroyd:short, positive, positive in terms of sustainability, individual satisfaction and social justice, which up for me kind of all the same thing. They're all they're all interconnected, but you might focus more on on one or another. Yeah, parallel worlds, not the future. And they must be kind of must be physically possible. So try to encourage people not to break laws of kind of physics, basic physics
David Bent-Hazelwood:or magical.
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yes. So you can't just have a magic one, but just like pinks and sorts everything out. But they should push beyond what feels plausible. Today, from wherever the person is speculating. You know, different people have different experiences. So everyone's idea of plausibility will be different. So that's, that's the first stage. The second stage,
David Bent-Hazelwood:the second stage,
Amy Twigger Holroyd:is prototyping. So we create visual, visual or material prototype to represent life in one of these fictional worlds. And the whole structure of the project is that everything has a Creative Commons licence. So anybody can come along and pick something up that someone else has created. So often, it will be a different person or group of people that picks up a world, it was written by somebody else, they'd pick it up and kind of flesh it out. And in that, they might kind of develop it, change it, it will evolve to suit their interests, priorities, imaginations. And they imagine that they've travelled to this parallel world, and they've picked something up or taken a photograph and brought it back to show us what life is like there. And then the third stage is we try to bring the world to life in some way. So that we're not just describing the world or creating something to represent what life is like there, we try to, in some way kind of step in to the worlds with our bodies, and ourselves and our clothes and our kind of ways of interacting with each other. And that might be like an in person event that brings people together to kind of enact a key moment or kind of process, as described in one of these fictional worlds. Or it could be something more kind of slow and drawn out. Something that you might do once a week, over a period of time. And in those cases, the people might be geographically dispersed, but connecting online sharing their experiences.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And as anyone tried to make, one of the pieces of I assume its clothing, was closing, especially, which is better, they made a sort of social microbe anyway, has anyone tried to make one of the things and wear it and like enact in the world in that kind of way?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah, so we, so quite often the things to made in stage two, the prototyping are quite often they they're not garments themselves, they're kind of other things that exist in the world. So it might be a whatsapp chat between two people in this world having a conversation, or what does a bar of soap look like in this world? Things are to connected with the world that the experience of fashion but not necessarily the garment itself, although it can be. And then yeah, we did a stage three enactment where I was picking up on a prototype that had been made by a group at a workshop. And they were working with world 54 Where all textile production has ceased. And so people are having to be resourceful, successfully managing to be resourceful with the stuff that's leftover and bearing in mind like we have a huge amount of stuff still left over, you know, if we stopped production we would we wouldn't be short of fabric. So I kind of picked up I designed the stage three enactment and I picked up a bit of what they had been thinking through in their discussions and turned it into this enactment. So in my state three vision of it, there are a lot of sheets and curtains left in lofts of the people in world 54 And they but not many clothes. So they have to start dressing inventively in the sheets and the curtains and they stitch to help with this. They they sew buttons in a grid formation on their sheets and curtains. And by a stroke of good luck. They also had a lot of buttonhole elastic left in their world. You can see you could kind of take
David Bent-Hazelwood:a bit of creative possibility but still,
Amy Twigger Holroyd:like it's kind of part of the fun. So I made these kind of intriguingly flex versatile straps that can be used in the buttonhole elastic is key because the buttons on the sheet can be buttoned through this buttonhole elastic. And this strange slightly plant like strap formation, though made, creating an abundance of dress possibilities.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Any curtain with the right combination and right shape of strapping into almost any shape or form.
Amy Twigger Holroyd:But I mean, you can't make conventional garments, but you can, there are many ways that you could close your body. So I got a gang of people together with a pile of sheets with buttons stitched on a pile of straps. And we had a go at dressing in a world 54 style. And the Pete like people are amazing. And people are really creative. And they were just like, totally up for having a go. And there's something I guess what my design practices really is sort of creating these spaces that people can and inviting people to step into them to do things that they wouldn't normally happen to do. And see what happens there. And I'm kind of constantly delighted by people's, like, willingness to engage in these invitations to make likes anyone want to come and do this thing. And then people do and that they, they that what's nice about the enactments is they can be simultaneously really silly, and really moving and insightful kind of at the same time. It's all mixed up together. I love that.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And the fact people are coming along might speak also to how what was once universal and what is foundational has become specialised, but people would like to have more of that experience. As you're talking, part of me is thinking about the sound of music and turning the curtains into the children's play where and problem is also thinking is like it Marvel and DC have their parallel walls all which have their numbers. It's really interesting. You have all over the world world 52. Well, one thing is, at this precise word, I'm looking at the website, it says you can still contribute your 100 word fiction, is there a deadline? So if people are listening to this into the future, and there'll be a link in the in the show notes, they can stick in there at their 100 word future? Yes, absolutely. Not future kind of reflection. Yeah. And we will be picked up by somebody and used. So your timing was running out. So you have presumably, well into stage three, you've got your themes. Are you able to is it too early to share some of those things?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:No, I can I can do that. So yeah. So just to confirm that, yes, the invitation is open ended, I can't see that it's going to close anytime soon. So people can create things and submit them and they they go on the website. And all of those stages kind of coexist. So anyone can contribute anything at any time. Yeah, the themes are really, really fascinating. So I had a huge amount of data, like just a ridiculous amount of data from each I ran for stage two workshops, and for enactments, like for the research and documented what the conference, it was really the conversations that people have along the way, the really valuable thing, the real world, things that they reference as they trying to imagine and that the concerns and the dreams and all, you know, stuff that's coming up as they're kind of invited to just imagine somewhere totally different, and what do they come up with? There are strong themes of nature, connection with the natural world, strong themes have to do with spirituality comes up a lot. And I would say sort of, like tentative kind of engagements with spirituality. There's often particularly in the stage one fictions, people writing these little frictions, and I really encourage them to be kind of playful, and they can be quite throw away the idea that they're not like writing a manifesto that they're gonna stand on and campaign for only 100 words. Yes, only 100 It's really small. And also, like, you can kind of play with an idea where you think I don't even know whether this, this would be good, really. But I'll throw it in the mix. And then, you know, we'll pick it up and think about it a bit. So yeah, this kind of gestures towards spirituality. There are really interesting themes to do with stories and storytelling, which is kind of implicit already in the name of the project and you know, the whole idea of what we're doing but then it comes through in the fictions themselves, and also a real interest in language. So sometimes when people are making the fit the prototypes, there's been like real in depth conversations about how Word, they need a word to describe something in particular, that doesn't exist? And then what should that word be? Yeah. And very interesting, when there's people coming from with different languages as their first language, you know that that's always a fascinating conversation. Really interesting things about different different ideas about who, who should be like the big players in these kinds of systems. So, like, businesses are pretty much absent in the 100 word fictions that people write, there's quite a lot of mention of the state doing something. There's quite a lot of mentions of kind of local authorities. So you know, like, the state but in a more localised way, kind of playing a role. And a lot of mentions kind of community led initiatives. Yeah, there's, there's loads of, there's a really nice theme of rebellion. So quite often the fictions imagine we're and it's partly as a device that I probably encourage people to like, imagine that something's been outlawed is quite handy as a way of going, okay. So it would be it would be different. But whenever people imagine, like, laws, or rations, or rules, or even kind of cultural norms, or, you know, that shaped behaviour in a particular way, they very quickly start talking about rebellion and black market and like, how people would try to get around the rules. Those kinds of dynamics. Yeah, the there's loads is so rich, it's so rich. And what excites me about it is that the themes that come out, feel fresh to me, as someone that's been plodding along trying to do work in fashion and sustainability for 20 years. Yeah, it feels like there's like different conversations to be had, which is like, for me, the main delight,
David Bent-Hazelwood:and I want to move on to what you're trying to create with all of this in a second book. My and I would, in other circles, have a follow up question for pretty much every one of those themes. One day, I just is nagging away at me. Is there a risk of a sample bias? I mean, is it all Guardian reading middle class left leaning folk who come along to workshops, and therefore, that's what's getting most of the themes? Or is there enough diversity for you to, to feel like, it's not just the representation of like one particular segment of society,
Amy Twigger Holroyd:there's, there's definitely a risk of sample bias. Because partly because this thing that I'm inviting people to do, we don't really have a cut their cultural space for. So we don't have that if you invited someone to come to a craft workshop where they're going to make something and take it away with them, we kind of know what that is. So you could think, oh, yeah, I would quite like to do that. But if you want to invite them to come along to a thing, where you'll imagine a parallel world and and you'll make something from it, and it will be really interesting, it's kind of harder to explain, because there isn't a, like a cultural shape for it. And so I've tried my best in the activities that I've run, to get as much diversity as I could, bearing in mind, this invitation that I was I was trying to make, but I couldn't get many men along, because of this cultural baggage to do with fashion. I think that's what that is, you know. So yeah, I did my best. And I think wherever the the more diverse setting is the stage one fictions which have do come from people in different parts of the world and different kind of cultural backgrounds, but it's always in an ambition is to, to continue increasing the diversity of that. And that's, that's a part of the work that I'm developing at the moment is trying to encourage people to run their own fashion fictions, activities in different settings, which takes it beyond my own network, you know, so yeah, I mean, that's a totally, totally legitimate point and one I'm very aware of, but yeah, I feel like the the themes come through in those stage one fictions, as well as the things that that people do when they get together. So it feels it feels like they resonate to some extent across across those contexts.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Fantastic. And then what is the future you're trapped with all of this activity? What's the future you're trying to create and why?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah, it's funny because I have this you know, this thing where we're doing parallel worlds and not futures, and that's part of my kind of my allergy. To to the future, I would say But I guess if I think about what is the this, what am I trying to create in terms of the, you know, working in fashion and sustainability is I'm trying to, I'm trying to expand the sense of possibility. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to, it's very, very, definitely the whole project was created as a response to my feeling that, that people just kind of feel hemmed in, and they don't feel like much change is possible. So therefore, there's not much that you can do. So I'm trying to create, trying to nurture a kind of expanded sense of possibility. And along with that, this kind of expanded vocabulary of visions and that then they're not none of them are intended to be real. That comes through really nicely in the workshops, people will spend two days like really getting into like, imagining this world and representing it and then saying, of course, we wouldn't want to live there, because it's not three dimensional. It can't be you know, but it gives us like many more reference points to be able to refer to so it's trying to create a more space with more diverse visions and reference points that reveal more diverse ways forward, I suppose some, I'm trying to create a space that creates more futures. Yeah, different features.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And as you're talking, it's making me mean, there's lots of resonances with other people's work. And by giving people a sense of agency that it is possible for them to make a difference. And you mentioned the design practices. There's the collective imagination, and there's, there's creating a space in which other kinds of spaces become possible. Those Those enactments in particular, are moments of a different world existing in our world. Totally. Yeah. And it's making me think I don't know if this is part of your remit or whatever. But there's Arturo Escobar was designed for multiverse. So this idea of having parallel worlds within our world, yeah, modernised. Yeah, the world, which the range of possibilities, just one kind of political economy, one kind of place.
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah. And that's the kind of to translate that into the fashion context. The problem is really that we have the world is dominated by one globalised fashion system. There are several, but they're sort of the versions of what one thing when there should be countless fashion systems if we think about fashioning the body and it allowing that to be rich and diverse and contexts specific and, and all of that thing. So it's kind of Yeah, allowing a space where many systems can can flourish.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yes. And it's interesting in the sustainability space, there are very few vision like positive visions of the future, which can which allow for many different parallel political economies in parallel worlds at the same time, they often describe one future with one modulus better. But actually not very diverse, like not much diversity is allowed in that future. Weirdly. The exception to that I think, would be the great transformation and I'm going to forget the name of the guy who wrote it, which is from the Telus is stupid anyway, I will stick that in the show notes for everybody. So you're, you're in the completion, phase four, this fashion fiction's
Amy Twigger Holroyd:the current bit of it, yeah, current bit
David Bent-Hazelwood:of it. But that's going to lead into the priorities for the next few years. So what do you want to do next? I'm assuming it's taking this to the next level, but maybe not. So what what's, what are your priorities for the next few
Amy Twigger Holroyd:years? Yeah, so the things I'm working on at the moment are working on a book, as I say, that's kind of got these exploring the themes that come out of the the things that have been explored as I've documented them. But the, the other strand is that has a longer timespan to it is this strand of work, which is about trying to open up the invitation more strategically to other people to run their own activities. The whole project is conceived really as quite a decentralised sort of mode of activity. And it's worked really it's been working really well already in universities. So I put out a fairly low key call for did anyone want to run their fashion fictions activity in the university in my kind of fashion and textile design education networks a couple of years ago, and people came forward, and then other people hear about it. And then, and so there's been, I lose count, but 1020 30 things going on, in universities from like a 20 minute seminar activity to a module long major project that all students do, you know, and everything in between. So, I've seen that it can work really nicely that the, the, the whole project, as I say, but I mean, the materials and the the resources are all creative commons. So it's like, here's some stuff. Like it makes sense in your context. And what that there's the strand of work that we're we're trying to develop is about opening that out beyond University contexts, because obviously, that can have some diversity in terms of global spread, but also not in many other ways. So we're piloting that at the moment. And it's just really wonderful to make connections with with people. So there's a currently just commissioned a community art studio in Minneapolis to run a pilot fashion fictions workshop in their community. And although, you know, it was one example of one of those connections. So I'm aiming to, I'm hoping to get some more funding to kind of support that rollout. And some of those things end up on the website, and some of them don't, because the the job of documenting the stuff and submitting it via a form for me to then upload on the website is a part of the job which in some cases, appeals and is part of the motivation, and in some cases, isn't necessary. So the best version of this is that there's fashion fictions, activities happening in loads of places. And I don't necessarily know that much about them, because they're making sense to people, and they kind of getting on with it, wherever they are. So that's kind of the that's, that's the the next steps, I guess, for fashion fictions. For me more broadly, there's a an element of stuff that's mixed in with this, which is about thinking about fashion and textile education and design education more broadly. As a discipline, which has been historically and still to date, like very bound up with industry and industry, which is inherently unsustainable. And yeah, I'm kind of increasingly interested, but partly because fashion fiction has been picked up in, you know, in in higher education settings, in thinking about taking on this kind of massive question, what is fashion and textile design education, if it's not training people to go into an industry and kind of
David Bent-Hazelwood:become part of the machine become
Amy Twigger Holroyd:part of the machine, the person who's moving the sequence on the sequined cat to be made in acrylic on the other side of the world? And
David Bent-Hazelwood:there's a way in which that does connect us part of what you said was your route out of that was being inspired by the design for sustainability. Work that was existing when you were coming out of university into the world of work? So there's a way in which there's a parallel in specialised parallel there. And I wanted to ask you, have you had have you tried? Have you had any success in getting that sort of distributed fashion fiction's activity into supply chains into the woman were in in Hong Kong? Who is selling those sequences? There? Is that possibility?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:That's a it's like, it's a dream, which I haven't specifically tried to. It's on my my list of Yeah, would love to do. But yeah, I would love to know what the what the dreams are, of the work the garment workers who were and I mean, I can remember thinking when I was doing this sequined cat thing I can I can remember specifically remember thinking, What must they think of us? That was like, What must you think when you're sitting stitching these things all day every day and turning them like? Like, what a waste of a potential connection, like, in a way how amazing to be connected with people with really great skills, but what a waste of it that were just like, churning the same, you know, paying them to not very much to produce the same thing that doesn't have much value again and again and again. So yeah, I would I would love to to him to, to invite and if that invitation was made sense for those people to and it's part of this agenda of, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with of kind of who gets to imagine the future and who get mostly powerful white men in California. Yes, that's Yeah. But yeah, I mean, kind of opening out that that invitation. And in that BMA thing.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah. So in the spirit of opening items for it, that invitation, if someone wants was inspired to, to follow those priorities. So there's an there's priorities at different levels here, there's the priority, which is almost the umbrella of making it possible for more people to be involved in enacting their life and enacting their future. So what your design practice, and there's more specifically, the next phase of fashion, fiction's and then there's also specifically education in the fashion world. If someone was inspired to follow those practices, what can they do next?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Well, the fashion fictions one is the easiest. So the website has information. Hey, so you want to get involved? Steps this way, here are the things that you can do.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And that website is fashion fictions.org. And there is a join in button at the top. So just for anybody, I mean, I'll stick with it into the show notes. But fashion fiction is. That's the obvious one. Yeah.
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah, I think. For me, I guess it's, there's something that I'm finding very powerful in devising the project about thinking speculatively. So yes, it's kind of a meta thing. So the fashion fictions invites people to speculate and imagine other worlds. But we did an event A few months ago, where I had a few invited guests from different places in the world where we were talking about the project. And one of the guests said, fashion fictions is like a fiction in itself, it could have been written as one of the stories that there's this project that allows people to imagine and then by imagining that people start to make it real. And I was like, this Cokely blew my mind. Like, Oh, yeah. And then I got kind of very excited about something I haven't mentioned, and was thinking of mentioning when you reference the numbering of the worlds. So my, the influence for me of the parallel worlds and the numbering of the worlds comes from the writing of Diana Wynne Jones, a children's fantasy author. And she in a series of her books, they there's the related worlds and this 12 series, and there's nine worlds in each series. So there's a kind of a numbering thing going on there. But I've been digging up in very geeky digging into writing about Diana Wynne Jones's fiction and her approach to writing and finding so many fascinating resonances, what I'm doing are things that really inspire me. And in a lot of her books, she she writes about, the person who can write the story, or who can make the spell, for example, has a lot of power. So it's like the power of telling a story. And then it becoming true is a kind of a device that happens in quite a lot of her stories. And I feel like there's a kind of magic spell that can happen, that we can we write the fiction of something happening, and then it sort of by us enacting it, it actually does, it becomes real. And then there's, there's a real power and it's kind of subversive, and playful and funny, because it's like, I now feel like I could kind of write a little fiction of anything, and then I could enact it, and then I can sort of make anything happen. So that was a very long winded way of getting in Diana Wynne Jones, but also kind of, I guess, encouraging people to like, really strategically draw on the speculative and the fictional and then stand on that as a way of kind of making it real. It's, it's, it's feeling quite magical to me at the moment.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Wonderful. And so if your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:Yeah. I think one thing that I was, I was thinking about this is to let go of the, the thing that art and design education teaches you about originality to let go of that sooner. So we, you know, the the kind of the ease source of design education is quite a lot about, you know, the designer of coming up with this original vision, and you have to be unique and all of these things. And I think we really have to kind of let that go. And so being seeing the creativity and building on the work of others, that's partly why fashion fictions has this, this structure, that people create things, and someone else can come along and pick it up and run with it. And I think that that's a skill and an attitude that we really need to have. In a world where we can't just be producing loads more stuff all the time, you know, it's about kind of working with what already exists. And that might be in a very material way. But it might also be in a very, in a more conceptual way. And I think that, for me, it took a while to kind of unpack the values that you're taught. And I guess that's one of the things that I would like to unpick in the education itself. But assuming that hasn't happened, my advice would be to not yet, kind of try to let go of that sooner. Cool.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Who would you nominate to answer these questions because you admire their approach? Hmm.
Amy Twigger Holroyd:I enjoyed thinking about that. And there are, there are many people who I who came to mind and some of whom you've already interviewed. So that's nice. That's nice. I guess one person who I would, I would love to suggest is Kate Fletcher. And Kate is world leading researcher in the field of fashion and sustainability. And she actually co authored the design for sustainability resource that I found, right 20 years ago, when I was studying, and I've had the pleasure of being friends with Kate since not long after that time, and we worked together on various things. And she Yes, has a very long track record of of pioneering work, but also deep wisdom and knowledge and questioning and seeing things in a wonderful way. So her her publication that she co authored with Matilda tamp. Another amazing thinker in this field is called Earth logic, which, so they're kind of arguing that we need to think in and on the basis of Earth logic, rather than growth logic. It's presented for it's a fashion action research plan is the sort of kind of Subtitle but it really has the the clarity and the kind of ambition and yeah, value of this stuff really has to has applications beyond fashion. You No wonder?
David Bent-Hazelwood:Well, we'll follow up on that. And then just finally, is there anything else important? You feel you have to say?
Amy Twigger Holroyd:I don't think so. I've got in Diana Wynne Jones. So that's important. I guess I would, yeah, just to emphasise that if anybody wants to get involved a little bit or more, please get in touch because my work is own I create spaces, but it depends on people coming into the spaces. So it's all about the people who get involved, really, I have nothing without them.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And I suppose also, particularly people who may be able to craft into invent invitations into the gut, that garment worker in Bangladesh, or the supply chains that particularly encourage folks to get in. And it's been wonderful to hear that, that sort of about the specifics of a design. I mean, it can get very meta but a design practice, which is about making other worlds possible, not by just thinking about them, but enacting them just imagining them, but I tried to put them into practice as well. It's fantastic. So thank you very much to you, Amy. Thank you very much to everybody who's been listening. This has been powerful times with the David dent, and Amy doing a whole range. Thanks very much.
